knowing the truth has made me disappointed, sad, and maybe a little betrayed.
Carrie comes into my office, hands me some figures that have just come in. She smiles, but her eyes don’t quite meet mine.
“Hey,” I say, “you got a second?”
“Sure, Judd.”
“Have a seat.”
She sits. Worry now creeps onto her face. “What is it?” she asks.
“You know, we’ve been working together for a few years now, and I kind of think of you like you’re family. I hope you feel the same way about me.”
She smiles. Now she makes eye contact and then quickly looks away. “Of course I do.”
I nod slowly. “Things are pretty up in the air around here – with Wade’s new show. The thing is: that might not happen now we’ve got all this publicity. If he does go, then it’s likely I’m not going with him. Either way, you still have a job here. You understand that, right?”
She smiles again, nods.
“I’d hate for you to do anything to jeopardise that.”
Her eyes drop to her lap.
“I think you have something you want to tell me. I think you feel like you can’t because I might fire you. But, you should know, what you say in this office will stay between us.”
She starts to cry quietly.
“What happened to make you want to do this?” I ask her gently.
She sniffs. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I wasn’t going to tell anyone, and then this guy comes in looking for you. He was a friend, he said. Then he starts asking questions, about Wade, about your wife. And I got angry.”
“Why? They didn’t hurt you. They hurt me.”
She shakes her head, looks up. Her eyes are running but there was anger in them. “But they did. Both of them. I knew about them, and they forced me to keep quiet. Wade said that if you found out then you’d leave and then there would be no place for me. They threatened me. They threatened by job.”
“Both of them?”
“Well… Wade did, but she had to be pushing him.” She exhales deeply. “I’m just so angry at both of them. They get to do that to you, behind your back, make me keep their secrets, and then when you find out, they get to parade themselves in front of everyone. You forgave them, Judd. I can’t believe you did that. Do you remember last New Year’s?”
“Not much of it. But I know what happened.”
“That was when I caught them. I was in the hall. You were playing video games with Kenny. She comes out of his bedroom, looking a little rumpled. Then he does, like a minute later. My jaw dropped and he knew that I’d seen them. Later, as I was leaving, he pulls me aside, tells me not to tell you. What could I do?”
I nod sadly. “You did what you had to do. And you did it well. I never suspected anything. Tell me, did you know I’d be walking in on them?”
She looks down. “I got that cake for you – for her birthday. You were leaving early to surprise her. Then he takes off in a hurry. I knew where he was headed.”
“You could have held me up a little longer - then I would have missed them.”
She shakes her head. “I’d had enough by then. I’d had enough keeping that ugly secret. So I let things turn out the way it did. I know what finding out did to you, and I’m sorry about that. But you were going to find out eventually. Maybe I did you a favour, I don’t know. But I still can’t believe you forgave them?”
I shake my head at her slowly. “We can’t live our lives hanging onto hurts like that, it will kill us. Look… if I wasn’t going to forgive you for telling the world about what happened then you’d be out of a job with a bad reference.”
“Crap,” she whispers.
“That’s how this works. You get forgiven, and you forgive. You are sorry, right, for talking about the three of us?”
She nods emphatically. “You’re not going to fire me?”
“No. Look, I understand. You were angry. I get that. I still get angry - furious actually. I know it’s hard to believe, but I do. I just don’t let it rule me. I don’t let it decide how I’m going to act, how I’m going to love the people that have hurt me, how I forgive them. I’m not saying that I succeed all the time, but I am getting better at it.” I chuckle to myself. “And, don’t feel so bad about being suckered in. I talked to the same man and told him a lot more than you did.” I sit back in my chair. “Good. So that’s settled then. Now I think that Wade has some apologising to do as well.”
Her eyes widen. “Please don’t tell him,” she begs me. “I don’t need an apology from him. I’m good. Let’s just forget all of this.”
“To be honest, I think he’s forgotten all about you knowing about the affair. And I don’t think Wade would do anything. He can hardly punish you for disloyalty.”
She laughs a little.
I take a deep breath. “Carrie, on behalf of Wade, who is highly unlikely to do this, I’m sorry that you were forced to keep that secret. It was wrong, and you shouldn’t have been threatened like that. And, for what it’s worth, thank you for opening my eyes to what was happening. In a way, you saved all three of us.”
She closes her eyes. Water creeps out and runs down her cheeks.
“We won’t talk about this again. And I won’t tell Wade, alright?”
She nods, stands, and almost runs out of the office.
I’ve ceased being amazed at the lengths my wife and her lover went to in order to keep their affair a secret. If anything, it proves to me that what she has been saying about that time is true: that she did still love me; that our marriage did still mean something to her. Why else would she invest such energy to maintaining the lie? It would have been easier, far easier to tell me. It certainly would have saved me witnessing the two of them having sex in my bed.
But maybe that isn’t true. Maybe the reason is far too complicated for even Quinn to understand. Or maybe she does know, and she believes the truth to be too hard to hear, even after everything that we’ve been through.
I could go mad ruminating on this.
I can only imagine the thoughts going through her mind at that time – the conflict, the fear, the resentment. On the night that she told him that she loved him someone discovered their little secret and threatened to pull it all out into the open. Carrie became a threat to the delicate balance between her two lives.
Even though I told Carrie I was still angry, I can’t be angry with Quinn about this. She was in such pain, such confusion, and I was too wrapped up in myself to notice or care.
Wednesday
Quinn cooks me one of my favourite meals and we sit in silence as we eat, the only sound the quiet contact of our knives and forks upon our plates. We are both painfully aware of what is ahead of us.
If I’m being honest, the thought crossed my mind to watch an hour or two of television, shower and change, and retire before the time is upon us. I know Quinn has considered it too. But neither of us run away from hard matters anymore. We face them. We talk about them. We hold hands and deal with them, together.
And so, as midnight rapidly approaches, we sit upon our sofa, in each other’s arms, watching the television as it build anticipation for people whose experiences have not been marred by poor choices. But Quinn and I are not alone. There are plenty of people out there hurting tonight, but they aren’t as blessed as the two of us. We have each other. And in that pain that we feel, neither of us is blameless.
As we lie there I try vainly to hold memories at bay. I’ve been all too clearly reminded what happened last year. I didn’t realise it at the time, but the fog that obscured certain truths has been lifted and now I see it for what it was. She was in love with him. She loved him. And even though she tells me that she still loved me, that night was the beginning of the end for us. Her connection with me was already thin, and then it was starting to fray. I have no doubt that she would have told me the truth eventually had I not stumbled upon it myself. But then Rachel was coming, not at that moment, but a little after, and that complicated matters beyond
belief.
The ball drops. Quinn leans over and kisses me, long and sweet. Her lips are soft and yielding and they tell me that she loves me more than any words she has ever uttered.
As we watch the fireworks, she sighs. From Wade’s balcony we would all stand and see them light up the city with a myriad of colours. Now we have to settle for the small screen in front of us, and it doesn’t do the display justice.
“I kissed you last year, at midnight, remember?”
I do. It was brief, dismissive. I should have known.
“I regret that moment,” she tells me. “Not kissing you. I don’t regret that, just the way I did it, and what was going through my mind at the time. I remember right then thinking that it should have been him that I was kissing, in front of everyone. I thought I loved him and I wanted everyone to know.”
“But not me.”
“Especially not you. Can you imagine the scene?”
“I can. But I was little drunk and a lot self-absorbed, so I’d probably not have noticed.”
“As you kissed me all I could taste was beer and… whatever you’d been eating. I just wanted to be kissing his lips. I’m sorry if this is too hard to hear.”
“It’s honest, and I want that. I want us to be able to tell each other things – deep things. That’s intimacy, at work.”
“Intimacy… a guess that’s why I kept going back to him, even though I was riddled with guilt. He was intimate with me when you weren’t. I needed that. I craved it. And when you were so closed off, I went looking for it, I suppose.