Chapter 14: Graceland

Jack and I had been together—happily, for all intents and purposes—for nearly six years when I started sexting with The Musician after the concert that night. Asher was almost four.

Though I was initially scandalized, gradually it began to feel less wrong. It was energizing to have a thing that was just mine. Anyway, Jack knew I still had feelings for The Musician, a point I used to justify our occasional contact (whenever he turned up looking, if I’m being honest). It was fine-just-fine—that’s what I told myself. It never occurred to me this secret corner of my life might have begun to undermine the foundation of my marriage. Nor that by meeting those needs elsewhere I was undermining the intimacy I professed to want with Jack. It’s hard to be close to someone when you’re simultaneously hiding something from them. But I’d been telling myself that what Jack didn’t know couldn’t hurt him for long enough that I’d begun to believe it, which made it that much easier to take things a step further when an opportunity presented itself. 

I was meeting my friend Reese in Colorado—we were going to see The Musician play a show. Reese and I had booked an Airbnb, which is where we met the afternoon of the concert. The apartment was on the top floor and it was sweltering, so we opened the windows and went outside while the space aired out.

As Reese and I sat talking, a burgundy pickup pulled into the dusty parking strip. The driver got out and walked through the gate, feet from where we were sitting, acknowledging us with an authoritative nod.

Something happened in those thirty seconds. Was it the nod? His bare chest? Some alchemical fusion? I had an instant crush.

The guy disappeared inside for a few minutes and reappeared with work gloves. He gathered tools from the side of the house and began tilling the garden fifty feet from where we were, generally appearing to ignore us as Paul Simon played on a small speaker turned way up. The guy—The Gardener—mouthed the words to Graceland as he worked. Reese and I were mostly silent, watching him move. Or she may have been talking. I wasn’t listening. I needed to study him, the first stranger I’d really looked at since I married Jack—the first man that gave me that kind of pause.