After the affair was exposed, Susan had fallen into a deep depression. The shame became unbearable. One night, she took too many sleeping pills because she wanted to escape everything she had done.
She woke up in a hospital.
Michael was there.
At the time, Susan remembered that moment as one of the last signs that he still cared. He was sitting beside her. He was holding her hand.
When she asked why her lower abdomen hurt, Michael gave her an explanation.
“The pain is just from the stomach pumping,” he told her.
She believed him.
Why wouldn’t she?
Back then, she felt she owed him everything. She believed she had already damaged their marriage beyond repair, and she was grateful he had stayed at all.
But now, sitting in her car eighteen years later, Susan wondered whether she had spent almost two decades apologizing for something she did not fully understand.
