St. Helena, Napa County, California
September 1999
MY HUSBAND REMAINED STATIONED in the doorway, his face both intensely familiar and suddenly alien, the tiny bags ringing both eyes, the cleft in his chin. My limbs refused to obey my brain, which didn’t know what to command them to do anyway.
“David,” I repeated, the only thing I could think to say.
“Are you leaving?” he asked, gesturing to the clothes on the bed.
“I was thinking about taking a trip,” I stammered. “Where were you?”
“You asked me to leave,” he said, his hands in his pockets, like he wasn’t sure what to do with them. “So I went. I checked in on Andrew, then I stayed at a little hotel in Petaluma, just doing a lot of thinking. I tried calling you, but you probably know that. I wanted to give you space, but I couldn’t stay away forever.”
Seeing him standing in front of me made my resolve weaken, the memories of our marriage flooding back. He looked so apologetic, like he’d give anything for a second chance.
“What were you thinking about?” I asked, sitting on the side of the bed. He pulled the door closed and slowly stepped across the carpet, then took a seat on the opposite edge, far enough away that we weren’t even close to touching.
“Us. Me. The things I’ve done. The way I’ve treated you.” He spread out his hands—big hands, palms clean, not burnished with grape stains like they normally were this time of year. “I owe you an apology. My… indiscretion, it was bad enough. But the way I told you made it even worse. This isn’t who I am. How did we get here, Bev?”
“I don’t know,” I managed, the fight sucked out of me, heavy sadness in its place. I’d imagined confronting David, but now with him next to me, I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
“I don’t want to dwell on the past,” he said. “We’ve spent enough time there. The night you asked me to leave… I tried to blame you. And that was just as bad as what I’d done. None of it was your fault. I’m sorry for everything, Bev. This isn’t on you.”
I stared at the carpet. It was exactly what I wished he would have said that night.
“I don’t know if there’s still a chance,” he said, his voice small. “I just want us to love each other the way we used to.”
My eyes teared up, but I couldn’t seem to find my voice. How could I explain that I felt forked into two, between the path I’d traveled and the one I hadn’t?
“You cheated on me,” I settled on instead.
David’s eyes were glassy. “It only happened once, and I swear that to you. I take full accountability that I fucked this up. If you need more time, I understand. But I just need to know—is there a chance?”
I weighed both scenarios in my head. If I left David, would Emilia be there for me? And would that be enough? Josh and Andrew would question whether their childhood had been a lie, and Kieran would grow up shuttled between two households, never remembering a version of his parents happy together.
David inched closer on the bed, gently moving my piles of clothes out of his way. His fingers tentatively stippled the skin on my arm. For better or worse, David knew me. We’d built a life together. We’d promised, in our vows, that we’d love each other until death do us part. And he was taking accountability, asking for a second chance. His bald vulnerability was the most disarming thing of all.
“I should have listened to you,” he said. “About Andrew. I went to see him, and he seems… different. I really do think it’s good for him, being at Dunn, but maybe you were right about what happened…”
“It wasn’t about being right,” I said. “It was that you wanted to pretend the incident with Abby never happened. You changed the story so that we came across better. You didn’t even consider that there was more to it.”
“I just wanted to protect our family,” he said quietly. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. Maybe I didn’t handle things perfectly, but I was doing the best I could. I love you and the boys more than anything, Bev.”
When he kissed the knuckles on my hand, I didn’t stop him. When he tilted my face toward his, I felt myself sucked into the familiarity of his touch. I let him kiss me, my mouth responding on autopilot. I clamped my eyes shut and retreated into my memories as David’s lips trailed down my neck.
The sound of footfalls in the hallway made me open my eyes. The door had been pushed open, and Emilia was standing half in, half out, her smile falling. I pulled away from David.
“Emilia,” we both said at the same time, my voice remorseful and David’s confused.
The betrayal on Emilia’s face was gutting, the way her soft features seemed to harden. She shifted from one foot to the other.
“The door was open, and Marcel said you were here…” Emilia’s voice trailed off. I wasn’t sure who she was addressing, me or David. “I’ll go, and give you some privacy. We can talk later.”
“I just returned from my business trip,” David said. “I’m very behind on calls and emails, so I apologize… If you give me a few minutes, we can meet in the tasting room.”
“It’s okay. I was just stopping by… I’ll call you another time.” Emilia was already turning to go, and she didn’t look back. Once she was gone, I found my voice again.
“I met with her while you were away. I didn’t even know you two were still in touch.”
“Well, I’d seen her at some events over the years… She mentioned in San Francisco a few months back that she’d love to stop by. I’m glad you met with her. How did it go?”
My mouth was dry. I compressed my time with Emilia—our beautiful, endless days—into the most boring answer. “It was good. She’s interested.”
“That’s great,” David said. “I forgot I was supposed to be seeing her—after I left, it was like my mind went blank. But you used to know her too. It must have been nice to catch up with an old friend.”
I felt a pressure behind my eyes. I was going to cry.
David noticed. “What? Did something happen?”
I turned my sadness into anger, because I didn’t want David to guess at the real truth. “Who was she? The woman you cheated on me with? Who was worth wrecking our marriage for?”
He rubbed his temples. “Do you really need to know? Wouldn’t it just hurt more?”
“Tell me,” I said.
David paused, hissing a breath through his teeth. I was afraid of what he was going to say, but suddenly desperate to hear it.
“Her name was Ashley. I don’t know her last name. She was there, at the restaurant in Sonoma… sitting alone at the bar. Then the waiter brought me a glass of chardonnay, and apparently she’d sent it to me. I went over to say thank you, and we got to talking, and… I went home with her.”
I nodded. I could picture the scene: David in a suit, the sharp way he dressed to meet with clients, so formal and handsome. Ashley, younger than me with ample cleavage, hanging on his every word.
“I was lonely,” David said. “And I made the biggest mistake of my life.”
For some reason, hearing the actual details of the story made it more digestible. Ashley was no longer a threat to our marriage. She was something David had needed to get out of his system. He had physically cheated on me, but what I had been doing all week with Emilia was so much worse. Though I never would have done it had David not stepped out first.
Maybe in a sick way, I was glad he had.
“Say something, Bev,” David said, his voice pleading. “Do you hate me?”
I stood up and started walking toward the door, my nails biting into my palms.
“Where are you going?” David asked.
“I need to be alone,” I said. I waited for him to argue, to follow me anyway, to try to put a Band-Aid on this, like he did with everything else. But maybe he really had changed, because he let me go.
I caught up to Emilia in the parking lot, just as she was getting into her rental car. “Wait,” I yelled, jogging toward her. She stopped, the sun bouncing off the blonde crown of her head, and turned around, her eyes hidden behind oversize sunglasses.
“I was going to tell you that I wanted to go to Naples,” I said. “I was packing. That’s what I was doing in my room. I had no idea David was going to show up.”
“But you knew he was going to come home eventually,” she said. I saw my reflection in her lenses, my face elongated and distorted, my hair a mess. “What did you tell him?”
“That we had a meeting,” I said.
She was silent, but a flicker of hurt spread across her face. An invisible electric fence had suddenly sprung up between us. I was choosing David all over again.
“I need to go,” she said. “Goodbye, Bev.” She gave me a small, sad smile and got into her car, and I watched her drive away, unsure if I’d ever see her again. Don’t go, I silently screamed, wanting to run after the car and wave her down. But I remained statue still, my eyes burning with dust.
I wandered the vineyard, my brain racing with things unsaid. Hours ago, I’d been considering what my life would look like without David. I’d made him the villain in all of this, the one who’d betrayed our marriage. But I had been the one in the wrong, and I had just driven Emilia away for the second time because of my inability to admit what I really wanted.
By the time I made my way back to the house, David was chopping vegetables for a salad, Camille was feeding Kieran in his high chair, and Josh was seated at the table, laughing at something his father had said. We were all one perfect happy family, minus Andrew’s empty chair. We were a family who moved on. Just like we’d moved on after Abby. It would be so easy to go back to normal, to live in a world where David’s affair and mine had never happened.