I remembered the red scarf Michael had brought home after that trip. He claimed he had bought it during a layover because he missed me.

I had worn it for twenty years.

“Did they love each other?” I asked.

David hesitated.

“Don’t lie to me again.”

“Yes,” he said.

The answer did not shatter my life with a dramatic sound. Something simply collapsed inside me.

Michael had died beside me after a long battle with cancer. I had fed him when he could no longer hold a spoon, washed his hair and slept beside his hospice bed.

On his final morning, he squeezed my hand.

“You were the best part of my life,” he whispered.

I had believed him.

The cruelest part was that some part of me still did.

“Why did the affair end?”

“Ruth said they chose their families.”

“How noble.”

“They ended it twenty-one years ago. The letters continued for a while, but the final ones were mostly apologies.”

I looked at the envelope.

“And this?”

“Michael wrote it to you.”

“Why didn’t he give it to me?”

“I think he gave it to Ruth because he was afraid.”

“Of me?”

“Of losing you.”

I laughed bitterly.

“He risked losing me for eleven years.”

I asked whether Ruth had known Michael died.

David admitted that she had followed our family online. Photographs of Michael and me had been hidden in the suitcase with the letters.

“That’s how you recognized me,” I said.

David nodded.

“You saw me struggling with my map and knew exactly who I was.”

“Yes.”

“You pretended we were strangers.”

“I intended to introduce myself and give you the envelope.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.”

“Why?”

His gaze moved toward the harbor.

“Because you smiled at me.”

He explained that he had spent months thinking of me as nothing more than a name written on an envelope. When he saw me laughing at myself in the street, I became a real person.

“So you invited me for coffee.”

“I told myself it would only be coffee.”

“Then breakfast.”

“Yes.”

“The trip to Gozo.”

“Yes.”

“And this dinner.”

“Yes.”

Every memory from the week changed as he admitted the truth.

The coffee that had seemed spontaneous.

The ferry ride when he held my hand.

The afternoon he bought me lemon ice.

The quiet moment beside the sea when he said he was glad I had come to Malta.

I had believed life brought us together.

David had recognized me, followed me and allowed me to trust him without explaining why.

“You used me,” I said.

“At first, I wanted answers.”

“What kind of answers?”

“I wanted to know whether Michael had destroyed your life the way Ruth’s secret destroyed mine.”

“Did I look destroyed?”

“No.”

“Did that disappoint you?”

His expression tightened.

“At first, perhaps.”

The honesty was ugly, but I preferred it to another comforting lie.

Part 2: The Letter

David had believed his marriage was honest until six years after Ruth’s death, when he discovered the hidden letters.

He came to Malta because it was where the affair had begun. During his first visit, he sat inside the restaurant for three hours without ordering anything. He returned the following year, then again after finding Michael’s envelope.

David searched for a way to contact me but could not decide whether revealing the truth would help or hurt me.

Then Clara saw a post from Rebecca celebrating my first solo trip.

“That’s how you knew I was coming?”

“Yes. I didn’t know your hotel or schedule. Meeting you in the street really was an accident.”

“A convenient accident.”

“Yes.”

Clara had traveled to Malta after David called her. He feared he would ask me to stay without first telling me the truth.

The admission hurt differently because it meant his feelings might have become real, even though they had grown from deception.

David told me he owned a small house outside Valletta that Ruth had inherited from her sister. Although he lived in England for part of the year, he had spent several winters in Malta after Ruth’s death.

“So that was another lie.”

“I allowed you to believe it was my first visit.”

I picked up Michael’s envelope.

“Have you read this?”

“No.”

“How can I believe you?”

“You can’t.”

Strangely, that was the first answer of the evening that made me trust him.

The letter was two pages long and had been written twenty years earlier.

Michael confessed that he had met Ruth in Malta and continued seeing her for years. He did not include every detail, but he admitted enough.

He wrote that he had confused escape with love.

With Ruth, he could pretend to be a man without bills, responsibilities or routines. Their relationship existed outside ordinary life, which made it seem more exciting than it was.

Eventually, Michael understood that the life he wanted to escape was also the life he would choose if he were forced to lose it.

He ended the affair, but he lacked the courage to tell me.

Michael wrote that he did not know whether confessing would free me or merely place his guilt in my hands.

I stopped reading.

That was exactly what he had done. He had protected himself and described his silence as concern for me.

In the final paragraph, he admitted that I might consider our entire marriage false if I ever learned the truth. He insisted that although his betrayal had been real, so was his gratitude each morning he woke beside me.

I folded the letter.

For thirty-nine years, I had believed fidelity was one of the foundations of our marriage. Now I had to decide whether one hidden room meant the entire house had been a lie.

“Do you hate him?” David asked.

“Not yet.”

It was the truth.

Grief does not protect the dead from anger. It only makes that anger lonelier.

“Do you hate Ruth?” I asked.

“I did.”

“And now?”

“I hate what she did, but I still miss the person she was.”

I understood him immediately.

Perhaps that was why David had searched for me. Not because our spouses had once loved each other, but because we were the only two people who understood how love and betrayal could exist inside the same memory.

I placed the letter inside my bag.

“I’m leaving.”

“I’ll walk you to your hotel.”

“No.”

“It’s late, Eleanor.”

“I promised to say yes to everything this week, but that does not mean you decide what I say yes to now.”

He stepped away.

“You’re right.”

I left him in the courtyard.

For Complete Cooking STEPS Please Head On Over To Next Page Or Open button (>) and don’t forget to SHARE with your Facebook friends.