One month after the man I’d had an affair with died, I received an email from his wife.
Shaking, I locked myself inside my small office before opening it. In the weeks since Anthony had passed away from colon cancer at 31, I’d scoured my laptop, hoping to find an email or a photo that had escaped the wrath of my delete button when I’d resolved to erase all evidence of our relationship. Digging old cell phones out of storage bins, I’d charged them to see if I could recover some of our texts.
When I came up empty-handed, I’d driven to a bookstore, pulling titles he’d gifted me that I’d dumped in the trash. Huddled in a corner, I clutched Still Life With Woodpecker, Love in the Time of Cholera, and The Missing Piece Meets the Big O until an employee in a red vest asked, “Ma’am, are you alright?” I wiped the covers dry, sliding their spines back into place.
What right did I have to mourn him? I was just a stain from his past, a messy adulteress who didn’t have the guts to call him when I learned he was dying. Languishing on the periphery of grief, looking in on something I felt didn’t belong to me, I didn’t dare to contact his loved ones. His wife and I had never met—their relationship began shortly after ours ended. So I was shocked the woman most important to him would reach out to me.
“As most of you now know, on Thursday, July 27th, Anthony succumbed to his year-long battle with colon cancer,” her email began. I learned that in his final days they had married, and, surrounded by his family, he’d said goodbye to his closest friends. She included a link to a website containing photos and interviews with Anthony chronicling his illness.
The email was a beautiful tribute to the man we both loved. For the rest of that afternoon, I lay on the dirty carpet of my humid office, my body heaving as I heard his voice for the first time in nine months.
It was also an invitation.
“Please feel free to send pictures, stories, and old memories to share,” she wrote. “EVERY story is welcome. To me, you are ALL a part of Anthony, completing him to who he became.”
Our affair began six weeks after my summer wedding to my college sweetheart. I’d met Anthony on a trip to Los Angeles from where I lived in Washington State. Only 23, I fell hard for the effortlessly cool and intelligent 29-year-old video editor with golden skin and piercing green eyes. He was the type of handsome that commanded attention when he walked into a room.
After three months of going back and forth between my husband and Anthony, I eventually confessed and left my marriage for good. I loaded my hatchback with my books and clothes, chain-smoking Marlboro Lights as I sped down the lonely, wintery, 18-hour stretch of the I-5 corridor to Anthony’s home in Venice Beach. Forced to stay in a truck stop motel when a snowstorm shut down the freeway, I ate Cheetos and drank gas station wine, talking on the phone with Anthony until I fell asleep.
He was waiting outside on the pathway to his home when I finally arrived. I ran from my car into his arms, convinced our love was worth sacrificing everything.
And for a few brief weeks, it seemed that way. Anthony and I played house. We cooked dinner, made plans to buy a Christmas tree, dreamed up a trip to Peru for his 30th birthday in January. But the whole time, I was terrified I’d made a horrible mistake. No one else believed in our love story. My father wasn’t speaking to me; I was a whore to my evangelical Mexican mother. Even my sister said, “You can live your life any way you please, but I don’t have to stand by and be your friend.”
The magnitude of the hurt I’d caused rippled through every waking moment. I couldn’t stop picturing my husband—whose love for me remained unwavering—alone, suffering. I worried my family would disown me forever. No matter how hard I tried to pretend that everything was fine, I was crumbling.
Despite being in love with Anthony, I was the one to end our four-month-long relationship. I moved back in with my husband and tried to scrape together some semblance of a marriage. It was no use. Nine months after we said our vows, the divorce papers were signed.
Anthony and I didn’t get back together, but we stayed in touch, keeping each other abreast of our evolving lives. That summer, less than a year after we met, my cell phone rang.
“Hi, stranger.”
“I have cancer of the ass,” he said, trying to make light of his stage three colon cancer diagnosis as I burst into tears over the pile of T-shirts I was folding.
In October, weeks before his surgery to remove the tumor, he revealed that his burgeoning romance with a co-worker was getting serious. When he explained his new relationship had been complicated because she’d had a boyfriend at first, I lashed out.
“That’s kind of your MO, isn’t it?” I snapped, hurt that he’d found himself in a similar situation again.
He only sighed. “I’m starting a blog. I figure it’ll be easier to update everyone about my health that way.” He didn’t say it, but I knew he wouldn’t be calling anymore. I pretended to write down the URL. Later, I destroyed every trace of our relationship. He was moving on, and so would I. Young and naive, it didn’t cross my mind that Anthony might not survive.
Eight months after that conversation, he was gone.
His wife’s email was a lifeline when she couldn’t have known I was drowning. I wrote back, telling her everything I wanted to tell Anthony. How I fell apart when it got back to me that he was terminal. How many times I picked up my phone, but told myself I had no place popping up in his life again. How, in all my searches—cursing myself each time—the Google results never yielded his obituary or blog.
I told her about the white plumerias I’d gathered from my yard and taken to the ocean after Anthony died. Alone, under a gray sky, I’d watched the turbulent waves carry the petals away, my offering to him.
“Thank you for including me in your email,” I wrote. “You have no idea the peace you’ve brought me.”
I hit send, not sure whether to expect a response. Still, I refreshed my email constantly in hopes one might arrive. In time, it did.
“I smiled when I pictured your memorial, felt your heartache, experienced your pain, and took a breath of your sorrow,” she wrote. “I miss him so much. Love him so much. More than words could ever express.”
I understood, because I did too.
Over the next 10 months, we continued to write. She sent me the link to her blog. I followed her travels across Europe, toward healing. On my deserted island of grief, I found solace tethered to her, though we were several thousand miles apart.
Shortly before the first anniversary of Anthony’s death, she invited me to his life celebration at their home. Still, that night, I stood outside their house, gripped with shame. Who did I think I was, showing up here?! I didn’t belong with his real and respectable loved ones! I imagined their disgust when the adulteress who’d wreaked havoc in his too-short life walked through the door. Then, steadying my breath, I knocked.
Anthony’s wife welcomed me with a hug, ushering me in from the shadows to take my place among his family and friends.
When I saw the framed photos of Anthony on his wedding day—how frail his body looked in his hospice bed, yet how steady and strong his eyes remained, his wife by his side—I wept uncontrollably, stumbling away to hide in the bathroom. But I was intercepted by one of Anthony’s friends, holding a box of tissues.
“You must be Kim,” he said. “Anthony told me all about you.”
Later, everyone gathered in the living room to watch a home video of Anthony. He was so alive. Happy. Deeply in love with the woman who had carried him through his sickness, whom he would ask to be his wife, if only for a day. I couldn’t stop the guttural sobs escaping my body. I curled into a ball, trying to stifle the sounds, trying to vanish into the floor. Two sets of arms wrapped around me, more of his friends, holding me until my wails subsided. When I looked up, tears streamed down their faces, too. “Thank you,” I whispered.
At midnight, we rode bicycles down to Anthony’s favorite spot on the beach. I handed his wife the flowers I’d brought to place in the ocean. She held my hands, softly shaking her head. “That’s for you to give him.”
A few months passed before I heard from her again.
“I’ve thought about you a hundred times since the July bike ride,” she wrote. “I wish I could have shared more stories with you, but words fell short for the emotions I was feeling. But I hope there comes a day when the two of us can sit down, giggle like girls, and truly share the stories of our love.”
Three years later, we did just that. Over cocktails, she told me how Anthony had two folders in his email: one with her name on it and one with mine. In them were all of our correspondence.
She told me about a memoir she was writing. “You’re in there,” she said. Then she looked knowingly at the tattoo on my forearm.
“What does it mean?”
In my sent box, I had found an email that my delete button missed all those years ago. In it, Anthony had written, “The divine in me sees the divine in you.”
I’d gotten the ink to memorialize the night of his life celebration, to forever be reminded not only of his impact on my life, but of his wife’s, and the way she had selflessly pulled me from my shameful isolation, offered me community, and taught me there was no hierarchy to grief.
I suddenly felt bashful. She squeezed my arm and winked. “That can be a story for another time.”