All Chapters of I Regained My Sight Just in Time to See My Husband Cheat: Chapter 1 - Chapter 8

“Lily,” I said. “Tell me about Auntie Elara’s office.”The spoon clinked back into the bowl.“Can I have more cereal?”“You haven’t answered me, baby.”“There’s a frog at school,” Lily said. “His name is Gerald. He only has three legs but the teacher said he’s still a good frog.”And just like that she was gone, off down a hallway in her own head, the office forgotten, the couch forgotten, Gerald the three-legged frog now the most important thing in the world.I almost laughed. Four-year-olds. You couldn’t time them. The truth fell out of them sideways and then they wandered off before you could ask a second question.“Gerald sounds very brave,” I said.“He is. He hops funny.”“More cereal’s coming,” Mrs. Rose said, and I heard the box tip.I let the office go. I’d learned that too. You couldn’t pull a thread in front of the person who’d sewn the seam. You waited until they left the room.So I waited. All morning I waited.By the time the girls were down for their nap I had the house

I climbed the stairs.Fourteen of them. I knew the number. But for the first time in three years I didn’t need it, and that was the strangest part, my feet still counting out of habit while my eyes did the work, the two halves of me not yet agreed on which one to trust.The laughter came again. Soft. Lazy. The laughter of people who think they’re alone.I told myself it was nothing. I told myself there’d be a reason. I’d see them sitting in the study with coffee and I’d feel foolish for the cold thing crawling up my spine, and we’d laugh about it later, all of us, when I told them I could see.I reached the landing.The bedroom door stood open a few inches. Light spilled through the gap and lay across the hallway floor in a long pale stripe. I stayed out of it. Some instinct older than thought kept me back in the dim, my shoulder near the wall, my breath held.I leaned just enough to see through the gap.And the first clear thing I saw with my brand new eyes, after three years of dark

He was standing in the dark with his arms crossed, and for one cold second my whole body wanted to look at him.I didn’t.I let my face drift past him, eyes loose, aimed at the wall over his shoulder, and I put one hand out for the door frame like a woman who’d heard someone breathing but couldn’t find them.“Alexander?” I made it small. Uncertain. “Is that you?”A pause that went on too long.“It’s me,” he said.“You scared me.” I pressed my hand flat to my chest. “What are you doing standing there?”Another pause. He was reading my face. I could feel it, the weight of his attention, looking for the thing he hadn’t found yet.“I heard the tap,” he said finally. “Thought maybe you needed help.”“I just wanted to wash my face. Couldn’t sleep.”“You’ve been having a lot of trouble sleeping.”“I have.”He uncrossed his arms. The danger went out of the hallway slowly, like water draining.“Come back to bed,” he said, and his voice was warm again, the husband-voice, and he took my elbow to

The house didn't sound like mine anymore.I lay awake most nights now, and I'd learned to read the place by its sounds the way I once had by necessity, except now the sounds told a different story than they used to.After eleven, there was the murmur.Alexander's voice, low, through the study wall. Not the clipped tone of a work call. This was slower. Warmer. The voice you use when there's no hurry, when the person you're talking to is close and the night is long. It went on some nights for an hour. I lay in our bed on my back with my eyes open and I listened to my husband murmur to someone in the next room, and I didn't have to guess who.And there were the footsteps.Elara's. Light and quick, at hours a guest wouldn't be walking around. Down the hall past our door at midnight. Up again at two. The soft click of the office door, or worse, no click at all, just the footsteps stopping somewhere they had no business stopping.I stopped telling myself I imagined it. I'd done enough of th