Another thing about my type of divorce—a man finds a hot, limber yoga teacher, and while his peers might be shocked and momentarily disgusted, there’s an element of . . . admiration. Look at Brad! Look at where he lives now! Did you see his wife? He’s a new man!
That’s not the cuckolded wife’s experience. Once word got out, I’d go from being a nice Cape Cod girl who’d married up （yes, that was still a thing） to a woman dumped. A woman who couldn’t “hang on to” her husband. A woman who introduced her husband to his lover. A woman without a son at home anymore, without a husband, who’d be dealing with the patriarchal notion that I was somehow flawed because Brad had left me.
If I could choose, I’d never see Bradley Fairchild again.
But of course, you can’t erase the father of your only child. You can’t forget the man who had tears in his eyes when he said his vows. He’d been my best friend. We’d overhauled this house and raised the best son in the world and laughed and talked and reassured each other for two decades.
Not telling anyone was killing me. Wanda and I had talked a few times after work, me crying, her soothing. But I had to wait for Dylan to get settled. Beth, who had been my best friend since third grade, wouldn’t be able to not tell her husband, and Freddie was a notorious gossip. Besides, right now their restaurant was incredibly busy, as it always was in the summer.
I was going to grow old alone. These thoughts yanked me from sleep, sent my heart thudding erratically, caused tears to spill down my face before I was even fully awake. What if I fell out here? There were no neighbors close enough to hear me, and our house had two flights of stairs. In the rain or snow, the stairs to the pond were slippery and treacherous. I could picture it now . . . me going down to stare at Herring Pond to find some peace, slipping, the crack of my tibia as it broke, the tumble down the granite steps. I’d have to crawl with my limp and useless foot dangling. Or what if I broke my femur? That would be much worse! I could bleed to death if that happened! What if I broke my skull and gave myself a traumatic brain injury and had to go to a nursing home? What if, as I lay helpless at the base of the stone stairs, a bear ate me? Okay, we didn’t have bears on the Cape, but what about coyotes?
And all the while, Brad and Melissa would be inhaling light and exhaling love, watching the sunset from one of the many decks of her house, drinking malbec.
Brad must pay.
It started one morning when Dylan offered to drive him to work. “I’d love that, son!” Brad sang merrily, and the two of them went off in male camaraderie, discussing if they should stop at Blue Willow Bakery or Hole in One for donuts. If he knew his father was screwing someone else, Dylan would have punched Brad in the face. But of course, I had to be bigger than that and keep Brad’s infidelity to myself until Dylan was in Montana.
My phone cheeped with a text. Wanda. Bring half-and-half to work or Carol and I may die, and you don’t want that, do you?
I did not.
I had just been grocery shopping and had an unopened container of half-and-half in the fridge. I took it, grabbed my bag and went out to my car. Paused when I saw Brad’s VW sitting there. Then, without much forethought, I opened the back door and poured a slosh of half-and-half on his car rug. Repeated the action on the other side. It would take a day or two to sour, sure, but that smell was hard to get out. I checked to see if I felt bad about that. Nope.
That night, I opened my laptop. Brad was one of those PhDs who loved those letters after his name. If someone called him Mr. Fairchild, he would immediately correct them. He always filled out forms with his title, so all his mail was addressed to Dr. Bradley Fairchild, PhD. （He entered his last name as Fairchild, PhD.） “That’s Dr. Fairchild,” he had told innumerable ma?tre d’s, AppleCare technicians, mechanics and teachers. Even Dylan’s friends were chastised. If they said, “Thanks for letting me come over, Mr. Fairchild,” he’d smile patiently and say, “That’s Dr. Fairchild. I spent too many years in graduate school to be called mister, son! But you can call me Brad.” Which they never did.
Hence, I stayed up till 4:00 a.m., logging in to Brad’s online accounts and changing “Dr.” to “Mr.” （I briefly contemplated “Ms.,” but figured it would be too obvious that I’d done it.） Amazon, Apple Music, his automatic signature on emails, his magazine subscriptions, his bank account, his alumnus listings at Boston University and Swarthmore, his listing on psychologytoday.com, his credit card. Every place I could access, and there were dozens. Sixty-eight, to be exact. This is what could happen if you let your wife handle the household finances and were dumb enough to use the same password for every account—Terriersbtfphd#1. The Terriers were the mascot of Boston University. His initials. His degree. Every single account, the dumbass.