One Less Problem Without You Read Free

on. I’d been living in nervous apprehension for too long, never quite trusting anything he said, whether it was that he loved me or that we were running low on toilet paper. I’d heard lies that mattered and that didn’t, and that sent me into a tailspin of doubt.
    I certainly never believed him when he said he was working late.
    For perhaps ten minutes I scrolled through his e-mail, and apart from a few seemingly innocuous messages to his friends, there was nothing. I actually began to feel a little bit better. Not okay, by any means—the texts with “Red” remained inexcusable—but something inside of me just hoped to God I hadn’t been duped time and again.
    That hope died fast when suddenly I got to a date, about two months prior, with a collection of Craigslist answers. He’d been on a business trip to Las Vegas. A long one that included weekends, which struck me as odd at the time. But still, he did have business out of town a lot, did a lot of consulting on legal cases and whatnot, and I never wanted to be the kind of wife that did inordinate investigating of something presented as truth.
    In other words, I never wanted to be the kind of wife I was being at this moment.
    But I was in for a penny, so I might as well go in for the whole pound. Even while I clicked, during that fraction of a second between clicking and opening, I hoped he’d been trying to sell or buy some car part or something. But it wasn’t the case.
    Come play with me? 100 gifts an hour, you come to me. 200 gifts an hour I go to you. The link was too old for me to see anything beyond that which was in the e-mail, but there was plenty in there. Leif described his physique, in painful (and possibly inaccurate; to my memory we never measured) detail, and asked where she—assuming it was a she— could be found. What room?
    There had to be missing e-mails—though I couldn’t tell why he would have deleted some but not all, or why they weren’t all in the history of the one I was looking at. Still, even though there were enough gaps for Old Me to have slipped through the cracks, this me was seriously disgusted.
    I mean, what were “gifts”? That could only mean payment, right? My husband, who declared every small new thing I timidly suggested we try in bed for freshness to be “weird,” was willing to go to Vegas—where, by the way, clean, tested prostitution was legal —and pay some Craigslist person for anonymous sex?
    I cut-and-pasted her ad headline into the current Las Vegas search bar and came up with a new ad with the same wording. This time there were pictures. A woman, her face obscured by long dark hair but revealing enough to show she wasn’t … conventionally attractive, was posing with her foot up on a dirty avocado-colored bathtub, bending over, with a soap scum–covered shower stall behind her.
    This ? This he was willing to pay for?
    It’s hard to describe just what this did to my heart. And I don’t even mean my metaphorical “broken heart” (which surely existed and was damned to get worse) but just literally my heart. It clenched, felt so tight I could barely breathe. I thought I was going to throw up.
    There was no forgetting this. There was no ignoring it.
    There were more Craigslist correspondences there, but I couldn’t even bear to look at them. None would say, “Just kidding, can’t believe you fell for that, Di!,” so all they could possibly do was exponentially increase the horror and betrayal I was feeling now.
    I had to stop. For my own good, I had to stop.
    But before I did, I clicked each one to forward it to myself—then noticed the faint arrow indicating that the e-mail had been forwarded.
    Shit!
    I fiddled around, trying to find a way to undo the indicator, and finally ended up just deleting the e-mails from his list completely, and then emptying the trash.
    He’d probably never miss