When Two Plans Collide
It’s strange how much you can read in a person’s face in the first two seconds.
I opened the door and there he was—a man I had never met, but whose name Lily had mentioned in the car. The look on his face said everything.
He hadn’t expected me to be there.
I stepped aside and asked him to come in. No shouting, no scene on the porch. Lily was in the next room, carefully arranging forks by color. She didn’t need to witness whatever this was about to be.
What followed wasn’t dramatic in the way people often imagine. There were no broken plates, no screaming. Just a painfully calm, long conversation in the sitting room.
Questions.
Answers that didn’t fit.
Half-truths that had to be dragged the rest of the way out.
Pieces of my life rearranging themselves into a new picture I didn’t want, but couldn’t unsee.
It was, in many ways, more exhausting than an argument would have been.
By the time that door closed behind him for the last time, I knew that some things in my marriage would never go back to the way they were.
But there was something more important than that.
Lily.
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