The Wife Stalker(61)

Before I went any farther down this rabbit hole, I had to go. I had an appointment with Celeste, and though she’d asked last week if we could devote this session to talking about my father, the new information on Piper was all I could think about.

When Celeste called me in, I took a seat, eager to get started.

“Thank you for the email,” she said. She’d asked me to write up a timeline on my father’s departure and our scant contact since. “I’d like to talk about some of the similarities between Leo and your father. How about we explore those today?”

“Before we get to that, I’d like to get your take on some new information I found.” Celeste nodded, though I was already plowing ahead. “I’ve discovered that Piper was married at least two times before Leo.”

She nodded again. “Go on.”

“Her first husband died in an accident, too. Pretty coincidental, isn’t it?”

If she was shocked, it didn’t show on her face. “What kind of accident?”

I handed her the obituary, which she read and handed back to me. “It says he fell during a hike. Do you know if Piper was with him when it happened?”

“Not yet, but I’ll find out more tomorrow. I’m going to go see his mother.”

“I suppose that’s fair enough. Let’s see what she says. In the meantime, back to your father and Leo. Can you tell me the ways in which they are alike?”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes; it felt a little condescending for her to prompt me like this. “Both of them are hardworking.”

“Good. What else?”

“I suppose both are more vulnerable than they let on.”

She leaned forward. “How so?”

“Both of them succumbed to the charms of a woman outside of their marriages. That suggests to me, if not a weakness in character, at least a weakness in resolve.” I wondered if Celeste’s husband had such a weakness and if she trusted him or not.

“I find it interesting that you refer to a weakness in character as ‘vulnerability.’ Why do you think that is?”

It was because I still believed in Leo and didn’t want to admit his character might be flawed. And, in my father’s case, it was because he’d lived in a miserable marriage for over twenty years. But I shrugged, not ready for her to try to disabuse me of my ideas. “I’m not sure.”

“Most women would vilify their husbands and call them names. Yet you continue to defend Leo, to say you want him back. By continuing to believe that Leo was coerced into infidelity, don’t you think you’re letting him off the hook too easily?”

“Maybe. I guess I haven’t wanted to allow myself to feel that anger, because I’m afraid if I do, it will swallow me up. But he is responsible. And he did wrong me.”

She was nodding. “Yes. He did. And it’s okay to feel that anger. This is a safe place.”

“How could he do that to me? After the way I took care of him and the children? My father might have had a reason to leave, but Leo didn’t.”

She rotated her hands, palms up. “These things happen sometimes. Why do you think it’s still so hard for you to forgive your father when you’ve said yourself that you understand what he did?”

“I forgave him a long time ago for leaving my mother—even for leaving me. After all, I was eighteen. But what I can’t forgive him for was replacing me.”

She looked puzzled. “Replacing you?”

I nodded at her. “With a new daughter. Four years younger than me. She wasn’t even his biological child, but I found out a few years after he left that he’d adopted her.”

“How did you find out?”

“My mother told me. She started following him, and she saw them together a year after he left. He told her everything then. How he was starting a new life with a new family.”

“That must have been very hurtful.”

Why did therapists always do this? It must be to prompt their patients to say more, but it always felt like a ridiculously obvious statement. I took a deep breath before responding. “Yes, it was. He even paid her college tuition, something he told my mother he couldn’t afford for me. He was more concerned about the future of a child who wasn’t biologically his. That’s what I can’t forgive. When all my friends left that August for colleges all over the country, I had to enroll at the community college, because without my dad I couldn’t afford the tuition for BU. Sometimes I wonder if he did it on purpose, to make me stay home and take care of my mother. He knew what she was like, that she’d be pestering me constantly with her complaints about how sick she was and how she needed help. What kind of man does that to his own child?”

“You’re right. That’s not fair at all.”

“The only reason I found out was because my mother told me—more evidence of what a bad person he was.”

“That was a terrible thing to do.”

“Terrible that he didn’t pay my tuition or terrible that she told me about it?”

“Both. They both let you down.”

I looked past her to the framed degrees hanging on the wall behind her. A bachelor’s from Springfield College and a master’s in social work from Syracuse University. “Did your father pay for your undergrad?” I asked, cocking my head.