Challen and Addy Novel – In marriage, you have to learn when to pick your battles. There are some things you learn to ignore. There are some things you ignore for a while, and then you finally address them. And then there are some hills you’re willing to die on. Apparently, I was on one of those hills right now and losing. “You have no right to say who I can or can’t be friends with,” my husband was telling me. “If she was a man, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion.” “We would,” I protested, “Because you’re spending free time with her that you used to spend with me, Challen. It would be the same thing if you were spending all your free time with a man.” “I doubt you’d have a problem with me hanging out with a man. Not sure what you think is going on, Addy, but she and I are friends.
That’s it. We became friends during our last project and we each got one another through the long hours. We found out we have a lot of hobbies in common ones that you and I don’t share, so now that the deadline pressures are off, we’re just having some fun.” I used to be the one who got him through things. I used to be the one he wanted to spend all his time with. “Why don’t you want to do things with me anymore? We used to do so many things together.” “We still do things. Have dinner. Movies. But I want to get out, see things, do things. I don’t want to just sit around all the time.” “Then let me go, too. If this is so innocent, invite me to go along and we can all do these hobbies of yours together.” He sighed. “You aren’t exactly at our level as far as skills and abilities. You’d slow us down and hold us back. We hike, ride mountain bikes, run — and you don’t do any of that.
The last time you and I went mountain bike riding, I had to stop every mile for you and you bitched and moaned the whole time.” I looked at him, this man I’d been married to for five years and felt like I was looking at a stranger. Maybe I was a little overweight. Maybe I led a more sedentary life than he did now, maybe I didn’t work out very often. Well, at all. I knew I could do better. But shouldn’t he still want to spend time with me instead of leaving me behind? “Do you even love me anymore?” I asked Challen. “Are you falling in love with her?” He shook his head in disgust. “You’re my wife, for God’s sake. Jennifer’s a friend. I’m not even going to dignify that question with an answer.” “You’re avoiding an answer,” I pointed out to him.
He pressed a smooch to my forehead. “Because you already know the answer. I’m going to go meet her. She and I are going mountain bike riding. You and I can talk more this afternoon when I get back.” “And after mountain bike riding? Are you going to have lunch with her?” Challen shrugged, irritated. “Probably. And again, you wouldn’t be asking all these questions if it was a man.” “But it’s not a man. It’s a woman, and this is how cracks start to form in a marriage. You start spending your time and energy on someone who isn’t your wife, and things go downhill from there.” “Addy, I need to go. I don’t want to keep Jennifer waiting.” “Don’t go,” I said, grabbing his hand. “Please. I feel like you’re starting a relationship with her and you’re leaving our marriage and you just won’t admit it to me yet. You won’t leave her waiting, but you have no problem leaving me behind, waiting for you to get home.”
“Babe, stop. Please. I just hit a major deadline two weeks ago, I was under a huge amount of pressure and now I’m just trying to de-stress, relax.” “Relax with me. At home.” Not only was I begging, I could feel tears forming from sheer frustration. I was losing my husband, and I knew it. “We’ll have dinner out tonight, OK?” Then, after throwing that bone at me, Challen walked out, and I felt like my whole life had just walked out the door and left me, and our marriage, behind. To keep from crying after he drove away, I stormed out to the garage, pulled on my bike helmet, dragged my (extremely dusty) mountain bike from the side of the garage and took off. Unfortunately, thanks to a driver who didn’t see me and clipped me from behind, my husband and I never made it to dinner.
I had no identification on me. I was out of it for two days, and on the third, when I woke up, I was still too out of it to give them my husband’s name. But it didn’t matter because my husband hadn’t been looking for me anyway. It annoyed me to no end, but my wife’s words rang in my ears as I drove to the park Jennifer and I were meeting at to go mountain bike riding. They stayed with me even as I parked my car near the trailhead and waved to Jennifer, who was already waiting for me. Addy had been clingy these last few months, and after what she’d said today, I knew now that it was jealousy driving it. Despite what she said, I knew that she wouldn’t have a problem if Jennifer had been a man. Her refusal to understand that I was just hanging out with a friend who shared similar interests with me was getting old. I worked hard to provide a good life for us.
Addy wasn’t in the same industry that I was in, so she didn’t understand the constant pressure I was under. Getting out and getting active was a pressure release for me, one that I badly needed. Working through the tension with physical activities whenever I had a chance kept me healthy and sane. Unfortunately, Addy had become more sedentary as I’d become more active. My wife ate her emotions while I worked mine out as often as I had a chance. That meant my wife wasn’t able to or interested in keeping up with me anymore. To my mind, that meant I could find a friend who could keep up with me because it was more enjoyable to undertake these activities with another person, to share the thrill of accomplishment with someone else who could appreciate the effort required. Jennifer was as athletic as I was. We were on the same team at work and had realized we shared the same interests as we talked while working grueling hours with impossible deadlines.
She also, unlike my wife, understood how demanding our jobs were and the pressure we were under. She got why the physical outlets were necessary mentally. My wife was way off base when she accused me of having feelings for Jennifer. Other than friendly ones that you’d have for a colleague, I didn’t. She was simply someone I could blow off steam with in a way I couldn’t with my wife. Maybe if you’d talk to Addy more, she’d understand. I squelched that thought. I’d tried to explain to Addy but she didn’t get it. I’d asked her to go hiking and biking and running with me, but she always declined. Maybe you could have scaled back your expectations, you could have found a way to share the activities. But why should I have to hold myself back to cater to my wife’s inability to keep physically fit? “Hey, Chall,” Jennifer greeted me when I got out of my car.
“This must be a record you’re five minutes late.” I was known for being punctual to a fault because I was never late to anything. If I said I was going to be somewhere at a certain time, I was there, and I was usually at least five minutes early. “Got held up at home,” I said, more irritated than I intended. Jennifer gave me a penetrating stare. “Does Addy have a problem with you doing things with me?” You wouldn’t be asking all these questions if it was a man. But it’s not a man. It’s a woman, and this is how cracks start to form in a marriage. You start spending your time and energy on someone who isn’t your wife, and things go downhill from there. I looked at her sharply. “Why would you ask me that?” “Well, you spend a lot of time with me at work and outside of work. Most women would be really insecure about that, especially given…” Her voice trailed off and I had no idea where she’d been going with the rest of that. “Especially given what?” I asked, exasperated that she hadn’t finished her thought. Jennifer looked uncomfortable for a minute. “I just meant that…your wife isn’t exactly in shape, Challen. Fit or athletic. She may look at me and feel like she doesn’t, you know, measure up.
Like she couldn’t compete with me. That can cause jealousy.” Do you even love me anymore? Are you falling in love with her? “My wife has no reason to be jealous of you,” I said, while wondering if that were true. Was I giving Jennifer attention I should have been giving my wife? Jennifer shrugged. “It’s happened before, where I’ve been friends with a married man and his wife got all insecure and didn’t want him hanging out with me, even though it was completely innocent. The married women let themselves go, basically, and when they see me becoming friends with their husbands, they can’t handle it. They look at me as some sort of competition and their claws come out and suddenly they’re demanding their husbands stay away from me.”
That sounded exactly like what was happening with Addy, given the way she’d been talking to me before I left the house. Don’t go. Please. I feel like you’re starting a relationship with her and you’re leaving our marriage and you just won’t admit it to me yet. You won’t leave her waiting, but you have no problem leaving me behind, waiting for you to get home. Lifting my bike off the rack on my SUV, I wondered if Jennifer was right. Then I decided I wasn’t going to think about it anymore and just enjoy the ride. We both strapped on our helmets and took off on a grueling three hour trek. We’d just gotten back to the trailhead when both our phones went off. We checked our texts and looked at each other. The new sales reporting system we’d just released to Europe two weeks ago for testing before full-scale implementation had gone down. I was calling my boss as Jennifer got her bike on the rack. “Need you here ten minutes ago,” he said. “We’re going live in three days and I need this operational. I don’t need to tell you what’s riding on this.” “Jennifer and I are on our way.”
I practically threw my bike on the rack, and Jennifer and I took off for work. I used Siri to send a text to my wife, telling Addy I had a work emergency and had no idea how long it would take to fix the problem. The answer was three days. Working around the clock and surviving on caffeine, our team tracked down and fixed the bugs causing the problem that had shut down the system. We tested the fixes and delivered the updates just in time for the rollout. Bleary eyed, we all walked to our cars, blinking at the bright sun, not having been outside in three days. All I wanted to do was go home, see my wife, shower and fall into bed for a couple of days. I’d checked my phone a couple of times, but there’d been no reply from Addy. Maybe she was that upset with me or she just didn’t believe me that there’d been a work emergency that had kept me from home for three days. I wondered if she thought Jennifer and I had been shacked up somewhere, and the thought of that just pissed me off. No matter how angry she was, a simple thumbs up to my text would have been appreciated.
Her car was in the garage, but since Addy worked from home as a medical transcriptionist, that wasn’t surprising. I walked in and immediately knew the house was empty from the quiet stillness that permeated it. “Addy?” I called. I saw her purse and car keys on the foyer table shelf. I circled back into the kitchen and noticed some hamburger defrosting on the counter, but it didn’t look right and when I felt it, it was completely warm. Addy never left meat out to defrost for longer than an hour, and she had just taken it out before I’d left three days ago, before I’d offered to take her out for dinner. And now the meat was still out after all this time? I ran to our bedroom and the bed was still unmade. The same way it’d been since I left because, as a joke, I always placed the bed pillows on each corner of the bed before Addy made it. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. Something wasn’t right. No texts from Addy. The meat on the counter for three days.
The bed the way I’d left it three days ago. Addy’s car in the garage and her purse and keys in the house. Something was very, very wrong. I pulled out my phone, and called the police, my heart pounding. Thirty minutes later, I was on my way to the hospital, unable to breathe, on my way to see if the woman who’d just regained consciousness after getting hit by a car on her bike was my wife. I knew it was. I knew it. Addy had been on her bike. That thought stabbed through me as it registered that the accident had happened not long after I’d left home to meet Jennifer. When I ran out to the garage after getting the information from the police, I noticed as I jumped into my SUV that Addy’s bike wasn’t in its usual place. I knew the unidentified woman in the hospital was my wife, but they’d refused to give me any information until I came to see if it was my wife.
Her purse with her ID was with me, and I flew into the hospital, checked in and was taken to see Jane Doe in the ICU. A nurse met me outside her room, and I thought I might pass out as she opened the door to Addy’s room. Nothing she was saying was registering as I was solely focused on the figure in the bed connected to all sorts of tubes. “Addy,” I choked out, swamped with unspeakable pain that she was in the hospital because of me. Her head moved in my direction, her eyes shadowed, scared and sad. “Challen,” she whispered. “Oh, God, Addy, Addy,” I said, rushing toward her. “Oh, sweetheart. I’m so sorry.” “Challen,” she whispered again, her eyes filling with tears. “I want…” “What? What do you want, Addy? Tell me.” “I want you to leave.”