Chapter 11

Melbourne

Jack drove down the treelined street in Toorak and parked just across the street from Elena’s apartment block. It was an interesting twelve unit block on a street that was otherwise filled with single houses. He walked up to the foyer and pressed for Unit 4. When Elena’s voice crackled through the intercom, she told me she was coming down, and I waited, leaning against the brickwork, feeling a spark of anticipation.

The heavy glass doors swung open, and for a moment, the world stopped. I had seen Elena in corporate uniform, a vision of cool beauty. But the woman walking toward me now was a revelation. She was wearing tight, dark jeans that clung to every curve and a cropped white T-shirt that hugged her ample breasts, leaving a daring sliver of tanned midriff exposed to the breeze. Showing a big smile, she was incandescent. My jaw actually dropped and I stood there, open-mouthed. Elena noticed my expression and a playful, knowing glint entered her eyes. She stepped into my space, and pressed a soft kiss to my lips.

“Hi, Jack,” she whispered, stepping back just enough to let me take her in. A smirk played on her lips. “Like what you see?”

“You look ... incredible. I think I’ve forgotten how to breathe.”

Her laugh was melodic as she reached out to me, her hand grazing my forearm as she gestured toward the entrance. “My suitcases are upstairs on the first floor. I was hoping that could carry down the large one for me.”

As we settled into the car and I navigated towards the M1, I described our first stop as a nice B&B near Wilson’s Promontory, which would allow us to relax and do a couple of days of trail walking. Elena sat beside me, her presence warming the cabin, her occasional laughter punctuating the click of the turn signal.

It wasn’t until we merged onto the M1, that I decided to get my first heavy discussion started.

“There’s something I need to get off my chest, Elena,” I began, my voice steady but stripped of its usual academic polish. “I have told you about how I set up marriage counseling, and it was during the counseling that my wife and revealed her lifelong infidelity. What I didn’t mention was that who she had as her current lover hit me particularly hard. It turns out that her current lover is my boss.”

“After I left her, I called HR at my work, threatening to quit if they did nothing about Thomas and gave them a week. After a week, I called and they said that they were not going to do anything, so I quit.”

A laugh escaped me as I recounted the aftermath. “The irony is, after I quit, the they then followed through, fired Thomas, and then called and asked me to come back. There may be an element of ethics for their follow through, but honestly, I think they were terrified of losing their research pipeline.” I glanced at her, a flicker of amusement in my eyes. “I told them I’d return in three months. I think I’ve earned a ninety-day sabbatical from what, for me, was the most horrible few days of my life.”

Elena listened with a quiet intensity, her hand resting lightly on my thigh, offering physical contact that kept me from drifting back into the grief. When I finally finished, the car was silent for a long moment, the only sound being the rush of wind against the glass.

“Jack,” Elena said, her voice soft but heavy with a genuine, shimmering disbelief, “I’ve spent years navigating human nature in my line of work and I’ve heard stories of familial betrayals that would make a soap opera look tame. But this ... your story is one of the worst examples of betrayal I have ever heard.” She paused, her gaze lingering on the road ahead. “I simply cannot imagine how your wife could do that to you. To sustain a lie for an entire lifetime? It’s not just infidelity; I honestly think she has a psychological problem.”

I glanced at her at this final comment. It was something that I had not considered. I had looked at this as a betrayal, but not a psychological illness.

“And from my perspective,” I said, my voice dropping into a register of cold clarity, “it actually gets even worse.”

“The serial betrayals were one thing,” I continued, the car humming as we pushed deeper into the Victorian countryside, “but the cruelty of our sex life was the real poison. For twenty years, Claire played the role of a low-libido wife as I lived in a state of perpetual rejection. Once every few weeks, maybe once a month toward the end, she’d grant me sex, always making it feel like a chore she was performing for the sake of the marriage. She told me repeatedly that she just wasn’t interested in sex, that her drive was naturally low. I spent two decades believing I was married to a woman who simply didn’t crave sex, and I spent those same two decades trying to be patient, trying to be understanding of her ‘nature.’”

I tightened my grip on the steering wheel, the memory of that perceived deficiency stinging like a fresh wound. “Then came the reveal. In that counseling session, the mask didn’t just slip; it disintegrated. She admitted that while I was at work, she was meeting men several times a week. The frequency alone was a shock, but her justification was the real blow. She looked me in the eye and told me that I wasn’t very good at sex. She claimed that our time in bed left her profoundly dissatisfied—so dissatisfied, in fact, that she felt compelled to seek out others just to feel something.”