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I’d like to say that I didn’t want Roger to leave his wife, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. I’m a relatively impatient person, and I can be short-tempered. I hated the new limits imposed by his illness. His marriage was an inconvenience, and one he explicitly framed as a financial obstacle …

I didn’t see Roger before the surgery, but his immediate recovery went well enough that he managed a solo trip to his DC condo about a month later, and I spent the night with him there. By this time, they’d determined that he had brain cancer and it was not curable. “If I could, I’d leave you four …

It was easier to obsess over concrete factors, like money, than to confront my existential and actual helplessness. I thought a lot about other mistresses during those days, the ones in positions more precarious than mine because they were in love with their married men or completely relied upon th…

Despite this wishful thinking, resentment constituted much of my reaction to the news. Roger’s progressively incoherent emails and the assertive, bitchy-feeling replies they warranted from me highlighted how siloed our lives were. I knew him well—maybe I knew more of him than his kids or his wife, …

Whether or not a wife sounded likable, I knew I usually had more in common with her than with him. The clients, almost all of them, made a strong case for the impossibility of male fidelity. Any person can be cheated on at any time, but it feels like a uniquely humiliating and female position to be…