Neighbors

Not long after our twins turned three, my wife, Anna, accepted a transfer to the West Coast. The opportunity was lucrative, but that wasn’t why we were eager to go. Anna had spent that March and April involved with another man, a colleague, someone whose name I’d never heard until she told me about him. She said that it had been a terrible mistake, that it had only made her hate herself, and that this person had now begun almost to frighten her, continuing to call after she’d asked him to stop, declaring that he’d leave his family, demanding to speak with me. I was surprised to find that, more than anything, I felt sorry for her.

- Zach Williams

The episode was the culmination of a long withdrawal that each of us had made from the other—for some time, our mutual unhappiness had felt like too delicate or intimate a subject to broach. I knew I wasn’t blameless. The hard-to-fathom part, really, was that she’d hidden it from me. It felt so old-fashioned, predicated on such a rigid understanding of who we could be together. In bed, in the dark, I told her that, if we wanted to try again, we would have to redraw the map. We spent the days that followed talking more openly than we had in years—about our girls, our childhoods, old lovers, doubts and desires we’d each been afraid to confess.