Inventory of a Long Mistake

She asks him over breakfast, because the kitchen at seven in the morning is the most honest room in the house. The light is bad for lying. The coffee is between them like a small witness.

"I want to tell you something," she says.

He puts down the paper. He has known her for twenty-two years, and in twenty-two years she has said that sentence perhaps four times, and each of the four times the thing that followed it has changed the shape of a year.

"Alright," he says.

She takes a breath and lets it out, and he watches her decide to keep going, and loves her for the deciding more than for what she is about to say.

"I've been thinking about something for a while."

"How long is a while."

"Maybe a year. Maybe longer."

He waits. He has learned, over the long marriage, that the worst thing he can do at this kind of moment is help. She has to lay it down herself or it doesn't count.

"There's someone," she says. "Not in the way you're thinking. I haven't done anything. I haven't even — there's just someone I've thought about."

"Okay."

"And I want to ask you something about it."

He sets his cup down very carefully on the saucer, because his hand is not entirely steady, and he does not want her to see the cup shake. The cup is one she made the year their daughter was born, the year she briefly took a pottery class and produced four objects, of which two survived and one is this. He has held this cup almost every morning of his adult life.

"Ask," he says.

She does. She uses careful words. She does not use the names of organs or acts. She talks about wanting to know what it would be like, just once, to be wanted by someone who did not already know what she looked like asleep. She talks about not wanting to leave. She talks about being forty-nine and having a body that had begun, in the last two years, to feel like a country she was emigrating from. She talks about how she would tell him everything, or nothing, or whatever he wanted. She talks for a long time and her voice does not break, but at one point her hand goes flat on the table the way it does when she is holding herself in place.

When she finishes, the kitchen is very quiet. Outside, a bin lorry is making its slow Tuesday way down the street. A neighbour's dog barks twice and stops. He thinks about a great many things at once. He thinks about the first night of their honeymoon, in a hotel where the window would not close, and how she had laughed at the rain coming in. He thinks about the year she was sick and how thin her wrists had got. He thinks about a woman he himself had not slept with, eight years ago, in a hotel bar in another city, and how he had come back to his room alone and called her, his wife, just to hear her voice, and had not told her why.

"Who is he," he says, finally.

"Does it matter."

"I think it might. Not in the way you think."

She tells him. It is no one he knows. It is no one she works with. It is a man she met twice, at the kind of event where one meets people once and never again, except that she had met him twice. He thinks: she has been careful. She has been careful for me.

"And you've spoken with him about — "

"No. I wanted to speak to you first. I would never — " She stops. She starts again. "I wouldn't even consider it without you. That's the whole point. If I did this without telling you, it would be the thing. The telling you is what makes it not — "

"I know," he says. And he does know. That is the strange thing. He knows precisely what she means, and he is not sure whether knowing makes him generous or pathetic, and he suspects there is no useful difference.

They sit there for a long time. The coffee gets cold. At some point he reaches across and puts his hand on top of hers, not in answer to anything yet, just to keep contact while they think. Her hand under his is warm and dry and very familiar. He can feel her pulse in the inside of her wrist, and it is fast. She is more frightened than she has been letting on.

"I need to ask you something too," he says.

"Anything."

"Is it that you want him. Or is it that you want to be the kind of person who could."