Nigel always looks at me before he answers.
And I always nod.
And then he tells them the truth. All of it. The swing, the rock, the move, the lie, the twenty-seven years.
It doesn’t get easier for him to say. I can see that. I can see his hands shake every time.
But he says it anyway.
I spent two decades imagining what my husband looked like.
I imagined a young face. An unlined face. A face I’d invented from the shape of a jaw under my fingertips.
The real one is older. More tired. It has a scar over the left eyebrow that I’ll never be able to look at without remembering a hot August afternoon and the sound of cicadas.
It’s not the face I imagined.
But it’s his.
I’ve learned that seeing someone clearly doesn’t mean only seeing the good things. It means seeing the scar too. The lie, and the shame under it, and the thirty-eight years of trying to make it right.
