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 put in. More than that, my identification with the wife was based on my assumption that she and I both hated having sex with him or listening to him bloviate, yet we relied on him for money. And this key commonality rendered us enemies or at least rivals. I didn’t see it as a strictly her vs. me struggle, and it wasn’t that I wanted any wife left destitute, but her presence limited his freedom, and he couldn’t hire me if he didn’t have time to himself. Family trips in particular took the husbands and therefore their money away from me. I felt put out by those.

At the start of my career, I believed sex work would teach me something about men, and it did, but fitfully. The lessons were impermanent, just pulses of knowledge. I kept glimpsing flickers. I kept trying to catch the flash. It was like fishing with bare hands. The slipperiness of wisdom—the Sisyphean struggle to not just achieve revelation but to make it stay put—isn’t a unique challenge but a feature of the human brain. Sometimes a savant, like a Zen monk, will train so rigorously and for so long that they’re able to hold the wisdom fish and show it to the rest of us, but we can’t stare at someone else’s fish for our whole lives. Looking isn’t the same as holding, anyway. One can examine their own pathology and still be bereft of a why. Even rarer is the why that lingers long enough to make a change, to eliminate the need for the behavior and spoil the enjoyment of its ephemeral satisfaction.

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, or at least I knew him differently, because the version of him I knew was obscured from them and from everyone else. But I didn’t have his health history. I had his ATM card, but I didn’t have his home address. I couldn’t have arranged a doctor’s appointment for him no matter how badly he needed one. I couldn’t even visit him in the hospital. We’d played prominent roles in each other’s lives for almost a decade, but I couldn’t talk to anyone in his family. No one would recognize that I meant something to him excepting, maybe, the doorman at his condo building in DC.

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 them financially. When you’re the other woman, there’s no dignified way to announce yourself. You blast into his larger life like a bomb, or you don’t enter at all. What radical loneliness those women must feel in these situations. So much loss, including the horrible finality of being closed out of his life and public record of the same.

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 million dollars,” he told me in bed. “Five hundred thousand dollars for every year we’ve had together.” I stayed quiet. I thought it was an uncharacteristically crass thing to say since he’d made it clear he wouldn’t be able to bequeath me with so much as $5 after he was gone. To promise someone money without giving it to them is to demean both parties. But I know he meant—or thought he meant—what he said, and that he said it to indicate how much our relationship had been worth to him, though I had no idea what percentage of his wealth that number represented. Given the nature of us, this might sound silly, but it was weird of him to put a single, solid sum on it, not flattering as he may have thought. He was, unfortunately, right about my relationship with money; I could be avaricious, but I wasn’t impressed by people having a lot of it nor giving it to me. If he’d left me with $4 million, it would have changed my life, but it wouldn’t have changed my opinion of him or how much I believed he cared about me.

Roger did not leave me millions, or even a million. But he did write me large checks, including one that was flagged by a banker, who sent the image of it to both Roger and his wife.

In retrospect, it was laughable for me to entertain the possibility that he would want to leave her for me after the diagnosis, since that was when he needed the stability and support of his family more than ever. But he’d just threatened to leave her when he thought he had decades of life left. I thought the shortening of the timeline might make seizing the day imperative, but it must have had the opposite effect; because he had less time left, there was no point in change. Maybe he was relieved that he’d not followed through with his ultimatum. Maybe he imagined what it would be like if he’d been separated from his wife when he discovered the tumor—living alone in a furnished local rental, buried in divorce paperwork, his children angry and confused, me dismissed from my post. I’m sure that vision would be almost too bleak to contemplate.

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 for me, so I resented it. But I wasn’t in love with Roger, and I didn’t want to marry him, so I didn’t want him to leave his wife for me. I wanted for him to be the man he seemed to want to be: decisive and confident, unafraid of other’s opinions and willing to prioritize what mattered most to him. But maybe that was exactly what he did by staying with her.

I SUGGESTED TO ROGER that he tell his brother about me, about us, because his brother was coming into town to visit while Roger’s wife would be away. Enlisting his brother as our ally could have helped us arrange a lot of time together, at least doubling the length of the afternoons we’d contented ourselves with so far—and any visit could be our last. I also thought it might be a relief for Roger to finally have someone to talk to about me because he’d lamented that inability for years. I thought his brother might also be able to help us keep in touch near the end. His brother had been in an affair that broke his first marriage, and even if he weren’t able to relate, surely he wouldn’t deny his dying sibling this request.

I explained this to Roger when he asked why I would propose such a thing. He was quiet for a beat. Then he told me that his many siblings had all been in marriages that failed. Only he had married just once and stayed married. As far as his Irish Catholic family was concerned, he was a paragon of marital virtue, and that was a source of great satisfaction for him. He wanted his family, his coworkers, and everyone who knew him to continue believing he was a faithful partner in a sterling union.

I saw an aspect of him then that I hadn’t before: his satisfaction at having gotten away with the biggest deception of his life. “I’m so looking forward to seeing you that it’s hard to bear,” he wrote of the few hours we’d steal under his brother’s ignorance. “It’s the one light in my dark universe.” But it wasn’t really the only light. He would die proud of having hidden me. I didn’t know that about him before he got sick. I don’t know if he’d known that about himself.

I don’t think Roger wronged me once. I have no grudges, and I don’t think anything about our arrangement was unfair. In fact, it was one of the most honest and equitable and respectful relationships I’ve had. But Roger took away one of the biggest decisions anyone has ever taken from me when he kept me from his death.

That was his right. Even if he hadn’t been paying me, or if he hadn’t been married, that would have been his right. I know he did the best he could, and that it was better than most people’s best would be. But we didn’t get to say goodbye. It’s a wound that will last forever.

ANY EXPLANATION OF MY decision to marry might sound provincial and patriarchal. Perhaps my heart, desperate for superlative expression, reached down into its own depths and in lieu of inventing something new and iconoclastic, seized upon the most banal tradition. But we didn’t marry because of religious alignment or pressure from our families, not because I wanted a ring—we don’t wear rings—or kids or a wedding. (We don’t and didn’t have either.) I felt already pledged to him, and marriage seemed the starkest way to illustrate it because of what marriage (had) represented to me before him, which was nothing. I wanted to demonstrate—to myself and to him—that he was the only one I would do this for or want this with because he was the only one who could fill it with meaning. Our marriage matters to me not because I care about marriage but because I care about Sam.