Melissa drew in a deep breath and I wondered if I’d crossed a line. “For a long time, I held onto hope that things would change. That eventually he would come back to me and decide he was ready to give up the stuff that was pulling him away from Jackson and me. At one point, not that long ago, we were trying to have another baby and I was very torn about it. I thought that maybe another baby would be a wakeup call to him. But I think I knew deep down it wouldn’t matter. I’d just be twice as stuck.
“When we got married, he was a nobody. I mean, really, he worked part-time as a timeshare salesman. You know, those people who do the sales pitches to a room full of people who just wanted a free vacation?”
I smiled. “Sure.”
“Yeah, that’s what he did. He was good at it, but those guys don’t get paid all that well, even when they can sell. I actually made more money than he did the first year we were married. I worked at a bank.” She smiled at the memory and I sat back, suddenly feeling as though I were intruding on a private moment. Then, her expression crumbled and turned cold again. “He got his break when he was selling the shares. Some big time guy came in, kind of undercover, and after hearing Henry’s pitch, he offered to buy the whole complex of condos if he could also get Henry in the deal. He wanted him to work for him on future projects. Henry took the deal and studied under him for about eighteen months. He made a lot of money in a very short amount of time and everyone in the real estate world knew about him. Overnight it seemed.”
“That’s impressive.” I’d never heard of her husband before taking the job, but then, I wasn’t in the real estate business.
“Yeah,” Melissa agreed with a nod. She swirled the contents of her wine glass and then took another drink. “Anyway, that was really the beginning of the end. I just didn’t know it at the time. But when I play it back in my head, that’s where things got ugly.”
“How so?” I was full on prying now, but I couldn’t stop myself. I wanted to know what had happened to the beautiful woman in front of me. How she’d transformed into the strong, resilient woman I was getting to know.
“Henry started working ridiculous hours, traveling all over the place, and he had his first affair.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. We’d been married about three years by that point. I was at work and Henry had stopped by to visit. He used to do things like that.” She paused to heave a sigh. “Anyway, while he was still there, this woman in line was acting odd. She kept staring at us. Henry didn’t seem to notice. When he left, she made a beeline for my teller window and asked if I knew that the man who had just been kissing me was seeing another woman. He was seeing her best friend, which is why she’d been so agitated seeing him with me. When I explained that he was my husband, she was utterly horrified and went running out of the bank.”
“Damn,” I breathed, my eyebrows halfway up my forehead. I couldn’t even fathom.
“Yeah,” Melissa said. “It was insane. I asked Henry about it that night and he tried to play it off like it was a mistake. Eventually, he apologized and begged me to stay with him and forgive him. I did, but only on the condition that we see a therapist. So, we did that for a while, but Henry missed more appointments than he made. He always blamed it on work and for some stupid reason, I forgave him.
Things changed when I got pregnant. He was building his own empire by then but managed to come home almost every night. He was actually very sweet and I thought maybe things would finally get back on track for our marriage. But by the time Jackson was two, he was back to his old ways, and that time around he didn’t even bother hiding it. He had a lot of celebrity clients and would go out partying with them. So, sometimes there would be pictures of him at some club with a half-naked woman in his lap on the front of some gossip magazines. Eventually, I just stopped asking him about it and let him do what he wanted. I was busy trying to raise our son.”
“Why didn’t you leave him then?” The question bubbled out before I could stop myself.
Melissa laughed. “I don’t know. The hope thing, I guess. We talked about having a second baby. I figured he’d be around more and maybe we could rekindle what we’d once had. But then Talia came along.”