Through the Heart Read Online Free PDF

imagined this moment? I had imagined what hearing those words would give me—not that it would take all the pain away, but I thought it might give me back a sense of not having been so completely and disastrously wrong.
    All of a sudden, something in his face tugged out the echo of an old memory—the memory of what I used to feel when I looked at him.
    “And?” I asked.
    “And I want to spend time with you,” he said earnestly. “Could we do that? I miss having you in my life.”
    Then the baby stirred on his chest—a visible reminder of the intervening years, the betrayal, the hurt: the ocean of hurt.
    “What’s her name?” I asked him.
    “Courtney.” He looked down at the baby, and he smiled. It was involuntary, genuine, real. It was a smile I realized I’d never seen on his face. And without knowing why, my heart started to ache.
    “How old is she?” I asked.
    “Six weeks.” Dan caught one of her tiny hands between his fingers. He was still in full confessional mode. “Stacey found out she was pregnant . . . and we thought . . . well, things hadn’t been going so well, and we thought it might help. It was so good at the beginning, when we had Dan Junior.”
    The ache intensified, I observed, almost dispassionately. Now it had an object; it hurt to hear that he’d been happy when I’d been so miserable.
    He went on, “But it didn’t. I mean, it hasn’t . . . helped. At all. Not between me and Stacey. If anything, it’s worse now.”
    “When did you decide that you were going to leave Stacey?” I asked.
    The moment I said it, I knew something was wrong.
    He shifted from one foot to the other and smiled—but it was about as different a smile as you could get from the one I’d just seen when he looked at his baby. This one was nervous, uncomfortable, apologetic.
    “I . . . well . . . the thing is, Courtney’s so young. I couldn’t leave. Not just yet anyway. When she gets a little older . . .”
    I knew what he was saying, but somehow I couldn’t quite believe it.
    “So what exactly did you mean when you said you wanted to spend time with me?” I asked. What’s usually said about cheaters is, “If they do it with you, they’ll do it to you.” He wanted to turn that around. He’d done it to me, and now he wanted to do it with me. He had nerve—that was for sure. And when we were together, I thought it was the one thing he lacked.
    “Well . . . I mean . . . I miss you. My marriage is basically over, even if I can’t leave. And I guess I thought you might be lonely too. I haven’t heard that you’ve been dating anyone. It’s been a long time. Maybe you’ve been thinking about me too? I thought maybe you never really got over us.”
    “You mean you thought that if I couldn’t be with you, I wouldn’t want to be with anyone?” There should have been emotion in that question. But the emotion had been missing from my life for so long that maybe it was just cleaned out—like someone had taken a big vacuum and sucked it all away.
    He said, “I don’t know. Not exactly. But . . . well, you’re not with anyone else, are you?” Then he added, “I think you know that it doesn’t get better than we had.”
    This was so ridiculous, that I couldn’t help it—I laughed. Right in his face. And the words just slipped out. I said, “Oh, Lord, I hope to God you’re not right about that. That would be terrible.”
    He looked incredibly offended. Finally, something had gotten through to him.
    For one moment I could see clearly. I’d spent so much time imagining him as the one who had it all together—who had a wife and a family and a good job and a life—but there in the store it seemed very clear to me that even though he appeared to have everything, he in fact had no more than I did. And maybe less.
    It was one of those rare moments when all the trappings of life drop away and you see the person standing in front of you, almost, it seems, from the inside out rather than the outside