I turned to him.
“Daniel?”
He looked away.
And in that instant, I understood that the affair was not the only secret they had been keeping from me.
Something else had happened twenty years earlier.
Something that frightened him more than being caught in my mother’s bedroom.
“Sit down, Claire,” my mother said.
“I don’t want to sit down. I want the truth.”
She took a deep breath.
“Twenty years ago, Daniel was the man I intended to marry.”
I stared at her.
She explained that they had met when she was thirty-eight and he was twenty-eight. He had been a young pharmacist working at a neighborhood pharmacy in our city. She had been married to my father, Victor, for nearly a decade, but their marriage had already become a lonely arrangement held together by appearances.
Daniel had been the first person in years who made her feel heard.
Their relationship had begun innocently enough. They talked after work, met for coffee, and discovered that they shared the same dreams about family, travel, and a quieter life.
