The Wife Before

“Was that his first time being aggressive with you?”

I sniffled and wanted to answer, but my throat was thick with emotion. Walden reached for the bamboo box of tissues on the table between us and offered one to me. “It’s okay. Take your time.”

I grabbed a couple and dabbed at my cheeks. “I’m a bad wife,” I said through tears. “I never should have agreed to marry him.”

“Why do you call yourself a bad wife?”

“Because I married Roland knowing we wouldn’t make it. And I cheated on him with someone he cares about a lot—someone very close to him.”

Walden was quiet a moment and I didn’t dare look at him, so I kept wiping my tears away, but they wouldn’t stop falling.

“Does he know that?”

“Know what?”

“That you had an affair with someone close to him?”

“No. He hasn’t asked who I had an affair with. I don’t think he wants to know. Or maybe he doesn’t care to know.”

“Sometimes the unknown can make certain events feel like they’ve never happened. He’s suppressing his emotions and shielding himself from the truth. Perhaps he knows it was with someone close and refuses to acknowledge that to protect himself.”

“I guess so.”

Walden shifted in his seat. “Melanie, I want to go back to my question before. Was that his first time getting aggressive with you?”

“Yes, it was. He’s usually calm. Never that quick to anger, but I think my confession really hurt him that night and he just kind of blew up. I’d never seen him get like that before.”

“Do you think he will hurt you again?”

I looked into his gentle eyes and they were full of concern. “I . . . I don’t know, honestly. I think if he ever finds out who I had an affair with, that he might hurt one of us.”

With a nod, Walden wrote another note, and while he did, he asked, “When do you think things changed between you and Roland?”

I had to give his question some thought. I tried to think it through, but couldn’t think clearly at the time, so muddled with emotion and also relief that I could finally talk to someone without the weight of judgment, so I just shrugged.

“I want you to try a coping technique that has helped some of my other clients tremendously. What you do is you buy a journal, and with that journal I want you to sit and think about when you felt your marriage unraveling. Take your time with it. If you have to, write every event down from the moment you met him to now, sitting here, talking to me. Perhaps then, it’ll be clear to you why you feel the way you do. And I think, as you do, you’ll find the answers to your problems, and then we’ll discuss it further and work on finding the best solutions.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

“Do you like to write?” he asked.

“Sort of.”

“I’ve noticed with a few of my clients that they like to write their traumas and experiences as memoirs. What they discover can cut deep and they’re hard realizations, but they learn so much about themselves and even begin to remember things they’d purposely blocked out so they wouldn’t have to remember the trauma. Perhaps you can try that?” he offered. “It may help you delve deeper into what really shifted things in your life and your marriage and why you really want the divorce from your husband.”

I nodded again. “I can try that.” And this was the moment I started asking myself, when did things go so wrong with me and Roland? It hadn’t started that night in Hawaii. Things had begun unraveling way before that—before we were even married—and I wanted to blame Miley, blame Dylan—hell, I even wanted to blame Roland’s mother for her lack of parenting and not showing him real love, but our problems didn’t stem from any of them.

It stemmed from the night before we got married.

He didn’t have a bachelor party and I didn’t have a bachelorette party. We saw each other the night before, though it would have been considered bad luck to do so.

I was in a hotel penthouse and he came to visit me. But he hadn’t come alone. There was someone with him.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

“Hi baby!” I squealed, throwing my arms around Roland’s neck after opening the door. Chuckling, he hugged me tight and kissed me on the cheek.

“Hey, baby.” He placed me back on my feet, and when he moved to the side, I noticed the person behind him. He appeared to be around our age, a Latino male with fair skin, wavy brown hair, and light brown eyes. He waved and I waved back cautiously.

“Who’s this?” I asked, keeping a smile in place as I looked between Roland and the other man.

“Mel, this is Felipe. You haven’t met him before, but he’s a good friend of mine. Takes pictures for some of my games sometimes.”