Page 80 of Sweet Ruin

2022. 2021.

My.

Fucking.

God.

They’ve been doing this for years.

It hurts so fucking badly that I can’t even find the words to express it. “Oof” won’t cut it anymore.

But why, I’m wondering? Nothing on these statements tells me anything I didn’t already know about who my husband is and who my sister is.

What it tells me is where I was.

Because every single one of those charges has me standing sadly on the other side of it. While they were busy frantically rutting in a closet or a hotel room or my own bed, I was carving turkeys and hauling folding chairs up and down some creaky stairs.

Fourteen months wounded me, but I thought I would recover.

Turns out the wound goes much deeper than that.

I feel like I’m being hurt all over again. Reading this stuff now, it’s like they went back and dug into the good days, burrowing like parasites into the ones I’d have listed if you’d asked me to name a nice day.

If I was simply sad, there’d be a process that I could go through. Cry, eat something, sleep it off, power through.

But this is so much worse than sadness. This is my whole world being destabilized. Everything I thought I knew was wrong.

It’s the nauseous lurch you get when you miss a step.

And it happens once for each little X.

Over and over, for two hours, on every good day I own. Gone. Gone. Gone.

I close the planner and put my hand flat on the cover like it’ll help me commune with the afterlife.

“Sorry, Dad,” I say to it. “I wrecked your calendar.”

I finish the statements at half-past four on Wednesday. All told, I find forty-one hotel charges and another twenty-eight suspicious charges that seem likely to coincide with an episode of the affair.

My life is ruined, but hey, at least Skye will be pleased.

What this doesn’t solve is anything that has to do with the bakery.

That’s still coming. January 15th is sixteen days away, and everything Skye said in that crooked little office is still true.

I’m right and I’m broke, and being right and broke is the same as being wrong.

I put myself to work for a little while, but only so I can stave off what I know is coming. Truthfully, I’ve known it’s coming for a long time now.

But I want just a little bit longer before I concede defeat.

I take the trays out of the oven and do the closing count. Then I send everybody home. I wipe the front cases down, turn the lights off out there and leave the one over the work table on, and then I sit back down in the office with the door open so I can hear if somebody rattles the front.

Then, finally, I can delay no longer.

I pull the keyboard over and I type it in.

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