“Stay if you want, but I’m not going to stop seeing whoever I choose!”

They have been talking, at length, about the point of impasse they have reached. She throws the line at him as he leaves for work and the safety of his lonely office.

He sits at his desk thinking through the last details of his plan to ‘do a bad thing well’. Much as he’d like to throw her out of their  home, he knows that would not be the best thing for their children right now. They do not even know what’s going on.

He will have to be the one to leave.

He decides that he will not publicly talk of the circumstances of their separation…he will remain as neutral as possible over issues of cause and blame.

After months of Prozac stress and trying badly to hold things together he knows that once this break is made it will be permanent. People may imagine it’s a separation with hope of reconciliation, but he knows better. This will be the end.

What he could not imagine at the time is how powerful people’s need to apportion blame and society’s bias against the man. Once everything goes public, he will be blamed, his faithfulness will be slandered, he will lose his job, his vocation, his home, his financial stability…and the lie will continue to haunt him into his future.

But for now, all that is in the future…after months of trying to salvage things he is finally resolved to being the one to end the painful cycle of betrayal and enable them to move forward.