“I’d like that,” I tell him. “Shall I cook?” But inside I’m screaming to myself. What the fuck are you doing? On what planet does Leah cook?

“I’d love that. Seven OK?”

“Perfect.”

“Have fun this weekend.” Then he is gone, and I am standing in the middle of a wood sporting a huge grin and hoping that he goes to warm his feet by a fire.

A few more days can’t hurt, I tell myself. And then Leah can disappear.

Have I upset you? The message my cheating shit of a husband sends to his mistress. You didn’t reply last night…

What do you reply when someone sends you a picture of their penis? Is there some kind of standard response, a common “that’s nice” message? I missed the etiquette on this stuff. Hannah would know but I can’t ask her, not without her thinking my mystery man is the one sending them. Somehow, I don’t think it’s Tom’s style. Although, to be fair, I wouldn’t have thought it was Chris’s either.

In the end I decide to not mention it and hope it goes away: Sorry! I was out with some girlfriends!

It doesn’t work and he sends another photo, followed by: Guess where I want to put this, my dirty little princess.

An involuntary sound emerges from the back of my throat, part gag and part laugh. Dirty little princess? Of all the terrible names he could think of.

Why don’t you tell me? I send. There is one thing I know Chris is awful at, and that is talking dirty. He tried it once when we’d only been together a short time and it was excruciating. The phrasing of the first messages I looked at between him and Leah was all over the place, too. Thinking about him in a slightly moldy hotel somewhere, waiting for his friends as he struggles to put into words the things he thinks his mistress wants him to say, makes me smile. Perhaps there is some fun I can have here.

And then I realize. There is a lot of fun I can have here. I can tear my lying cheating bastard of a husband down piece by piece until he’s a weeping shell on the floor. He’s always been so proud of how irresistible he is to women. “Not that I’d ever cheat on you, sweetheart. But you know that the ladies will look. They can’t help themselves.” How many times has he said some variation of that? Oh yes, my husband is a narcissist all right.

Perhaps I should even tell him I’m making amends with my sister, let him worry that we are rebuilding some of the bridges we burned before. Would we ever have done that? If I hadn’t… There was always a part of me that assumed we would reconcile, one day, when we were old and gray and all that shit from the past just didn’t matter as much any more. Maybe then we would have come back together, been two little old biddies in a nursing home somewhere, finishing each other’s sentences and eating jelly from little plastic pots. What would Chris do if he thought we were talking? Would he shit himself that she would tell me?