So there I was, sitting across from my husband in a fancy restaurant on our tenth wedding anniversary, holding a glass of wine I couldn’t afford, when Dave leaned across the candlelight and asked if he could date other women.
I’m going to need you to sit with that for a second. Because I had to.
Candles. Soft piano music. A waiter in a vest who’d just described the fish special like it was a poem. White tablecloth so starched you could’ve cut yourself on it. And my husband of ten years, the father of my two children, smiling at me like he’d just come up with the best idea since sliced bread.
“So, Felicity,” Dave said. His voice was way too casual. Like he was asking if I wanted to split a dessert. “I’ve been thinking.”
Now, here’s the thing you need to know about Dave.
When Dave says he’s been thinking, it usually means trouble.
This is the man who once put the Christmas lights up in July because “it would save time later.” They stayed up until the following March. The neighbors started a group chat about it. I was not invited to the group chat, but Linda from across the street showed it to me anyway.
This is the man who decided to “fix” our dishwasher by watching one YouTube video and ended up flooding the kitchen so badly that we had to replace the floor.
This is the man who once tried to save money by cutting his own hair. With kitchen scissors. In the bathroom mirror. The night before his sister’s wedding.
So when Dave said he’d been thinking, my guard went straight up.
“Uh-huh?” I said.
I tried to keep my voice normal. But my heart was already doing a nervous little dance in my chest.
Let me back up a little.
Dave and I met eleven years ago in a coffee shop downtown. I was twenty-six. I worked in marketing at a small agency, and I was standing in line wearing a white dress I’d bought for a job interview that afternoon.
Dave was in front of me. He turned around too fast with a large black coffee.
And he dumped the entire thing down the front of my dress.
Every drop.
I just stood there, dripping, while he grabbed napkins off the counter and started patting at me, apologizing so fast his words ran together. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry, I’m so, so sorry, I’ll pay for it, I’ll buy you a new one, I’ll buy you ten new ones, oh my God, is it hot, did I burn you, I’m such an idiot—”
He was bright red. His hands were shaking. He looked like he wanted the floor to swallow him whole.
And for some reason, I started laughing.
I laughed so hard I had to sit down. And then he started laughing too. And by the time I’d finished laughing, I’d missed the job interview completely.
He asked for my number to “pay for the dry cleaning.”
He never paid for the dry cleaning. But he did take me to dinner that Friday.
We got married a year later. Ella was born two years after that. Then Jack, two years after her.
And somewhere in there, the man who spilled coffee all over me and couldn’t stop apologizing turned into a man who didn’t notice me at all.
I’m not saying it happened overnight. It didn’t. It was slow. So slow that I didn’t even see it happening.
It was little things, at first.
Dave stopped asking about my day. He’d come home and go straight to the couch and turn on the TV. If I tried to tell him about work, he’d nod and say “mm-hmm” without looking away from the screen.
He stopped planning things. Date nights. Weekend trips. The little surprises he used to do in the beginning, like leaving a sticky note in my car that said You’re the hottest woman in marketing with a drawing of a very bad flame.
He stopped touching me. Not just in the bedroom. Everywhere. He stopped holding my hand in the car. He stopped kissing me when he walked in the door. He stopped putting his hand on my back when he walked past me in the kitchen.
And the kids. Well.
Ella was seven. Jack was five. And somehow, over the years, they’d become my job.
Not ours. Mine.
I did the school drop-offs. I did the pick-ups. I did the doctor’s appointments and the dentist appointments and the parent-teacher conferences. I packed the lunches. I signed the permission slips. I knew which kid hated crusts and which one only ate yellow foods for a whole month last spring.
I also worked full-time. I’d moved up at the agency. I was a senior account manager now, with four clients and two people reporting to me.
And every single night, after I got the kids to bed, I’d come downstairs and find Dave on the couch. And I’d say, “I’m so tired.”
And he’d say, “Mm-hmm.”
That was our marriage. For about three years.
I’m so tired.
Mm-hmm.
So when Dave leaned across that candlelit table on our tenth anniversary and said, “You always say you’re tired,” I thought, for one wild second, that he was about to offer to help.
“And I get it,” he went on. “Taking care of the kids and everything. It’s a lot. So I was thinking. Maybe we should open up our relationship.”
I blinked.
Once. Twice. Then a third time, just to make sure I wasn’t having some kind of stroke.
“Come again?”
He leaned forward. His eyes were wide. Excited. Like a golden retriever who’d just spotted a squirrel.
“Yeah! You know. Like, if I go out and have fun with other women, real women, then you can focus on the kids, and you won’t have to worry about me. You won’t have to worry about, you know, keeping me happy. It’s a win-win!”
I set my wine glass down very carefully on the white tablecloth.
And I swear to you, I felt the exact moment my heart cracked. It was like somebody stepped on a piece of ice on a frozen pond. A small, sharp sound inside my chest.
“Real women?” I repeated.
It came out barely louder than a whisper.
“Yeah. You know what I mean.” He waved his hand. “It would be like a favor to you. Less pressure. Right?”
Real women.
As opposed to what? What was I? A cardboard cutout? A robot that made school lunches?
I wanted to yell. I wanted to stand up and throw my very expensive wine right in his face. I wanted to make a scene so big that the waiter in the vest would tell the story to his grandchildren.
I looked across the table at my husband. At his hopeful, clueless, golden retriever face.
And then, in a flash of what I can only describe as divine inspiration, a much better idea popped into my head.
I leaned back in my chair.
I forced a smile. A big one. With teeth.
“You know what, Dave?” I said. “You’re right.”
He looked like a kid on Christmas morning.
“Really?”
“Absolutely,” I said. My voice was sweet as honey. “Great idea. As long as I get to date other people too.”
For one second, just one second, I saw something flicker in his eyes. Uncertainty. Like a little cloud passing in front of the sun.
But then Dave, being Dave, brushed it off. He laughed.
“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
Oh, Dave.
Sweet, clueless Dave.
He had no idea what he’d just agreed to.
The waiter came back with the dessert menu.
“Anything sweet for the anniversary couple?” he asked, smiling.
“We’ll take the chocolate lava cake,” Dave said happily. “Two spoons.”
I smiled at the waiter.
“One spoon,” I said. “I’m not hungry.”
The waiter looked at me. Then at Dave. Then back at me. He’d clearly heard some of the conversation. His eyebrows went up just slightly.
“One spoon,” he said. “Of course.”
Dave ate the whole lava cake by himself and didn’t notice anything was wrong.
On the drive home, Dave talked the whole time.
He’d clearly been thinking about this for a while. He’d read articles. He’d listened to a podcast about it.
“So there’s this whole thing called ethical non-monogamy,” he said, both hands on the steering wheel. “And the key is communication. You have to have rules. Like, ground rules.”
“Rules,” I said. I was looking out the passenger window at the dark street.
“Yeah. Like, no sleeping over at anybody else’s place. No bringing anybody around the kids. And you have to tell each other about dates. Like, before.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And no dating people we both know. Like, no friends. No neighbors.”
“So not Linda across the street,” I said.
He laughed. “Definitely not Linda.”
“What about coworkers?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I mean, that’s your call. I’m not dating anybody from my office. Have you seen my office? It’s six guys and a lady named Marge who’s sixty-eight.”
I didn’t say anything.
“This is gonna be great, Fee,” he said. He reached over and patted my knee. It was the first time he’d touched me in weeks. “Honestly. I think this is gonna be really good for us.”
I looked at his hand on my knee.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think so too.”
When we got home, I paid the babysitter. A teenager named Brianna from down the street. She told me Jack had thrown up in the bathtub and Ella had refused to go to bed until Brianna agreed to learn a whole dance from a video game.
“It’s fine,” Brianna said. “I’m pretty good at the dance now.”
I paid her an extra twenty dollars.
Then I went upstairs and checked on the kids. Ella was asleep sideways with one foot hanging off the bed. Jack was asleep holding a plastic dinosaur in each hand.
I stood in Jack’s doorway for a long time.
Then I went into our bathroom and locked the door and sat down on the closed toilet lid and cried.
Not for long. Maybe ten minutes. Quietly, with a towel pressed against my face, so Dave wouldn’t hear me through the wall.
Because the thing is, I made a joke of it at the restaurant. I played it cool. I smiled and said great idea.
But I wasn’t cool. Not even a little.
My husband had looked at me across a candlelit table on our tenth anniversary and told me he wanted to go find real women.
As a favor to me.
I washed my face. I put on my pajamas. I got into bed.
Dave was already asleep. He was snoring.
Fast forward one week.
Dave, bless his heart, was drowning.
Absolutely drowning in the modern dating scene.
Dave had last been single eleven years ago. And eleven years ago, you met people at bars and parties and coffee shops where they spilled drinks on you. You didn’t swipe on your phone. There were no profiles to fill out. No little bios. No prompts.
Dave downloaded three different dating apps on the first night. I watched him do it from the other end of the couch while I folded towels.
“Okay,” he muttered, typing. “Occupation. Insurance adjuster. That sounds boring. Should I say something else?”
“You could say risk management specialist,” I said.
“Oh, that’s good. That’s really good.” He typed it in. Then he frowned. “Wait. Why are you helping me?”
“Because I’m a nice person, Dave.”
He looked at me for a second like he wasn’t sure if that was true. Then he went back to his phone.
“Okay. It says ‘Tell us something interesting about yourself.'”
“You can juggle,” I said.
“I can juggle three things. That’s not interesting.”
“You once got stuck in a revolving door for forty-five minutes.”
“I’m not putting that on there.”
He ended up writing: I’m a dad, I like grilling, and I’m the reigning ping-pong champion of my office.
There are six people in his office. One of them is sixty-eight.
Then he needed profile pictures.
This took three days. Most of his pictures on his phone were of the kids, the grill, or a large fish he’d caught in 2019. The only good pictures of just him were from our wedding, which he quickly realized he couldn’t use, since I was in all of them.
“Can you take a picture of me?” he asked on the fourth day. “In the backyard? By the grill?”
I looked up from Jack’s spelling homework.
“You want your wife to take your dating profile picture.”
He thought about it.
“Is that weird?”
“It’s a little weird, Dave.”
He took a selfie in the bathroom mirror instead. With the flash on. You could see the toilet in the background.
By the end of the first week, Dave had swiped on about four hundred women.
He’d matched with eleven.
Nine of them never answered his first message. His first message, by the way, was “Hey ” every single time. I know because he showed me.
“Why isn’t anybody answering?” he said, holding up his phone. “I’m being friendly! I put the smiley face!”
“Maybe try saying something more interesting than ‘hey,'” I suggested.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Ask them a question about their profile.”
He looked genuinely amazed. Like I’d just told him the earth was round.
Two women did answer him.
One of them asked him right away if he was married. He said yes, but that it was an open relationship. She unmatched him in under a minute.
The other one agreed to meet him for drinks on Friday.
Then she canceled Friday afternoon.
“Another one canceled,” Dave muttered that evening.
He flopped down onto the couch next to me. I was folding laundry. Again. There’s always laundry. Two kids produce more laundry than the entire population of a small country.
“She said she’s ‘taking a break from men,'” Dave said. He stared at his phone. “What does that even mean?”
He looked at me. He actually frowned at me. Like he seriously expected me to translate for him. Like I was his personal dating interpreter.
It was very hard to keep the smile off my face. I bit the inside of my cheek.
“Maybe,” I said, folding one of Ella’s shirts very carefully, “she sensed your desperation through the app.”
Dave sighed. A big, heavy sigh.
“You’re not helping, Fee.”
“I’m folding your underwear, Dave. I’m helping plenty.”
The next week, Dave finally got a real date.
A woman named Crystal. She was thirty-one. She had a picture of herself doing yoga on a mountain.
He was so nervous that he changed his shirt four times. He asked me which cologne to wear. He asked me if his shoes were okay.
“Wear the blue shirt,” I said. “The one I bought you for your birthday.”
“This one?”
“That one.”
He put it on. He looked at himself in the hallway mirror. He looked nice. He looked like the man who took me to dinner eleven years ago after he ruined my dress.
For one tiny second, something in my chest hurt.
Then I pushed it down.
“Have fun,” I said.
He came home at 8:45.
The date started at seven.
“She talked about her ex-boyfriend the entire time,” Dave said, collapsing on the couch. “The entire time, Fee. His name is Brandon. He has a boat. He cheated on her with a woman named Destiny. He also has a tattoo of a wolf on his back. I know everything about Brandon. I know more about Brandon than I know about my own brother.”
“Did she ask you anything about yourself?”
“She asked me if I knew Brandon.”
I laughed so hard I had to put down the laundry basket.
Now, here’s where I have to confess something. Something I’m not proud of.
One morning, the following week, Dave was in the shower before work. His phone was sitting on the kitchen counter. It buzzed.
I looked at it.
I told myself not to. I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do. Snooping through your husband’s phone is not exactly what they teach you in marriage counseling. Even in an open relationship. Especially in an open relationship.
But curiosity got the better of me.
I picked it up. I knew his passcode. It’s Jack’s birthday.
I scrolled through his messages. Through his dating apps. Through the notifications.
Rejections. Everywhere. Rejections and awkward conversations that went nowhere.
Hey
Hey
Hey
A woman named Tamara had written: Your profile picture has a toilet in it.
Dave had written back: Haha yeah.
That was the end of that conversation.
There was a small part of me, I have to admit, that had been worried. That he’d meet somebody. Somebody younger and prettier. Somebody who laughed at his jokes. Somebody who didn’t come downstairs every night saying I’m so tired.
But looking through his phone, those fears melted away.
His dating life was almost pitiful.
I put his phone back exactly where I found it. I heard the shower turn off.
I poured myself a cup of coffee and didn’t feel quite as good as I thought I would.
My week was a different story.
Enter Shawn.
Shawn worked in the creative department at my agency. He’d started about six months before. He was a graphic designer. Tall. Dark hair, a little messy, like he’d just rolled out of bed but somehow on purpose. He had these warm brown eyes and a smile that could melt butter. He wore rolled-up sleeves and those little round glasses that should look silly on a man but somehow didn’t look silly on him.
Every woman in the office had noticed Shawn. Every woman in the office talked about Shawn in the break room when he wasn’t there.
I hadn’t paid much attention. I was married. I was busy. I was tired.
But that week, in the office kitchen, while we were both waiting for the terrible office coffee machine to finish, Shawn asked me how my weekend was.
And for some reason, I told him.
I don’t know why. Maybe because nobody had asked me how my weekend was in a very long time. Maybe because I was tired and angry and still hurt. Maybe I just wanted to say it out loud to somebody.
“Wait,” Shawn said. He’d been leaning against the counter, and he stood up straight. “Your husband actually suggested this? On your anniversary?”
“Yup,” I said. I stirred my coffee. “Crazy, right?”
“At dinner?”
“Between the salad and the lava cake.”
Shawn laughed. He shook his head.
“Real women,” he repeated. “He actually said that?”
“He actually said that.”
Shawn looked at me for a moment. He wasn’t laughing anymore. He had this look on his face. I couldn’t quite read it.
“That’s messed up, Felicity,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry.”
It was the first time anybody had said that to me. That it was messed up. That they were sorry.
I didn’t know what to say.
Then Shawn smiled. That smile.
“Well,” he said. “His loss is my gain, I guess. I’d be happy to take advantage of his crazy decision.” He paused. “If you’ll let me.”
Who could say no to that smile?
Not me. Apparently.
We went for coffee on Wednesday. Real coffee, not office coffee. At a little place down the street from our building with mismatched chairs and a cat that slept in the window.
It went well.
Really well.
We talked for two hours. About work. About movies. About where we grew up. He grew up in a tiny town in Ohio with one stoplight and three churches. I grew up in the suburbs with two older brothers who used to lock me in the basement. He has a younger sister who’s a veterinarian. He has a dog named Pickles.
He asked me questions. Real ones. And then he listened to the answers.
I kept forgetting to drink my coffee.
When we walked back to the office, I realized I’d been smiling the whole time. My face actually hurt.
That night, I told Dave about it.
Because those were the rules. Dave’s rules. You have to tell each other about dates. Before.
Okay, technically it was after. But I told him.
“I had coffee with somebody today,” I said while I was loading the dishwasher.
Dave was on the couch. He looked up from his phone.
“What? Who?”
“A guy from work.”
“From work?” He sat up. “You said you weren’t going to date anybody from work.”
“No,” I said. “You said you weren’t going to date anybody from your work. You said coworkers were my call.”
He opened his mouth. He closed it.
“What’s his name?”
“Shawn.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s a graphic designer.”
“A graphic designer,” Dave repeated. Like it was a disease. “Is he—” He stopped. “Is he, like, good-looking?”
I closed the dishwasher.
“He’s fine,” I said. “He has a dog named Pickles.”
Dave stared at me for a long moment.
Then he went back to his phone.
But I noticed he didn’t open the dating app. He just scrolled through the news. For a long time.
The coffee went so well that I invited Shawn over for dinner the next Friday.
I asked my mom to take the kids for the night. She lives twenty minutes away, and she’s always begging for a sleepover.
“Of course, honey,” she said on the phone. “Are you and Dave going out?”
“Something like that,” I said.
My mom has never liked Dave very much. She thinks he’s “a little bit of a doofus.” Her words.
I didn’t tell her what was going on. I didn’t have the energy.
On Friday, I spent extra time getting ready.
More time than I’d spent getting ready for anything in years.
I took a long shower. I shaved my legs. Both legs. All the way up. I did my hair in the loose waves I used to wear when I was twenty-six. I did my makeup. Not my usual five-minute work makeup. The real thing. Eyeliner and everything.
And I put on a new dress. I’d bought it on my lunch break on Wednesday, after coffee with Shawn. It was dark green, with little buttons down the front and a skirt that swished when I walked.
I looked at myself in the bedroom mirror.
A little thrill of anticipation buzzed under my skin. I hadn’t felt that in a long time. I hadn’t felt pretty in a long time.
Then I went downstairs and cooked.
I made a meal that would make Gordon Ramsay proud. Chicken piccata. Lemon butter sauce. Capers. Roasted asparagus with parmesan. Homemade bread. A chocolate tart for dessert, from scratch. It took me four hours.
I hadn’t cooked like that since before the kids were born. Dave always wanted spaghetti or tacos. Anything more complicated, he’d say, “Why’d you go to all this trouble?” and eat it in front of the TV.
About twenty minutes before Shawn was supposed to arrive, I picked up my phone.
Dave was out. He had a date of his own. With a woman named Barb, whom he’d met on the third app. He’d told me about it that morning. Rules.
I opened my texts. I found his name.
And I typed:
Don’t come home tonight. My date might go to the next level.
I looked at it for a long moment.
I knew what it would do to him. I knew exactly how it would land.
That was the point.
I hit send.
I felt a mix of giddiness and defiance. And something else, deeper down, that I didn’t want to look at too closely.
I pictured Dave’s face when he read it.
Tonight’s going to be a game-changer, I thought.
Shawn arrived right on time. Seven o’clock on the dot.
He looked even better than I remembered. He was wearing a dark blue sweater with the sleeves pushed up and those little round glasses. He was holding a bottle of wine and a small bunch of flowers. Sunflowers.
“I didn’t know what kind you liked,” he said. “But sunflowers always seem happy.”
Nobody had brought me flowers in five years.
“Sunflowers are perfect,” I said.
He had that easy confidence about him. The kind that made you feel like everything was going to be okay. Like nothing was a big deal.
We sat down at the dining room table.
I’d set it with the good plates. The wedding china that we’d used maybe four times in ten years. I’d lit candles. The same kind of tall white candles as the restaurant on our anniversary.
The conversation flowed as smoothly as the wine.
“This is incredible,” Shawn said after his first bite of chicken. “Felicity. Seriously. Did you go to culinary school or something?”
“No,” I said. “I just like cooking. When I have time.”
“Which is never, I’m guessing.”
“Which is never,” I agreed.
“So how did you get into marketing?” he asked. He leaned in on his elbows. He actually seemed to want to know.
So I told him. About my first job out of college, at a tiny agency above a dry cleaner, where the whole office smelled like steam and chemicals. About the time I accidentally sent a client a draft of an ad with the words INSERT SOMETHING CLEVER HERE still in the headline. About my first big account, a regional pizza chain, and the commercial we made with a dancing pepperoni.
Shawn laughed at all the right places. He asked questions. He listened.
His eyes never left mine.
And it felt good.
I’m not going to lie. It felt so good. To be seen. Really seen. By somebody who actually wanted to know about me. Not as a mom. Not as the person who packed the lunches. Not as the tired woman on the other end of the couch saying I’m so tired to a man who said mm-hmm.
Just me. Felicity. The woman who made a pepperoni dance.
I hadn’t felt like that in a very, very long time.
We were finishing dessert. The chocolate tart. Shawn had just told a story about his dog Pickles eating an entire birthday cake off his kitchen counter, including the candles, and I was laughing so hard I had tears in my eyes.
And then the front door slammed open.
“Twenty-five cats, Felicity!”
Dave’s voice. Booming through the house.
“Another date with a cat lady! She showed me pictures of every single one of them! On her phone! One at a time! Twenty-five cats, Fee! Twenty-five! She named one of them Dave! Do you know how weird that is? To be on a date with somebody who has a cat named Dave? She kept calling me by my name and I kept thinking she meant the cat!”
He came stomping around the corner into the dining room. His frustration was in every single step. His tie was pulled loose. He had cat hair all over his pants.
He stopped dead in his tracks.
He saw Shawn. He saw me. In my dark green dress. With the candles. The good china. The sunflowers in a vase in the middle of the table. Both of us mid-laughter.
“Uh,” Dave said. “Hey.”
He looked from me to Shawn to me.
“Am I interrupting something?”
I didn’t miss a beat.
“Actually, yes,” I said. “Didn’t you get my text?”
Dave frowned. He reached into his pocket. He took out his phone.
I watched him read it.
I had to bite back a laugh as his face turned bright red. It started at his neck and went all the way up to his hairline. I actually watched it happen. Like a thermometer filling up.
“So,” I went on sweetly, “could you maybe give us a few more hours? Shawn and I were just getting to the good part.”
Dave’s jaw dropped. It literally dropped open.
“You can’t be serious.”
“Dead serious,” I said. I crossed my arms. “Remember, Dave? You wanted this.”
Dave’s face went through about a thousand emotions in ten seconds.
Confusion. Then anger. Then something that looked a lot like hurt. Then back to anger.
And then, finally, a kind of grudging, defeated acceptance.
He looked at Shawn.
Shawn, to his credit, just sat there very calmly with his hands folded on the table. He didn’t smirk. He didn’t look smug. He just looked politely, patiently uncomfortable. Like a man who’d accidentally walked into the wrong bathroom.
“Fine,” Dave said finally. His voice was tight. “But we need to talk. Now.”
I sighed. I turned to Shawn.
“I’m so sorry about this,” I said. “Rain check?”
Shawn smiled. There was a little twinkle of amusement in his eyes. And maybe something else too. Something that looked like sympathy.
“Of course,” he said. “Another time.”
He stood up. He picked up his jacket from the back of the chair.
He leaned down and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. Just a peck.
Then he nodded politely at Dave.
“Nice to meet you, Dave,” he said. “Sorry about the cats.”
And he left.
The front door closed behind him.
And it was just Dave and me. In the suddenly very quiet dining room. With the candles and the good china and the sunflowers.
The air was so tense you could’ve cut it with the cake knife.
“What the heck, Felicity?” Dave said.
His voice was loud. He was pacing back and forth next to the table.
“Where did you even find that guy? A modeling agency? He looks like a cologne ad!”
“He’s a colleague, actually,” I said. “I told you. Shawn. From work. Graphic designer. Dog named Pickles.”
“I thought you meant, like, a normal-looking guy! I thought you meant like Steve from accounting!”
“We don’t have a Steve in accounting.”
“You know what I mean!”
I met his eyes. Across the table. And I felt this strange, tangled-up mix of feelings. Anger. Satisfaction. And underneath that, something much sadder.
“You started this, Dave,” I said. “At our anniversary dinner. Between the salad and the lava cake. You started it. Now you have to deal with it.”
He stopped pacing.
He ran a hand through his hair. And then he just stood there, next to the table, with his tie hanging loose and cat hair all over his pants.
And he looked more vulnerable than I’d ever seen him. More vulnerable than the day Ella was born. More vulnerable than the day his father died.
“Look,” he said. His voice had gone quiet. “I messed up. Okay? I messed up.”
He sat down heavily in the chair Shawn had just left.
“I thought it would be easy,” he said. “I thought it would be fun. I thought I’d go out and meet all these women and have this exciting new life, and you’d just be… here. Doing what you always do. And nothing would really change.”
He stared down at Shawn’s empty dessert plate.
“But it’s not easy. It’s awful, Fee. It’s so awful. Every single date has been a nightmare. Nobody wants to talk to me. The ones who do only want to talk about their ex-boyfriends or their cats. And I come home every night feeling like a total loser.”
He looked up at me.
“And then I walk in tonight and I see you. With him. In that dress.” He swallowed hard. “You look beautiful, Felicity. You look so beautiful. And you were laughing. You were really laughing. And I realized I haven’t heard you laugh like that in—” He stopped. “I don’t even know how long. Years.”
His voice cracked.
“And seeing you with somebody else,” he said. “It’s killing me. It’s absolutely killing me.”
I softened. Just a little bit.
I uncrossed my arms. I sat back down across from him.
“Did you really think I wouldn’t have feelings too?” I said quietly. “Did you really think I’d hear you say you wanted to go date real women, and I’d just say okay and go back to packing lunches? That it wouldn’t hurt me?”
He flinched.
“Real women, Dave,” I said. “That’s what you said. On our tenth anniversary. Like I wasn’t one. Like I was just—the babysitter. The lunch-packer. Furniture.”
He closed his eyes.
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I know you didn’t,” I said. “That’s almost worse. You didn’t even notice what you were saying.”
He let out a long, deep breath. His shoulders slumped all the way down.
“I was an idiot,” he said. “I’m sorry, Felicity. I’m so sorry.”
He opened his eyes and looked at me.
“I’ve been neglecting you,” he said. “For a long time. I see that now. I think I saw it before, too. I just didn’t want to look at it. You’d come downstairs every night and say you were tired, and I thought—I thought you meant tired of me. And I didn’t know how to fix it. So I just stopped trying.”
“I was tired,” I said. “I was tired because I was doing everything by myself. The kids. The house. The cooking. The laundry. The school stuff. All of it. While you sat on that couch.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t want you to go find somebody else, Dave. I wanted you to get up off the couch.”
He put his face in his hands.
“I know,” he said through his fingers. “God. I know.”
We sat there for a long time.
The candles were burning down. The chocolate tart was sitting half-eaten on the table. The sunflowers were bright yellow in the vase, looking happy, just like Shawn said.
“There’s something I need to tell you too,” I said finally.
Dave looked up.
“I looked at your phone,” I said. “Last week. While you were in the shower.”
He blinked.
“You what?”
“I looked through your dating apps. Your messages. All of it.” I took a breath. “It wasn’t right. I shouldn’t have done it. And I’m sorry.”
He stared at me.
“So you saw—”
“I saw all of it,” I said. “Tamara and the toilet.”
He groaned and put his head down on the table.
“Oh my God.”
“And I have to be honest about something else,” I said. “About Shawn. And tonight.”
He lifted his head.
“I didn’t invite him over because I wanted to sleep with him,” I said. “I mean, he’s nice. He’s really nice. But that’s not why.” I looked down at my hands. “I invited him because I wanted to hurt you. I sent you that text because I wanted you to feel what I felt. At the restaurant. I wanted you to know what it was like to be the one left behind.”
Dave was very quiet.
“So I’m not totally innocent here either,” I said. “I used a nice man to get back at my husband. That’s not great, Dave. That’s not a great thing I did.”
Dave was quiet for a long moment. Then he reached across the table.
He took my hand.
It was the first time he’d held my hand in I don’t know how long. Months. Maybe a year. His hand was warm. It was a little bit sticky from something. Probably the cat lady’s snacks.
“I think,” he said slowly, “we both need to stop trying to get back at each other. And start trying to get back to each other.”
I stared at him.
“Did you read that on a greeting card?”
“No,” he said. He almost smiled. “It was on that podcast. About ethical non-monogamy.” He paused. “The episode was actually about why most people shouldn’t do it.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
He smiled. A real smile. And in that moment, I saw a glimmer of him. The man from the coffee shop. The man who spilled a whole large coffee down my white dress and couldn’t stop apologizing.
“I appreciate the apology, Dave,” I said. “I really do. But things have to change. For real this time. Not just for a week. Not just until you forget.”
“I know.”
“We need to work on us. On us. Really work on it.”
“Agreed,” he said. He squeezed my hand. “Counseling. More time together. Me off the couch. Whatever it takes. I mean it, Fee. Whatever it takes.”
We moved to the living room. We sat down on the couch. Together. Side by side. For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t folding laundry and he wasn’t staring at his phone.
The silence between us wasn’t uncomfortable. It was full. Full of all the things we hadn’t said. Full of eleven years of history.
“Do you remember our first date?” I asked. A small smile was tugging at my mouth.
Dave laughed. “How could I forget? I spilled coffee all over your dress. And you still agreed to see me again.”
“You were so flustered,” I said. “Grabbing all those napkins. Patting me down like I was on fire.”
“I thought I’d burned you. I was terrified.”
“It was iced coffee, Dave.”
“It was not.”
“It was iced. There were ice cubes in my bra for an hour.”
He stared at me. “Are you serious? I’ve been telling that story wrong for eleven years?”
“You have. Every time. At every party. Hot coffee. Scalding. Near-death experience.”
He started laughing. Really laughing. And I laughed too. We sat there on the couch and laughed about the ice cubes.
“I thought it was charming,” I said, when I could finally breathe. “Honestly. You were so embarrassed. You kept saying you’d buy me ten new dresses.”
“I never bought you a single new dress.”
“No,” I said. “You never did.”
He was quiet for a moment. He looked at the green dress I was wearing.
“You bought that one yourself,” he said. “For him.”
“I bought it for me,” I said. “I just happened to wear it for him.”
He nodded slowly. He squeezed my hand.
“I miss those days,” he said quietly. “When everything felt new. Exciting.”
“Me too,” I said softly. “But we can’t go back to that, Dave. We can’t be twenty-six in a coffee shop again. We can only go forward. Together.”
He nodded. And there was a look in his eyes that I hadn’t seen in a long, long time. Determined. Clear.
“I want to be better, Felicity,” he said. “For you. For the kids. I don’t want to lose what we have.”
I looked at him.
And for the first time in a long while, I believed him.
“Let’s take it one day at a time,” I said.
“One day at a time,” he agreed.
The next morning, Dave did something he had never done in five years.
He got up before me.
I woke up at seven and the bed was empty. For a second, I panicked. I thought maybe he’d left. Then I smelled something.
Something burning.
I went downstairs. Dave was in the kitchen. He was wearing my apron, the one with little cherries on it. There was smoke coming out of the toaster. There was pancake batter on the ceiling. Somehow.
“I’m making breakfast,” he announced. “For when the kids get home. And for you.”
“Dave, the toaster’s on fire.”
“It’s not on fire. It’s just very enthusiastic.”
I unplugged the toaster and opened the back door.
“Why is there batter on the ceiling?”
He looked up.
“Huh,” he said. “I have no idea.”
We ate burned pancakes at the kitchen table. They were terrible. I ate three.
He deleted all three dating apps that morning.
He didn’t make a big speech about it. He just showed me his phone, while I was drinking my coffee, and I watched him hold his thumb on each little icon until they wiggled, and then press the little X.
“There,” he said. “No more Tamara. No more cat lady.”
“What about Crystal?”
“Brandon can have her.”
Going back to work on Monday was harder.
I’d been dreading it all weekend. Shawn. What was I going to say to Shawn?
I got to the office early. I went to the kitchen to make coffee. And of course, Shawn was already there. Leaning against the counter. Waiting for the terrible coffee machine.
He saw me and smiled. That smile.
“Morning,” he said. “How’d the talk go?”
I set down my mug. I made myself look him in the eye.
“Shawn,” I said. “I owe you an apology.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“I invited you over on Friday for the wrong reasons,” I said. “I wasn’t being fair to you. I was trying to make my husband jealous. And I used you to do it. And that wasn’t okay. You’re a really nice guy, and you deserved better than that.”
He was quiet for a moment. The coffee machine gurgled.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “I kind of figured.”
“You did?”
“Felicity,” he said gently. “You told me about the real women thing at the coffee machine. And then a week later you invited me over for a four-course dinner on your wedding china. And then texted your husband about it.” He smiled a little. “I’m a graphic designer. I’m pretty good at reading a picture.”
I put my face in my hands. “Oh my God.”
He laughed.
“Hey,” he said. “It’s okay. Honestly. I had a great time. You’re a great cook. And you’re really funny. Your dancing pepperoni story is going to stick with me for a while.” He shrugged. “And I think, if I’m being honest, I kind of wanted to be the guy who showed him what he was missing.”
I looked up.
“You’re a good person, Shawn.”
“I try,” he said. “Pickles thinks so. Most days.”
The coffee machine beeped. He poured his coffee. He picked up his mug.
At the door, he turned around.
“For what it’s worth,” he said. “I hope he figures it out. He looked pretty wrecked on Friday. And not just because of the cats.”
We found a marriage counselor two weeks later. A woman named Dr. Patel. She had an office on the second floor of a building downtown that also had a dentist and a place that did eyebrow threading. The waiting room always smelled a little like wax.
The first session was terrible.
Dave told the whole story. The anniversary dinner. The real women. The open relationship. The dating apps. The cat lady. Shawn. The text.
Dr. Patel listened to the whole thing without saying a word. When he was done, she put down her pen.
“Wow,” she said.
That was all she said. Just wow.
Dave and I looked at each other.
“Is that a professional opinion?” I asked.
“It’s a very professional opinion,” said Dr. Patel.
Over the next few months, we did the work.
It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t romantic. It was hard and awkward and embarrassing, and some weeks I left Dr. Patel’s office so angry at Dave that I didn’t speak to him the whole drive home.
We talked about the couch. About the mm-hmm. About why he checked out.
“I felt like a failure,” Dave said one afternoon, staring at the carpet in Dr. Patel’s office. “At home. You were so good at everything. The kids. The house. Your job. You were getting promoted. And I felt like I didn’t know how to do any of it. Like I’d just mess it up. So I stopped trying. And then, the longer I didn’t try, the more I felt like a failure. And the more I felt like a failure, the more I just sat on the couch.”
I stared at him.
“You never told me that.”
“I didn’t know how.”
We talked about me, too. About why I’d stopped asking him for help. About why I’d been carrying everything by myself for years without saying a word.
“Because it was easier to just do it,” I said. “Than to ask and be disappointed.”
“And what did that cost you?” Dr. Patel asked.
I thought about it for a long time.
“Me,” I said finally. “It cost me me.”
Dave started doing things.
Small things at first. He took over bath time on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He learned how to do Ella’s hair in the French braid she likes. It took him three weeks. The first two looked like a bird’s nest. Ella wore them to school anyway and told everybody her daddy did it.
He started packing lunches on Mondays and Wednesdays. The first Monday, he packed Jack a peanut butter sandwich, an apple, and a bag of shredded cheese. Just loose shredded cheese in a bag. Jack said it was the best lunch he’d ever had.
He started asking me about my day. Really asking. Putting the phone down, turning off the TV, looking at me.
“How was work?”
“Fine.”
“No. Really. How was it?”
And I’d tell him. And he’d listen.
He started planning things again.
Not big things. A picnic in the park on a Saturday. A walk after dinner. A Friday night where he got a babysitter and took me to the little coffee shop downtown. The one where we met.
“I want to recreate our first date,” he said.
“You’re going to spill coffee on me?”
“No,” he said. “I’m going to do it right this time.”
We stood in line. I was wearing a white sweater. He ordered two iced coffees. He turned around very slowly and very carefully and handed me mine without spilling a single drop.
Then he got down on one knee in the middle of the coffee shop.
“Dave,” I hissed. “What are you doing? We’re already married.”
“I know,” he said. “I just wanted to say something.”
Everybody in the coffee shop was staring at us. The barista had stopped making drinks.
“Felicity,” he said. “You’re a real woman. You’re the realest woman I know. And I’m sorry it took me ten years and a lady with twenty-five cats to remember that.”
A girl at the table next to us said, “What?“
I laughed so hard I spilled my own iced coffee.
All over my white sweater.
Dave grabbed a stack of napkins and started patting me down, apologizing.
And I was laughing too hard to stop him.
On our eleventh anniversary, we went back to the same fancy restaurant.
Same candles. Same soft piano music. Same waiter in the vest. He recognized us. I saw it on his face when he came to our table. His eyebrows went up just slightly.
“Happy anniversary,” he said carefully. “Can I start you off with anything?”
“A bottle of your best champagne,” Dave said.
The waiter looked at me.
I nodded. “It’s okay,” I told him. “He’s been thinking. But it’s the good kind this time.”
The waiter smiled.
Dave didn’t propose anything crazy at dinner. He didn’t drop any bombshells. He asked me about my new client. He showed me a picture of Jack’s science project, a volcano that had erupted all over the kitchen table. He held my hand across the white tablecloth for most of the meal.
When the waiter came back with the dessert menu, Dave didn’t even look at it.
“The chocolate lava cake,” he said. “Two spoons.”
The waiter looked at me.
“Two spoons,” I said.
I’d love to tell you that everything’s perfect now. That we lived happily ever after, like in the movies.
But that’s not true. It’s not a fairy tale.
We still fight. Dave still falls asleep on the couch sometimes. He still forgets things. Last week he forgot to pick Ella up from gymnastics, and she sat on the curb for twenty minutes before the coach called me.
And some nights, I still come downstairs after the kids are asleep and say, “I’m so tired.”
But now, instead of mm-hmm, Dave gets up off the couch.
“Sit down,” he says. “I’ll make you some tea.”
He makes terrible tea. He always leaves the bag in too long.
I drink every drop.
That night at the restaurant, on our tenth anniversary, I thought my marriage was over.
My husband looked at me across a candlelit table and asked if he could go find real women. As a favor to me.
And I said yes. Not because I wanted to. Because I wanted to teach him a lesson.
And he learned it.
But here’s the thing I didn’t expect. I learned one too.
I learned that I’d been hiding. Behind the laundry. Behind the lunches. Behind I’m so tired. I’d been so busy taking care of everybody else that I’d forgotten I was a person too. A woman who likes sunflowers and dancing pepperonis and dark green dresses with little buttons. A woman who laughs so hard she has to put down the laundry basket.
And I learned that you can’t fix a marriage by getting back at each other. Only by getting back to each other.
It’s not wrapped up in the neat bow of a fairy tale.
It’s real. It’s messy. There’s pancake batter on the ceiling and shredded cheese in the lunchboxes and a French braid that looks like a bird’s nest.
But it’s ours. And it’s worth fighting for.
So here’s to second chances. To learning from our mistakes. To iced coffee, and the people who spill it on us, and the crazy, beautiful, exhausting ride that is marriage.
Cheers.
Specialty: Quiet Comebacks & Personal Justice
David Reynolds focuses on stories where underestimated individuals regain control of their lives. His writing centers on measured decisions rather than dramatic outbursts — emphasizing preparation, patience, and the long game. His characters don’t shout; they act.