The Ex(25)

I was thriving in law school without him—or at least that’s how I felt—and all Jack could say was that he couldn’t wait for law school to be over so we could get married and “start our future.” His future felt like my end. What was supposed to be a word and a ring had changed everything. What used to be easy seemed boring. What had felt safe was now confining.

My sins started small. I stopped picking up after myself, put less effort into my appearance around the apartment, snapped at him on occasion. He seemed happy as ever, so I spent more time without him and was bossier when we were together. Before I knew it, it was like I was playing a game to see just how much Jack could take.

And, still, he waited for my every free second so we could spend it together.

The first time I cheated on Jack—truly emotionally cheated—was with the editor in chief of the law review, Gregg Bennett. I was a 2-L, he was a 3-L. It was during the big cattle call for law review submissions. We students got lobbied by professors from all over the country, trying to get their articles placed in a top-ten journal. It was like March madness for law geeks. Who would land Judge Posner’s latest masterpiece, sure to be cited by other scholars for years to come? Could we bluff Cass Sunstein into accepting by telling him we needed a decision in two days? Heady stuff for a twenty-four-year-old.

And no one got off on it more than Gregg.

I didn’t set out to fall in love, at least that’s what I would tell myself later. But I knew I enjoyed being around Gregg. Later, I’d realize that what I was really enjoying was not being with Jack.

And even though I knew that I was enjoying being around Gregg more than I should, I let it happen. Despite his engagement to a congressman’s daughter—or maybe because of it—we flirted to the point of making other staffers feel like they were crashing a date.

And sex with Gregg was everything it wasn’t with Jack. There was nothing slow or sensitive about it. It was a hand under my skirt in the library. Getting pulled onto a table in the law review office when another staffer stepped into the hall. His hand over my mouth as he whispered to me from behind, “You like this, don’t you?”

But then after, I’d go home to that stifling apartment at night. And hear Jack’s daily “miss you’s” as I left in the morning with my backpack.

For months, I lied to everyone about everything: where I was going, why I ran late, who was on the phone. I lied so much that I didn’t even realize that I was also lying to myself. It wasn’t just my stupid little rules—never in our apartment, never with both of them on the same day, always taking off the necklace Jack had given me for my twenty-first birthday before being with Gregg, my promise to myself to break the news to Jack once classes were over. Those were the selfish things I would tell myself every time I lied to be with Gregg Bennett. The biggest lie I told myself was that my infidelity was somehow special.

It’s not my fault I fell in love. The power of this particular lie is over whelming. A few years ago, a newly married couple went so far as to highlight in their Sunday Styles wedding announcement the fact that they had met each other while still married to former spouses. The public lambasted the bride for whining about her feelings of being “punished” for having failed to meet the love of her life earlier, but that’s exactly how I felt while I was with Gregg. To avoid feeling like a horrible person, I elevated Gregg (he’s my soul mate), derided Jack (I deserve someone who is more of a challenge), and turned myself into the victim (I met Jack too young, he’s suffocating me). When I hear other people talk about how infidelity “just happens,” I know how lame it sounds, but at the time, those words became my mantra.

I worked later and left home earlier. I gushed when Gregg landed a clerkship with the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit, which would make him a front-runner to land a Supreme Court clerkship.

And then when Gregg graduated, he dumped me. No, he didn’t dump me. He just moved—to D.C., to his fiancée, to his real life. He had used me. And the thing is, I felt more right with him for months than I ever had with the man who loved me. One night the following summer, Jack saw me staring into space and asked if I missed Gregg. “I mean, you guys were pretty good friends, is all.”

He knew. All that time, he had known. He just didn’t want me to know that he knew. And now that it was over, Jack was still there. He even wanted to comfort me. I felt so guilty that I started to hate him for it.

I would look at him and imagine the scene play out in my head.

We need to talk.

I love you, but I’m not in love with you.

You deserve someone better.

I’d picture myself giving back the ring—his mother’s engagement ring—and I’d hear him telling me, once again, that we belonged together, that he knew me better than anyone else, that we were perfect. I could almost hear my mother: I knew it was too good to be true.

No, I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t marry him, but I couldn’t be the one to say I wouldn’t marry him. He would have to be the one to see that we were all wrong. I wasn’t a good person, and I certainly wasn’t good enough for someone as accepting and forgiving as Jack.


I WAS RECOUNTING BITS AND pieces of this history when Don interrupted. “The case, Olivia. What does this have to do with Jack’s arrest?”

“You need to know about the last time I saw Jack before today.”