Page 7 of Cruel Summer

“When?” she asked. “When did you start… What was the moment?”

The breath he let out was heavy with regret, his teeth clenched. He looked away from her, the muscles in his face going tense.

She wasn’t going to like his answer. That was clear.

“There was a feeling. You know, just…these weird moments when I’d think…is this it? Is this all life is?”

Those words were like a knife, and she did her best not to look stabbed. She nodded, to show she was listening. If she made a sound, it would be a little bit too much like dying.

“But the actual moment I started realizing what I wanted…it was…Logan.”

“Oh, of course it was. You lied about this last night.”

“It’s not as simple as what… I don’t know, I guess it is.

It was just watching him. We went to some bar and this woman was flirting with him and he got her number.

” He covered his face with his hands. “It feels shitty. To admit that I envy anything about his life, because I know he didn’t choose to lose Becca, and I don’t want to lose you.

It’s just what I thought then was…he got to live both lives.

He got married young, he has a daughter, but he…

he gets to flirt when he goes out. He gets to drink too much if he wants.

He can travel when he feels like it, and he isn’t stuck doing a nine-to-five.

I jumped into this when I was a teenager, and I didn’t get to make choices.

I want to live the life I didn’t get to have, see what choices I could make, and I want to do it without destroying what I’ve got. ”

She tried to imagine it. Because they were always on the same page, except it was clear now they weren’t. That it was a story she told herself, because Will was exceptionally good at seeming fine when he wasn’t.

Apparently.

She was very good at seeing what she wanted to.

Apparently.

“I keep trying,” she said. “I keep trying to imagine it. I keep trying to picture myself…going out and finding someone and seeing where it goes, and I… I don’t want it.”

She wanted this life.

Their life.

But she could see that he was always going to question if he could have been happier with something else if he didn’t get to try it.

So she tried to imagine that. Being home while he was out. Accepting him being with other women.

Touching him after he’d touched someone else.

She stared past him, through the kitchen into the living room, where she could see the edge of one of their framed family photos. She could see the space they put their Christmas tree in every year.

The edge of the coffee table where they often sat on the floor and played board games.

The arm of the couch, a couch they sometimes sat on, each on their own electronic devices, not talking. But always with their feet touching.

Comfortable, happy memories.

For her.

“I want you to be happy,” she said slowly. “I want you to have the life I thought we had. The happiness I thought we had. I want to have it too, but I can’t… I can’t be happy if you aren’t. As much as I want to just pretend this didn’t happen, I realize I can’t.”

You have two choices…

Say no.

Say yes.

She didn’t want to say yes. She didn’t want to say no. She didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

She wanted to close the door on it, and she knew they couldn’t. Because whatever she might say about their life, their happiness, from the past few years it was clear she had somehow closed a door on him.

She had never asked if he was happy, she’d just assumed.

In the way he’d assumed—hoped—she wasn’t happy.

She had two choices.

Unless she could figure out what the third one was. Somewhere between solving the problem and closing a door.

She looked at him and felt something calm wash through her. She’d been with him for twenty-four years. Married for twenty-two. They were bigger than this. Than his feelings, his doubts, than this conversation.

It was why she couldn’t just flip the table and say forget it all.

But this moment was also too big to solve in a conversation, and maybe if part of her even secretly wanted it, it would have been different. Exciting, like Whitney had said it could be.

She didn’t want to share her husband. She didn’t want her life to change.

What do you want besides that?

She’d wanted to travel. In that way, she had wanted freedom. He wanted to have what he wanted, without her stopping him.

She wanted to have what she wanted.

Option three was starting to look obvious. But that didn’t make it easy.

They weren’t who she thought they were.

“I care so much about your happiness,” she said. “We don’t have a happy marriage if you aren’t happy, and as much as I don’t want to accept that…you aren’t happy. I know you wouldn’t have told me all this if you were.”

“Sam…”

“But I can’t watch you do this. I can’t talk to you about your…

sexual experiences with other women. I can’t go to bed with you at night knowing you’ve been with someone else, I can’t.

I also can’t go back to what we were, because now I know you don’t love this life.

” A sob rose in her chest. “I do. I love this life, so much.”

He reached across the table, but stopped an inch short of touching her hand, and she was glad he didn’t touch her. For the first time, she was glad he didn’t touch her. “I love parts of it. I just want to rearrange some things.”

Just the things that felt immovable to her. The things that had felt like foundational supports.

“We got this…we got this summer we didn’t expect.

Ethan was supposed to come back and now he’s not, and…

what if…we have a summer vacation?” she said, and just thinking about it hurt.

It hurt. She hadn’t been away from Will for more than a week, and now she was talking about separating for more than three months.

“What if we…put our marriage on pause for the summer?”

He wanted to test out what he thought he’d missed. She didn’t think any of that—bars and dating and random sex—was better than what they had. But why not? Why not let him see that? Know that?

Let him do it and have her not…watch.

She didn’t need anyone else. She didn’t need another life.

She needed their life. This life.

“I wanted to do this with you,” Will said.

“I know, but… Will, if you want to try another life, try another life. Then if you decide that you like it better than ours, we’ll talk then. About what the options are. But I can’t pretend nothing is different.”

“That isn’t what I want…”

“It kind of is. You want to do this…different thing but you want to have the same thing too, and I’m not sure that’s going to work.

I can’t watch you. I can’t let you stay and be unhappy.

But I can let you go for a while.” She didn’t know where that came from, the strength to say it, the strength to believe it.

“I didn’t want to let you go.”

She nodded. “I know. But I’m not sure there’s a way to have everything.

Maybe there is. Maybe in a few months I’ll have changed the way I feel.

” She didn’t think so. She took a sharp breath.

“Just for the summer. We don’t talk. We don’t see each other.

We don’t stay here. We go on vacation, in every sense of the word.

You can travel, I can travel. You can…do whatever you need to do.

Then we’ll meet back here and we’ll…talk about it. ”

“So…neither of us lives here.”

“No.” She felt definitive on that. “If we’re doing different lives, we’re doing different lives.”

“What are the kids going to think when they find out we’re going to be gone all summer but not together?”

What are the kids going to think when they find out you want to have sex with other women?

“We’ll figure out how to talk to them about it,” she said. “We’ll make it clear we aren’t getting divorced. It’s just…”

That word lingered there. Divorce. Because if at the end they didn’t agree, she knew that was a possibility.

But it wouldn’t happen.

In the end he would decide he wanted their life.

It was just one summer. It wasn’t going to wipe out twenty-two years.

He was searching. He was curious. She could give him that, even if it hurt. Because Elysia was right, he wasn’t going off and cheating. He wasn’t betraying her. He’d flipped the script, yes, and that hurt. It was understandable that it hurt.

But maybe they could do this and come back stronger.

She wanted to believe that was true.

“Okay,” he said. “If that’s what you want.”

She didn’t want any of it, but she was determined to find some way to fix it. Some way to make it salvageable.

“I don’t want it, but… I’ve loved you for more than half of my life, and I can’t love you being unhappy, even if I wish I could magically make this happy for you.

I can’t live knowing that I’m the only one who feels satisfied with that we have.

So yes, it’s what I want. On a spectrum of things I really don’t want.

But that is marriage, isn’t it?” She took a jagged breath.

“Sometimes you have to compromise in a way that hurts.”

Will took her into his arms, and she let him. She buried her face in his neck and tried to hold back her tears.

She needed to believe that if he had this one sparkling summer, like the kind he’d never had in high school because he was with her, and the kind he’d never had after because he was working and helping raise their kids, well…they would get back to who they were.

They’d always had the perfect life.

She needed to believe they’d find their way back to it.