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as with her father, Sheila had to work diligently to getBill’s attention. She cooked romantic dinners, planned weekend getaways, couple’s nights out, day trips to quirky places she read about in travel magazines. Despite her best efforts, he continued to withdraw. And the less interest he showed in her, the harder she tried.
    She knew the marriage was in trouble. She was working on her Ph.D. in social psychology by this time, and it wasn’t hard to identify the basic problems. Still, she didn’t have the courage to leave him. Not even when she began to suspect Bill was cheating on her.
    Instead, she threw herself into her work. Made full professor. Her work gave her so much joy and fulfillment, she could almost convince herself it was enough.
    Almost.
    Her marriage came to an end one weekend in April, nearly a decade after her wedding day. She came home two days early from a psychology conference because her pesky cold had turned into bronchitis.
    Bill’s Jaguar was in the driveway when she pulled up to the house in her taxi, exhausted and dizzy from the long flight and too much cold medication. At 3:00 p.m. on a Wednesday, this was unheard of. She’d never known him to blow off a weekday afternoon. Beside the Jag sat a cute little Toyota hybrid, a car she’d never seen before. It was then she knew.
    She paid the driver and stood at her front door, light-headed and sweaty, wondering if she was ready for this. Leaving her suitcase on the front steps in case she had to spend the night at a hotel, she let herself into her house. She tiptoed up the staircase, taking care to avoid the steps she knew would creak.
    The door to their bedroom was closed. She paused, ear cocked. Somewhere behind the door, Bill groaned in ecstasy.It was a sound she hadn’t personally heard in over four years, and it stabbed her.
    Finally, she was going to come face-to-face with her husband and his mistress, a woman who’d been stealing his heart away, piece by piece, for God only knew how long.
    She opened the door in a trance. If she thought she was prepared, she was wrong.
    That Bill was doing it doggy-style with his favorite surgical scrub nurse was not surprising.
    That the scrub nurse was a forty-two-year-old man named Norm floored her.
    In all the years they’d been married—despite all of Sheila’s work in social behavior and perception—it had never once occurred to her that her domineering, bullying, brilliant heart-surgeon husband was gay.
    A full minute passed before either man noticed she was there. Then all hell broke loose.
    Yelping in surprise, the two men jumped off the bed, penises still hard but wilting fast. They knocked into each other in their search for pants, shirts, anything to throw over their naked bodies, cursing and red-faced, watching her with furtive eyes, wanting to slam the bedroom door in her face. Neither did.
    She watched them for a few more seconds before she turned and walked slowly back down the stairs. She was seated on the sofa as Norm the surgical scrub nurse flew by, missing the last step and almost wiping out on the hardwood floors. He was out the front door and into his little car with scarcely a backward glance. Through the window she watched as he pulled away, flattening the recycling bin from next door, which their ornery old neighbor Mr. Zeminski never brought in on time.
    Bill didn’t come downstairs for another ten minutes. When he did, shirt buttoned haphazardly, hair in messy tufts, he wasshaking, his face a mask of shame and self-loathing. She had never seen him look anything but confident, and it was almost as unsettling to her as the gay sex act she’d just caught him in.
    The silence between them was like dead space. She waited for him to speak, having no clue how to begin this conversation.
    “Promise you won’t tell,” he finally said, his voice choked.
    She watched as her man-of-steel husband burst into tears. He dropped onto their sofa, sobbing like a child in the pale