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“Not true at all. You had no right to bring him into this.”

“Me bring him in?
Me?
Would you like me to remind you why we are even discussing him in the first place?”

Adam hurled a hunk of bread toward a nearby duck, who squawked and hustled away, wings flapping indignantly. “If we're going to get past this, you're going to have to stop treating me like the bad guy, Caro. I don't want to live the rest of my life on one long guilt trip.”

I bit down on the sarcastic hand slap that buzzed behind my lips.
Oh, pardon me for forgetting it is you who are the victim here.
“I understand that. And I will. But it's a little early to ask me to stop being angry.”

“You need to keep punishing me?”

“Insisting you take responsibility for your actions is not punishment.”

He turned back to me, eyes intent. “And asking you to be softer to me is not trying to escape responsibility. I recognize that this entire situation is my fault. I hate more than anything that I've caused you pain, and I'm doing everything I can think of to repair the damage. I'm not asking you to stop being angry. I am just asking you to choose to be kind instead of sharp. I know I deserve for you to hurt me, but all it does is add more hurt to us instead of washing it away. And I have no right to ask you, but I'm doing it anyway, because my pride doesn't mean anything to me here, and I'm terrified that I've poisoned the way you feel about me forever. I'm fucking terrified, sweetheart. Please be kind. Just kind.”

I stared into my interlaced hands as if they held the answer. When I was growing up, anytime I lost patience with Ruby badly enough to merit a talking-to by my parents, my mom would lecture me with the Golden Rule, and then my dad would hit me with his version:
Kindness knows no shame
. It wasn't until years later that I discovered he'd actually stolen it from a Stevie Wonder lyric, but the truth of it was as clear as it had ever been. Jealousy and hurt will whisper excuses in your ear for almost anything you do, but acting with kindness is a choice you will never have a reason to regret. And despite the terrible mistakes he'd made, nobody deserved that generosity from me more than my husband.

I rose from my side of the bench and sat down next to Adam. He didn't reach for me or try to kiss me, but he turned his left hand palm-up on his thigh. There was the scar at the base of his thumb (slipped paring knife), and there was the glint of his wedding band. His grasp, when his fingers closed around the hand I rested in his, was firm.

He turned his face so he could kiss the side of my head. It was one of my favorite ways that he touched me. “Sweetheart?” he said softly, lips against my hair.

“Hmm?”

“What was it you wanted to ask me?”

Down at the creek, a toddler shrieked. His wild nest of sandy curls glowed golden in the sun, and a potbelly protruded above his valiant chubby legs. He jumped in the lapping water, then splashed at it with his hands again and again, squealing with delight. His father stood nearby, watching with a smile.

Do you know he's in love with you?
I'd been going to ask Adam.
This affair you told me was just about attraction was also about love.

After a somewhat uncoordinated leap, the little boy at the creek toppled over onto his bottom, and just when I thought he would erupt into tears, he looked up at his father and laughed.

And suddenly, I didn't want to hear how Adam would have answered my question. It was the last thing I ever wanted to know.

I am happy in the knowledge that we are friends again, and that our love has passed through the shadow and the night of estrangement and sorrow and come out rose-crowned as of old. Let us always be infinitely dear to each other, as indeed we have been always.

—Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas, December 1893

I remember reading once about this dangerous little tic of human behavior called normalcy bias. What it means is that, when suddenly confronted with a threat, people often fail to respond to it appropriately at first, because their minds are busy trying to reassure them that nothing is wrong. Even with ample evidence of trouble, the brain rejects the fact that normal is gone. That popping noise in the street has got to be fireworks, even though it's the middle of the day. People will go right on believing it's fireworks until they start hearing screams.

Like I said, I thought I knew my story.

Adam had cheated, but we were fixing it. We were talking, every day more and more. Both he and I were giving concerted mental focus to the relationship in a way we had not for a very long time, and I could tell that it was helping. We were slowly dragging our wheels out of the sucking mud, and the road ahead was dry.

At no point did it occur to me that infidelity was not the cause of my problem, but rather a symptom.

Just like I've wondered what would have happened if I hadn't attended Patrick's gallery opening that clingy July night, or if Alicia hadn't shown me those other photos, I've wondered, too, what would have happened if I'd never gotten the voicemail. If the message had gone by email, instead, to its intended target.

As I walked into the house one afternoon a week or so after the kayaking expedition, the silence was shattered by the bubbling ring of a telephone: our land line, the cancellation of which had been on our household to-do list for so long that it had become a running joke. Oh, if only.

Hi there,
said an unfamiliar female voice, when the call rang through to the answering machine.
This is Frankie Berlin with the Diamond Agency, calling on behalf of Mike Diamond for A. T. Hamm. Mr. Hamm, we just got the publication payment for
Sliding Home,
and we typically send those via FedEx, but all you've got is the Manhattan P.O. address, which FedEx won't deliver to. We want to make sure we get it to you promptly, so let us know if there's another address to send to or if you want it sent regular mail. Give me a call back when you get a chance.

I shook my head as if I had water in my ears and replayed the message, but it didn't make any more sense than it had the first time. The sensation was not unlike when Adam took me to Provence for my twenty-first birthday and I then had to get us around using only the limited resources of my rusty high school French: I could understand some of the words that people said to me, but not all of them, and my brain labored to close the gaps in comprehension with highly limited success. In this case, I understood everything this woman was talking about, but none of the details were what I expected them to be.

Adam's literary agency was Darlington Literary, a name so significant to him I could practically hear a gong sound every time he said it. It was, according to my husband, the most prestigious agency in the country, with a client roster full of hoary old names. It was also, it bears noting, Adam's father's agency; but as Adam's agent Pauline assured him when she signed him five years ago on the strength of his partially completed Very Important Novel, nepotism alone couldn't get a book published.

And indeed, she was right. The VIN, eventually completed, titled
Nothing Good Gets Away
after a passage from a letter from John Steinbeck to his teenage son, and pitched to every imprint that published high-end literary fiction, failed to sell to any of them. It was praised gloriously and rejected regretfully, but rejected it was just the same. Adam subsequently published a volume of short stories that received a glowing review in
The New York Times,
but had not yet made any real headway on another novel. It was fine, he'd said. He was enjoying plays and short fiction more these days anyway.

Never…not once…had he mentioned a project called
Sliding Home.
Not even writing it, let alone—apparently—publishing it. I had never heard of the Diamond Agency, of any agent named Mike, nor of Adam writing under a weird pseudonym rather than his name. Fingers shaking, I reached into my purse for my phone and keyed the book's title into my search browser, and there, in bold block capitals, it was:
Sliding Home: My Journey Back to Safety,
by Richie Cabrero. And in much smaller letters underneath: “with A. T. Hamm.”

Richie Cabrero, who was basically a walking punch line for late-night comedy jokes about 'roided-out baseball players? Adam had, somehow, sometime, ghostwritten a memoir for him? I backed out of the link and searched again, for A. T. Hamm this time, and two other titles popped up. One of them another celebrity memoir, and the other a
New York Times
bestselling memoir-cum-self-help-treatise from a spirituality guru I vaguely recognized from TV. And I was drenched with a sickening sense of déjà vu.

I realized, at that moment, that part of me had been waiting to hear about another infidelity. Either from Adam himself, in a gush of truth like pus released from an abscess, or from someone else. From Ruby or Jonathan, who had both said it:
Did you have any idea?

What I had never expected to find was something like this. Something not only secret, but so contradictory to everything I understood about Adam's work, his goals, his very personality.

“What's up, buttercup?” said Ruby, breezing in through the kitchen door as I sank to the couch with my face in my hands. “Wait, whoa, seriously, what's up?”

I raised my face and stared at her beseechingly. “Adam…Adam published three fucking books and didn't tell me.”

She set the bucket of flowers she'd been carrying on the counter and frowned, trying to catch up to why I was so upset. “You mean, like, he self-published something?”

“No. I mean, like, my husband, who since I met him at sixteen years old has been working toward publishing a piece of literary art that's good enough to stand up to his father's, has apparently ghostwritten the memoir of a drug-addicted, steroid-abusing baseball player. As well as for some Food Network chick, and that guy who thinks you can solve every problem in your life by positive thinking.”

“Jefferson Ross?”

“That's the one. He did all of this, and he never told me. He
never told me.
”

“But why on earth not?” she said, plopping down next to me and stacking her elbows on her knees.

I couldn't answer her. I felt as lost and sightless as if I'd been swallowed by a sandstorm.

Wordlessly, she handed me my phone, which I'd tossed on the coffee table when my mental whiplash had gotten too overwhelming. I pressed down on Adam's name to dial him, hoping even as I did it that he wouldn't answer. If he didn't answer, maybe I could convince myself this was a misunderstanding. The “It's not what it looks like” moment that we never had with the actual infidelity.

“Hi, sweetheart! I was just thinking about you.”

Instinctively, I almost responded to the warmth in Adam's voice; my brain had been conditioned for the last seventeen years to believe that Adam being happy, Adam calling me “sweetheart,” Adam in general, were good things. I could hear the rush of city noise behind him—a siren in the distance, someone's shout as they walked by. It was jarring to realize I had no idea where he was, what he had actually been doing for the past few weeks. Two more things I didn't know about him.

“Listen, love,” he said, “hang on a minute until I can get to someplace quiet so I can talk to you.”

“You can talk now,” I said. “There was a message on the machine just now, from someone at the Diamond Agency about a publication payment for A. T. Hamm. Can you please explain that to me?”

Silence. There was a long, heavy silence, and then finally Adam sighed. But it wasn't a sigh of resignation or regret, it was—somehow—a sigh of long-suffering patience worn thin. “I assume, since you sound pissed rather than genuinely confused, you have already answered the question yourself.”

“I know that someone named A. T. Hamm has ghostwritten three celebrity memoirs. But I'm not familiar with A. T. Hamm, or this person's work, even though his literary agency
for some reason
has my home as the contact number. This is the part I need you to explain.”

He sighed again. “Jefferson Ross was the first one. I met him through someone I worked on a play with a few years back, and when he found out I was a writer he mentioned he had been working on a memoir but he needed some help to make it jell. I took a stab at it, for the hell of it, and he loved what I did, so I ended up helping him write the entire thing. Then he hooked me up with Adriana di Lorenzo, and she referred me to Richie. And there you have it.”

“There I have it?” I repeated, my voice pitching upward like a kite straining at its tether. “No, Adam, I don't. You've never mentioned any of this to me. Not one single word. All I've ever heard about was plays, and stories, and
Nothing Good
—not so much as a peep that you'd been ghostwriting memoirs, for Christ's sake!”

“And why do you think that is? You should hear yourself—‘ghostwriting memoirs,' as if I'd been selling meth to middle schoolers.”

“Oh, will you stop exaggerating? I have the right to be pretty fucking astonished by this! You wrote and published
three books
without telling me. You hid every step of the process, of the entire thing. You didn't share any of it with me. All this time I've been worrying, for your sake, about when you'd be ready to write another novel, and what would happen if it didn't do as well as you hoped, and meanwhile you've been making money—good money, clearly—from your writing, and you've been hiding all of it from me?”

“I wasn't hiding the money,” he said quickly. “I just didn't tell you exactly what it was from. I've been putting some of it into the scholarship account, too.”

Of course he had.

The scholarship account was something I admired about Adam. When we started planning to leave the city for Massachusetts, it had roughly coincided with Adam's thirtieth birthday, and this happy confluence gave his parents the idea to buy a house for us. Not only the down payment, which was not unheard-of among people we knew—the Hammonds bought the house outright. Their generosity had put us in the unusual position of being a young couple with poorly paying artsy jobs who didn't have to worry about a mortgage payment.

For my part, I was inclined to accept the generous gift for the pure good fortune it was, but Adam fretted. He insisted we had to do something to earn out this extraordinary cosmic advance, and the notion that finally struck him was a scholarship fund. He was taken with the idea of providing educational opportunities to young people whose backgrounds would not have otherwise permitted it. People like me and Jonathan, who Adam knew had only been able to attend our college by the grace of Williams's deep-pocketed financial aid endowment. But so, ever since, any extra money beyond Adam's share of our household budget went into the scholarship fund. I had never even looked at the balance; it was his project, his baby, and he was paying more than enough into our household pot to cover all of our expenses and savings goals. Though, come to think of it, there had been something of an uptick in his contributions within the last several years.

“My god,
why
didn't you tell me?” I said, suddenly exhausted. “It's such a basic thing to share with your wife. I can't begin to comprehend what would make you hide this.”

“Come on, really? You can't begin to comprehend? God, you never did get it. I'll spell it out for you: Because it's not who I'm supposed to be. I'm Theodore Hammond's kid. I'm supposed to be carrying on a literary legacy, not writing memoirs for people in
Us Weekly.
”

“Then why do it?”

“Honestly? I really enjoy it. I was shocked at how much I enjoy it. Everything I've ever worked toward says I should despise this kind of thing, but I love it. I love telling other people's stories. And I like the people. Richie's got this lived-in quality about him that makes him fascinating to listen to. Jefferson is completely different in person than he is on TV—he puts on a big act of being all fuzzy-wuzzy positivity, but he's a total shark. And Adriana's a screaming bitch, but it was fun as hell to somehow make her come across likable.”

Each of these details scored me with a fresh slash of pain. I should have heard about these people at the time Adam was working with them, should have talked and laughed with him about them over dinner, should have read his drafts like I had with his other work. That he'd locked it away from me hurt so badly I could barely speak. “Adam, that makes perfect sense. It sounds like you were born to do this job. But you didn't think I would get that?”

“I thought you'd be disappointed,” he said, stumbling on the word.

“Disappointed? That you found a niche for your writing that you're thriving in? How can you even say that?”

“Because it's kind of a bait and switch. Think about it. We spent so much time talking about our dreams when we were younger, but you're the only one of us who's actually made them come true. You've achieved every one of your goals and ended up exactly where you wanted to be. You're so certain about everything in your life, and you're
so
secure, I swear to god it's fucking abnormal, Caroline. And meanwhile, you thought you were married to a serious artist, and now it turns out I'm not quite up to snuff. So no, I didn't want you to see that I didn't know what I was doing after all. I thought you'd see me as a failure.”