But love could not make the hospital room disappear.
“I begged you to remain with me,” I said. “I asked for a test. I asked you to look me in the eyes. You left anyway.”
Aaron said he had been frightened and furious, that he had not been thinking clearly.
“That is exactly what scares me,” I replied. “When you were hurt, you did not come to me for the truth. You punished me for a story you created in your own mind. You required evidence before you would believe me, but you needed none at all before calling me unfaithful.”
He began to cry. He asked whether one terrible mistake truly had to end our marriage.
I told him it was not only one moment. The accusation had revealed years of unspoken resentment: his disappointment after each daughter’s birth, his insistence on trying again, his quiet jealousy of Michael, and my habit of making myself smaller so he would remain content. The birthmark had not created those fractures. It had illuminated them.
