Total pages in book: 143
Estimated words: 136743 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 684(@200wpm)___ 547(@250wpm)___ 456(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 136743 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 684(@200wpm)___ 547(@250wpm)___ 456(@300wpm)
“Look, Sol—”
My phone beeps and I glance at the screen, frowning when I see my doctor’s name.
“Brunson, lemme call you back. This is my doctor’s office.”
“Everything okay?”
“I had my annual. Probably just confirming that things checked out. I’ll talk to you later.”
I catch the call and am surprised not to hear my doctor’s nurse on the other end, but the physician herself.
“Dr. Claymont,” I say. “Reaching out to me personally, and on a Saturday? What’s next? House calls?”
I wait for her answering humor, but it doesn’t come. We’ve been together a long time. She was fresh out of med school and we had just relocated to Atlanta when I first started seeing her more than fifteen years ago. I know her pretty well, and her easy humor is usually evident.
“Shelia?” I glance at the girls eating breakfast and allow a nervous laugh to slip out. “What’s up?”
“Sol, I know it’s unusual to call on a Saturday, and for me to call personally, but I wanted to talk to you about some results from your annual.”
My belly knots with a familiar dread. I leave the kitchen and walk through the living room and out onto the front porch before answering.
“If it’s cancer”—I force the words out and sit on the top step—“just spit it out. You know my mother—”
“It’s not cancer.”
“Oh, thank God.” I slump, letting my back hit the hard edge of the porch steps.
“I know,” she says, compassion tingeing her words. “You’re fine. I mean… you don’t have cancer.”
“But I’m not fine?” A frown accompanies my brief laugh. “Just tell me what’s wrong.”
“You have chlamydia.”
The silence swells and bursts in my ears, ending in a roar where all the sounds of the neighborhood—Mr. Calloway’s dogs barking, the kids up the block squealing as their mom pulls them in a wagon, the airplane flying low, headed for Hartsfield—all come rushing back in.
“Oh, wow,” I giggle. “Sorry. For a second I thought you said I have—”
“Chlamydia, yeah. You do, Sol. I’m… I’m sorry.”
The humor burns to ashes on my lips, and for a few seconds I can’t speak.
“It’s not life-threatening,” she continues, reassuming a strictly professional tone. “You probably didn’t even know anything was wrong. You didn’t report any symptoms when you were here earlier this week. It’s curable. I’ve already ordered a round of antibiotics that you—”
“Wait a minute.” I stand to pace our driveway. “There’s a mistake. A mix-up with someone else’s results or something. Shelia, you know that couldn’t be. I’ve only been with…”
My husband.
I’ve only had sex with one person for the last two decades. Apparently Edward can’t say the same.
Shelia’s instructions about the medication, her telling me the prescription should be waiting at the pharmacy—very few of the details compute. I only absorb the pain of Edward’s betrayal. It batters me from the inside, pounding the tender muscle in my chest again and again. The beating of my heart.
In a daze, I disconnect the call and drop to the front step with a thud, the winter air drying tears on my cheeks into stiff tracks. A pain so visceral it literally steals my breath spears right through me. My mind reels, replaying every moment since the day Edward and I met on campus, finding the thread that runs through good and hard years, through three delivery rooms and nearly two decades under the same roof, sharing the same bed. I’m tired of gripping that thread, searching for the moment things started to change. I only know they did; he did, and his deceit has unraveled our lives completely.
I’ve been so stupid. All the nights I wondered why he didn’t want to sleep with me, and he was fucking someone else. The irony of me practically begging him to make love to me the night of the Christmas party. Now I understand his comments about vaginal rejuvenation weren’t just simple cruelty. He was redirecting; distracting me from his duplicity by making me feel inadequate, deliberately planting seeds of insecurity so I focused on me and not on the shit he was up to. My paranoia that sprang from his odd behavior the last two years wasn’t paranoia at all, but intuition. Instinct I was too afraid to follow to its natural conclusion.
It’s not even the infection itself that makes me feel dirty. It’s his betrayal. I feel stained not by what he has given me, but by what he has taken away. What he withheld from me when I held nothing back from him and gave everything to the life we promised we’d build together.
The hurt settles like sediment, sinking all the way to the bottom of me, and solidifies into rage. Not only has he put our financial security at risk, left the girls and me completely vulnerable, but he has violated me in the most egregious way. Not just breaking our vows, but defiling what was supposed to be sacred between our bodies and our hearts.