Okay. Two weeks before the wedding, we’d shared a bottle of wine, smoked some cheap pot, and Jeff’s playful pleas for me to call off the wedding grew more desperate and pathetic. He agreed to quit begging if he could have one last kiss—which seemed a sweet idea except for the lack of time limit we placed on it, because this last kiss led us to a bland room in a Motel 6 outside Bakersfield, where it almost turned into one last time. My maid of honor said it didn’t count because Jeff never entered me and it was all over quickly. I needed Tim to know about it. You see, during that last month of our engagement, he’d been telling me everything. Funny things. His first French kiss. Not so funny things, too. Two students he’d slept with in his student-teacher days. He’d been so forthright that I knew I had to tell him. Also, he deserved to know the person he was marrying. I was struggling to explain it when Tim held up his hand for me to stop talking. “Listen,” he said, “I’ll forgive you your past if you forgive me mine.”

“But I’m trying to tell you what happened yesterday.”

“Yesterday included.”

How cool was he. It was one of those moments when I knew I was marrying the right man.

But now Jeff Slade, TV star, was sitting across from me, struggling to find the words so that I might forgive him our past.

“I was rotten to you,” he said.

“Really, I don’t remember it that way.” I was lying.

“Part of my program of recovery is that I make amends to the people I’ve hurt. And you are my last person. And I want to thank you for giving me this chance . . .”

The beauty of this particular narcissist is that while he believed he’d changed and learned and grown, he forgot that so had the person sitting across from him. Yes, he hurt me, and yes, it took a long time to recuperate, but time and distance had been my friends in this regard: If there had never been the frequently drunk and wasted Jeff Slakowitz, the three-timing, deceit-riddled Jeff Slakowitz, that hollow/shallow/ soulless thing of beauty, I never would have found Tim. Jeff made Tim possible in the same way that any person’s mistakes inform his or her future choices. I can’t count the times I’ve wanted to tell my husband, “Without Jeff Slade, there would have been no you.”

I had the above thoughts while Jeff Slade kept on talking: “. . . was awful to you. And boy, do I know it now. The monster I was . . .”