Kat came to my house on a Sunday morning in August, carrying a bottle of white wine and a face that was a strange arrangement of shame and something that was not exactly shame. My husband Owen had confessed to me the previous night. He had come home from a work trip at 11 PM, sat on the edge of our bed, and cried so hard he could not get the sentence out for almost twenty minutes. When he finally did get it out, the sentence was: "I slept with Kat." I asked him when. He said June. I asked him how many times. He said once. I asked him where. He said at the Airbnb in Asheville, when the four of us —
Kat, her husband Derek, Owen, me — had gone for a long weekend. I had been sick that Saturday night and had gone to bed at 9 PM. Kat and Owen had stayed up on the porch with a bottle of bourbon. Owen slept on the porch couch. Kat walked past my sleeping body to get there. I had, at the time, noticed nothing. Owen cried on our bed until almost 2 AM. I did not cry. I did not yell. I did not ask him to leave. I told him to sleep in the guest room. I made the bed in there myself. And I sat awake in our kitchen at 4 AM, and I realized that the person I needed to talk to — the person I would have called about any crisis for the previous fifteen years — was the person who had caused this one.