Free The Letters by Luanne Rice, Joseph Monninger

the world can we even calculate that into the equation? I took you for granted. I did. I know that. In the devastated state I knew myself to be in, you felt—please try to understand this—like a chore. You were one more thing to do, one more thing to factor in when I had no desire to think of anyone but myself. Selfish, I know, but human, I would argue. We have talked about Paul a thousand times, but how can we ever fully comprehend what his death meant? How can we ever swallow that last full spoonful of utter loss? Hell, I am halfway across Alaska on a dogsled, still chasing something about Paul that we know can’t be captured. So perhaps we just have to accept Paul’s death as a prime mover, something that pushes us in directions we can’t always explain. I couldn’t be with you. Not for daily chats, not for a cocktail, not for a should-we-clean-up-the-garden-and-spread-compost-on-it kind of married discussion. To have engaged in that kind of conversation would have killed me or driven me mad right then. So, true, I had no psychological room to rent.
    I’ll add this. I took a certain delight in not being available to you. There, I’ve said it. I felt you blamed me for Paul’s death. Intellectually we both understood it was an accident, a horrible twist, but I felt in your bones you believed I had pushed Paul to take on an adventure like this. Though you never said it, I perceived a haze of blame, a motherly accusation that the older male had been unfair to the young male, your son. I understand that if I pinned you down this second, or if I said it to you face to face, you would deny it. And maybe part of you will deny it even reading it here. But I believed it to be true, felt it in my heart, and used my absence as a way to get back at you for such a terrible accusation.
    Now you know. I don’t know if a thing like this can be shaven and cleaned and made to live between us. I don’t know. But now you understand why I did not stay near you, why I accepted assignments to get me out of the house. Not noble, but perhaps forgivably male. I’ll let you decide.
    Now Daniel.
    I hate the bastard. Is that too blunt and unexamined? I hate his guts, everything he stands for, the pretense to art, his little “jewel-box windows,” as you call it, his appeal to the women of the town, his lurking, especially his lurking, on the computer, waiting to talk to you, his wife in the other room. I hate him for that. And I hated you for falling for it. You were too smart to fall for it, too smart to give in even in a small way to that jerk. I understand, I do, that you also went nearly insane after Paul’s death. I know that I had made myself unavailable to you. But Daniel? Good grief. He was such a cliché. I would have had more respect for your misstep if it had been with a local construction guy, or a cop, or almost anything. Sorry. I am not blaming you a second time, but if these letters mean anything, we might as well be honest.
    So, yes, when I saw what you had written in your email to him, when I knew you had gone to town to see him, I felt a deep, horrible train running through my stomach. Call it an excruciating nightmare when you know you shouldn’t look, you shouldn’t turn to see what has slithered up the stairs, but you have to turn anyway and put your eyes on the horror that came at least partially from your own imagination.
    I parked across the street. I watched you. Here’s a thing I never told you. Part of me, a sliver of me, accepted the pain of seeing you in another man’s arms. Does that sound perverse? I’ll tell you why I felt that way. I saw you, Hadley. It felt like a slap across my face, like the world sending me a message, and when he slid his hand off your waist and put it on your hip, ready to move down—the greedy bastard—I saw you as the girl I had fallen in love with, the woman I had loved for years, and you were no longer part of me, no longer a married woman, but Hadley Emmet, the beautiful