Claire pushed a dumpling back and forth on her plate.
“How was work today?” Ben asked.
“I have something I need to say, but I don’t know how to say it.” Claire’s face was serious, worrying.
“Okay.” Ben wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and straightened his back, bracing.
“I don’t think we should stay together.”
Her words landed in the space between them, splayed across the kitchen table, and Ben let them settle for a moment, deciding how to react.
“Are you sure?” he asked. He immediately regretted it, what a stupid thing to say. He wished he could take it back.
But then Claire’s lips started to quiver, and soon she was crying, and Ben could feel his face burning up.
“What happened?” Ben managed to ask.
His mind flashed through all of their biggest fights from the past year and a half, culminating with the prior week’s argument, when they had listened to the president declare that the strings were real, and Claire insisted they look in their boxes together. Ben told her that he wasn’t ready.
“I opened my box,” Claire said, her face wet with tears.
The sentence was a bullet to his gut. She had opened her box. Without him.
Ben saw her tears and assumed that she was crying for herself. That she had seen her own short string.
“Oh no, Claire, no.”
Then came the worst.
“It wasn’t mine,” she said, barely louder than a whisper.
“What do you mean?”
“Mine was long,” she said. “It was yours that . . .” Claire’s words melted into heavy sobs.
“Wait . . . let me get this straight.” Ben’s mind was spinning as he spoke. What exactly did she do? She had looked at her string, that much was clear. But she said that hers was long.
It was his that made her cry.
“Oh god.” He thought he might vomit.
“Please don’t be mad at me,” Claire whimpered. “When I saw that mine was long, I just assumed that yours would be, too! I honestly didn’t even think it was possible that it wasn’t.”
Ben shut his eyes and tried to breathe steadily, but he was choking on the air.
“How the hell could you do that?” he shouted. He didn’t realize his voice could hold so much anger. “It’s one thing to look at yours, but you had no right to look at mine!”
“I know,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
Ben stayed silent for several minutes, while Claire cried in the chair across from him, hugging herself tightly. There was simply too much happening, there were too many blows for him to process.
He was trying to focus on her betrayal.
That was safer ground than thinking about what she had seen.
“I wanted so badly for them to be the same. For us to share our lives together,” Claire said. “I hope you know that.”
He finally had to ask. “How short was it?”
“Mid-forties,” she said, her voice hoarse and cracking. “That new website isn’t perfectly . . . exact.”
Mid-forties.
That gave him fourteen, maybe fifteen more years.
But he would think about that later. Run the calculations later.
For now, he needed to deal with the present crisis, his relationship rupturing right in front of him.
“If you really love me, then why are you leaving? Especially now?” Ben asked.
“Please . . .” Claire hid her face behind her hands.
Ben stared at her, his vision blurring. “Don’t you owe me that much?”
Claire took a breath, trying to regain her composure. “I just can’t do it,” she said. “I can’t stay with you and have a countdown clock ticking away the whole time. I’ll go crazy.” She peered at him, her eyes anguished. “I know I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but I’m truly sorry, Ben.”
He felt like a tiny sailboat in the middle of a storm surge, and he needed something solid, some anchor for his mind to latch on to, if only for a moment. Ben looked down at Claire’s trembling hands on the table. He had held them so many times in the past year and a half, on long walks and in bed, their fingers easily interlaced. He recognized the chipped purple nail polish as one of her favorites. Lucky Lavender, or maybe Lucky Lilac. It was one of the two.
Claire must have noticed him watching her fingers, because she looked down at them, too. And they both kept looking at her shaking hands, because they couldn’t look at each other.
But now Ben was staring at his own hands, wrapped around the grip of the club.