Free Acts of Contrition by Jennifer Handford

recognition that we were now a couple.
    In those early weeks and months of dating, Tom and I poured out our every secret, talked of exes, skeletons in our closets. There was an urgency in getting to know each other, as if we were running against the clock. We’d found each other when we were thirty years old, not twenty. To make up for lost time, we skipped the stage of dating where we shared parts of our history in small doses—a sprinkling here, a scattering there. Why waste time dipping toes in the water when clearly a cannonball approach was so much more effective?
    So in our early days and months together, we lingered in restaurant bars, slumped in the vinyl booths of all-night diners, and told each other every detail of our lives. Tom told me of his brother and his struggle with alcohol, his father and his indiscretions, his mother’s stoic response to it all. And I told Tom about my family and Landon—but from the start, it was Landon he was most interested in. He would urge me on, frowning, as he dug deeper. Without giving a thought to the repercussions, I told Tom everything: how super intense Landon was—for a while he’d be all in, and then he’d cool off, leave me hanging for weeks, wondering what went wrong. How it was a rush for him to be so into me, and such a huge withdrawal when he stood back. Tom commented that I sounded like his brother, the addict, and I admitted to him that I couldn’t argue with that. Then I committed an even greater sin: I told Tom about the things we did, the places we went, how we watched every episode of
The West Wing
, how we’d meet for late dinners at Old Ebbitt Grill, how we’d linger over brunch, reading the papers. What I took as interest in my emotional history was really Tom on a reconnaissance mission, gathering damning bits and details about my relationship.
    I still believe Tom’s motives were honest and that he truly was trying to learn about me, but the information festered in him, jabbing at him like a thorn in his side and then, later, like a dagger. Telling Tom too much about Landon was a mistake I learned too late. Much became taboo: political TV dramas, late dinners, lazy brunches. My past had preemptively tainted my future. Once the information was told—that my relationship with Landon was at once needy and passionate, and then distant and cold—there was no retracting it.
    Now, from time to time, Tom holds it against me, as if our marriage—a steady, reliable ship—is lacking in comparison to the tumultuous force majeure that was Landon and my relationship.
    I squint into the sun to find Sally on the soccer field. “I’m sorry you have to see him,” I say, for lack of anything better.
    “Please don’t apologize, Mare,” he says without looking at me. “It makes it sound like you’re complicit, like you have a part in this. I’m not looking for you to be sorry about anything. I’m just saying, you know?”
    “I know,” I say, leaning in close to him, “but I
am
sorry, sorry that I brought baggage to our marriage. You could have married someone else, someone who hadn’t dated Landon James for six years, who hadn’t known him for a decade.”
    “So what?” Tom says. “That was before we met. You have nothing to be sorry about after we met, right?”
    Tom has a genius for reeling me into a trap like this, a claw clamped onto my foot so that I can’t move, a place where I have no choice but to lie more.
    “I feel bad,” I say, “because it doesn’t end with him. My relationship with him ended,
obviously,
but he’s still around. That’swhat I feel guilty about.” I dodge and skirt, avoid answering Tom’s question directly. “What else can I do but apologize?”
    Sally’s teammate passes her the ball. She dribbles it to the outside, her brows knit in concentration, fists clenched tight. A few more steps and then she shoots, sending the ball sailing over the goalie’s head, wedging it into the corner of the net. Sally falls to