I didn’t get any work done that day, nor did I sleep well that night. The following day was better, but by Saturday evening, I realized that I’d had no visitors, and I began to worry. I’d expected someone to come and try to talk me out of exposing Ella’s secret and, in turn, the community’s role in keeping it. That didn’t happen. No one came to talk to me about this or anything else.

I thought about reaching out to someone, but instead decided to keep my own counsel for once. The longer I sat with my decision alone, the more certain I became that it was the right one. It had taken me longer to get there than it should have, but I’d gotten there. That had to count for something, right? Months before, Bob had asked me to make the right choice, and I felt like I finally had. I understood why they hadn’t, why their fear steered them in the wrong direction, but I wasn’t going to let fear guide me anymore. I never should have in the first place.

Sunday evening, as I made my way toward Ella and Lance’s front door, I was Marshal Will Kane in High Noon, about to face down the evil no one else in town would. Maybe they’d thank me for it, and maybe they wouldn’t. Either way, I’d do what needed to be done.

Lance answered the door when I knocked, and I felt relief. Ella might have made a scene while keeping me from getting to him. Instead, we could talk man to man. “Lance–”

I didn’t see the first punch coming, and it left me too dazed to stop the second. “You son of a bitch!” A third followed, grazing my head as I staggered off the step. “You come around here after what you said to my wife? After what you tried to do?”

“What?” My ears rang. I hadn’t been in a fight since third grade, and I’d lost that one. Lance was chubby and already winded, but he still had several inches on me and a righteous rage fueling his fists.

I slipped the next punch, as he huffed, “You were our friend, asshole! She came to you for a shoulder to cry on, and you tried to seduce her? The fuck is wrong with you?” He tried for a haymaker, but it quickly became clear that he hadn’t been in a fight in a long time either, and I dodged backwards out of the arc of his wild swing.

“That’s not what–”

“Doug.” Bob’s low, stentorian tone caught my attention. I looked past Lance and saw him, Kathy, and Ella standing on the stoop. Ella was reaching out for her husband, trying to stop him, but Bob and Kathy simply looked on with disappointed faces. “Go on home, son. You aren’t welcome here.”

“You aren’t welcome here.” In that moment, I knew “here” didn’t mean in the Jenkins’ house, or on their stoop, or in their yard. “Here” meant the neighborhood. It meant the community. 

I looked to my left and right and saw the silhouettes of our neighbors in their windows, watching the clumsy brawl. Glancing back, more were visible in the houses across the street, townsfolk waiting to see the outcome of the showdown, even as they knew I’d been outgunned from the beginning. 

Once upon a time, I’d been their project, but now I’d become their problem. Bob and Kathy’s presence at the Jenkins’, backing up whatever Ella said, meant this wasn’t High Noon. It was High Plains Drifter, and I was Jim Duncan being beaten as the citizens watched, a sacrifice to hide their sins.

Lance’s next punch landed squarely on my temple, this one catching me unawares as I came to understand my role. I fell to the ground, head spinning; Ella reached Lance and grabbed his arm before he could take a stride forward to kick or stomp me, trying to calm his rage before he did something that might land him in prison.

I felt like throwing up, both from the pain in my head and the betrayal that tore at my heart. I almost laughed at the thought, as if I hadn’t betrayed Lance this entire time. Instead, though, I shoved at the ground, trying to bring myself to standing. My stomach lurched, but I managed it. Barely.

“I’m not your goddamned son, Bob.”

Lance turned back towards me, ready to go again, but he stopped when he saw me holding something out towards him in one hand. In the dusk, before the streetlights came on, he would have had trouble discerning it by its outline, clutched tightly as it was. 

Ella recognized the object that would doom her before anyone else. Horror spread across her face as she comprehended what its presence meant, gasping, “Don’t–!” just as her voice from days before sounded from the device’s speaker.

“I know you want me, Doug. I want you, too, and I have for a long time. Even before you knew… before you knew what I’d done, I thought about approaching you for this help. I wanted to be with someone I actually liked, that I actually wanted in more than a sexual way. Someone who could be an actual friend with benefits instead of just a guy I fucked.”

Lance’s adulterous wife screamed, lunging forward, trying to grab my phone. I was taller than her, though, and kept it out of her grasp, holding her at bay with my other arm as she flailed ineffectually.

“I know it’s a lot to ask, another secret to keep, but I promise you that I’ll make it up to you. When I need to get fucked, I’ll… God, I’ll do just about anything you ask. You can make me feel like a dirty little whore, or you can treat me like a lover, or just bang me like one of those sluts you brought home from the clubs. However you want me, as long as you can help me take the edge off.”

Smartphones had been around for a while, but most folks didn’t think about their ubiquity back then and what that ubiquity meant for their privacy, especially if they were over thirty. Ella hadn’t realized that when I’d gone to get drinks, I’d turned the recorder on, then put it on the table alongside my beer once I returned from the kitchen.

Ella screamed, trying to drown out her recorded voice, but the damage had already been done. Lance’s voice quailed, “Ella?” with all the pain one would expect of a loving husband so profoundly betrayed by his spouse. She kept clawing at my arm, though, Pandora vainly trying to close the box after her misfortunes had fled into the world.

Tears fell from Lance’s eyes as the modern miracle in my hands detailed his wife’s lies and infidelities, both real and attempted. Kathy eventually approached Ella, whose words had long since transformed into unintelligible, dolorous cries. Glaring at me, Mrs. Grayson pulled her younger counterpart away and hugged her, trying to tell her everything was going to be alright. 

It wasn’t. I’d make sure of that. The Drifter wanted revenge for the harm inflicted on Marshall Duncan by the iniquitous townsfolk. My thumb slid along the touchscreen to seek the segment that would damn at least one of them.

“You said that you talked to some of the others? Our neighbors? Who?”

“Oh, Julia, Mary, a few others. They know… Well, everyone knows what a good friend you’ve been to me, and they all appreciate that you kept my secret. Our secret, all of ours. They trust you to keep this one, too. chuckle. Like you said, if you’ve got me on tap…”

“Yeah. But what about the others? The ones you didn’t talk to?”

“They’ll come around. I’ve talked to Kathy, and, well, Bob’s going to be pissed, but she’s sure she can get him to see my- our point of view.”

Kathy Grayson went stiff. Bob Grayson’s face twisted into a mask of rage; I’d never seen that before. “You knew? You knew she was going to do this?”

His wife tried to placate him. “Bob, please–”

The elder’s mouth opened for a moment as if to bellow, then slammed shut. He shouldered his way past Lance and past the two women who now both sobbed. He glared at me for a moment before his face softened, but said nothing. What could he say? What mea culpa could make any of this right? The tears in his eyes spoke volumes, though, as he stepped around me and left the Jenkins’ yard.

I took a step closer to Lance, still wary of the fury he’d displayed earlier. Whatever spirit animated the man before had deserted him, though, leaving only a husk. 

“Lance–” He shook his head, and I didn’t continue. No apology existed that would make my role in this right, either, even if I had ultimately clued him in. I wasn’t a hero, not a marshal nor wild west gunslinger, nor vengeful spirit. I was just a man who had valued what was easy over what was right, no different from the rest of the townsfolk, even if I told myself otherwise. Doing the right thing after the fact only meant that I’d done the wrong thing for too long. 

After texting the recording to him, I left without saying another word. The lights in the houses to either side of us had gone out, and as I walked back towards my home, I saw the silhouettes in the windows across the way had gone, too. The showdown was over; no one had won.

Change came, as it often did, in measures both fast and slow in the following weeks. Most immediately, my neighbors ceased to be my neighbors, instead becoming simply people who lived in houses near mine. 

Eventually, they ceased to be even that. Within days of the showdown, the King’s Forest HOA began issuing citation after citation to me for minor infractions that had never been enforced on anyone in my entire time there. I thought about fighting them, but then wondered, ‘Why bother?’ I’d gone from project to problem to pariah. Why fight to live in a place where I had no friends and a history I’d like to forget?

My business dwindled, too. A large portion had come from my neighbors, and that was gone. Some of it came from referrals that they gave; most of those stayed, but I lost one or two there as well. I’d bought my house as an investment as much as a home, and I decided that I’d rather put my money towards growing the business again.

Lance and Ella didn’t make it; no surprise there. He moved out within a few days, leaving behind two crying children who didn’t understand why Daddy wasn’t going to come home, and a basketcase for a Mommy. The neighborhood women–minus Kathy Grayson–came to her aid, organizing the usual meal trains and helping out with the children as she tried to find her footing once more. Zoe sometimes saw me on the street before I left and called out, “Unca Doug!” Knowing how much she and Hunter hurt and not being able to help them grieved me worse than almost anything else.

I did see Lance one more time. He’d parked a rented U-Haul van in front of his house, not unlike the one I’d come to the neighborhood in. It was midday, and the kids were at school or with Mrs. Alvarez, while Ella was out, I presume, sweating and grunting with someone for money as opposed to pleasure. I approached him as he rested between trips back and forth to his house, wanting to offer a helping hand. I didn’t even get that far.

“Go the fuck away.”

“Lance–”

He got in my face, and I flinched, remembering the last time he’d lunged at me. His bloodshot eyes burned. “Go. The. Fuck. Away. You ruined my life, Doug. I was happy. I was stupid, but I was happy. All you had to do was keep your fucking mouth shut. You didn’t have to fuck Ella, but you didn’t have to tell me what she’d done, either. You could have told her to go to counseling or- or…” 

Lance ran out of steam with that, his next few words mournful rather than angry. “She’s going to get the kids, and the house, and half my business. I’m going to see my son and daughter maybe once every couple weeks if I’m lucky, and that’s only if I can find someplace to live that’s big enough for them to visit.” He sighed. “Just… Just go away, Doug. Leave me the fuck alone.” With an unhappy nod, I did, heading back down the block with my tail between my legs. 

In the years following my time in King’s Forest, I threw myself into my work. I moved a couple of towns away and grew my business through marketing and advertising, no longer relying on friend-of-a-friend referrals. I didn’t turn those down, of course, but I swore to never put myself in a position where falling out with a group of people could put me in the place I’d been early in my career. 

I didn’t shy away from making new friends, but I chose to make them based on shared interests rather than shared geography. When I did eventually move into my own place again, I held the neighbors at arm’s length, never being unfriendly, but also not putting too much effort into the relationships I had with them unless I would have done so even if we hadn’t lived within walking distance of each other. 

After a few false starts, I got back into the dating scene, too, even falling in love twice. The first relationship ended when she had to leave because of her career; the second ended in our divorce. 

I don’t know if I dated and then married a career woman because of everything that happened with Ella and Lance, although it certainly wasn’t an intentional choice. Maybe subconsciously I feared a similar downfall if I wed a woman who hoped to be a stay-at-home mom while I ran my own business. I’d thought about that a lot since I filed.

Caitlyn worked in advertising, and our jobs brought us into contact several times before we started dating, usually when her firm needed an app or website developed. We clicked almost immediately, but it took a little while to make the time to see each other outside of work. Once we did, though? We got on like a house on fire.

It took us a couple years to get to the altar, but when I married Caitlyn, I meant every single word of my vows. It turned out she didn’t, or at least she eventually came to change her mind about certain finer details. I thought I’d made clear to her my beliefs on fidelity, but I guess she didn’t believe me. 

Or maybe she just thought I’d never find out. That turned out to almost be the case, at least until one of her co-workers clued me in. The affair hadn’t gone on long–only two months–but it was still enough to end our marriage and upend the lives of our two kids, especially once I confronted her and she tried to trickle truth me. 

Cheating would have been enough; lying about it, too, even after someone else had given me pics of her sucking face with some dude she met at a conference while they fumbled with both a hotel room door and their clothes? No. Fuck no.

The divorce could have gotten pretty ugly, and it did in certain ways, but I’d made certain other choices that absolutely were intentional after what happened with Lance and Ella. I’d had an ironclad prenup drafted, so my business was safe. Her alimony would have been minimal, since she made only a little less than I did, but the prenup, with its infidelity clause, took care of that, too.

What it couldn’t take care of was our kids and our house. Since we split the childrearing duties before the divorce, custody ultimately came down to the judge’s decision, and the one we drew had a very old-fashioned approach to custody: mom gets it unless she’s currently serving time for a felony, and dad gets visitation as long as he’s never had a speeding ticket. Well, it seemed that way to me, at least. 

The house went with the kids. I’d get the vast majority of the proceeds once we sold it when they were eighteen, because that still technically honored the pre-nup, but until then, they got to keep living in it, so she got to keep living in it. 

I tried to remind myself, over and over, that I’d come out way ahead of where most fathers do in the divorce. I wasn’t living in a shoebox, and I’d kept my business. Being away from my kids hurt like hell, though. In the time before we reached the settlement, Caitlyn had been very careful to not prevent me from seeing them; she said she wanted to be a good co-parent, even if she’d been a shitty wife, which I thought surprisingly enlightened.

Once the divorce came through, though, my now ex-wife made it very clear that she planned to enforce the visitation schedule rigidly, “for the kids’ own good.” Not because she was pissed that she’d lost most of what she’d hoped to claim in the divorce! No, of course not! Because it was important for them to have “stability,” according to whatever handbook she’d been reading. Right.

The first week where I didn’t get to see them was torture. Yeah, I hadn’t actually gotten to tuck them in for a while, and I had acclimated–intellectually, at least–to the notion that this was our new normal. But after a couple of days, it really started to sink in: my kids were going to grow up without me. I’d be, at best, a Disney Dad and, at worst, “Daddy Doug” once Caitlyn remarried, and the kids were almost 24/7 around their new stepfather. The thought of that made me feel sick.

That sick feeling is what led me back to the town where I’d bought my first house, waiting for the ex-husband of the woman who’d first visited me there. The one whose life I had ruined. I thought I had understood the kind of pain I was about to put him through back then, but I did it anyway, so sure of the rightness of my cause. Now, having felt even a sliver of what I’d subjected him to, I couldn’t shake the idea that I needed to try again to apologize for what I’d done.

After that first hour in front of his building, I wondered if I’d made a mistake in not going inside. However, I didn’t want him to have security bounce me from the building, so I thought instead to wait until lunch and approach him then. He might still tell me to get lost, but at least I could get a glimpse at him and see how well he’d recovered from what I’d inflicted on him when I decided to blow up his life.

When Lance came out of the building, I almost didn’t recognize him. He wore a nicely fitted suit, and while he’d aged–God knows I had, too–he wore the years well. He’d grown a neatly trimmed beard, and it, like his full head of hair, had shifted towards salt-and-pepper. Most notably, he looked trim, unlike the entire time I’d known him. That threw me more than anything.

In fact, if he hadn’t recognized me first, I don’t know that I’d have spotted him. Lance saw me standing there like a process server waiting for his prey, and I watched his face as he went through seeing me, trying to place my face, recognition, and, finally, uncertainty as he approached me. “Doug? Doug Richards?”

“Hey, Lance.” Idiot. I hadn’t thought about what I was going to say next.

He broke into a big, goofy grin and thrust his arm forward for a handshake. “Oh, my God! It’s great to see you, man!”

I took his hand, bewildered. “I, uh–”

“Wait! Wait.” He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, opened them once more and earnestly said, “Doug, I am so, so sorry for the way I treated you the last time I saw you. The last couple of times, actually. I should have come looking for you, but I just couldn’t. I was too ashamed. Will you accept my apology?”

“... What?”

Lance peered at me. “For yelling at you? Cursing at you? Hell, hitting you? I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have done any of that. Well, maybe a couple of punches for not telling me sooner, but as for the rest…” He sighed. “I have no excuse. It was wrong, and I’m sorry”

“I- I… Um, sure, Lance. I accept your apology.”

His face lit up. “Thank you! God, thank you, man. This has been weighing on my conscience for years. You were the only person in that whole goddamned neighborhood that did the right thing and–”

Finally, I blurted out, “I ruined your life!”

“What? No, you didn’t. I know I said that, but–”

“I did! I… God.” My shoulders slumped. “I came here to apologize to you, Lance. For… for everything. For telling you, and for not telling you, too. For taking you away from your kids and your happy life. I…” The enormity of my own situation seemed to leap up and land on me with both feet as I thought about my children. “I didn’t understand back then what that really meant. Lance… Lance, I’m so sorry. Whatever you said or did to me then–”

He put his hand on my shoulder. “–Was an angry man lashing out at the wrong person, because he needed someone to blame. Doug, I was shooting the messenger. Man, you saved my life. You didn’t ruin it.” He took a second look at me and began to understand. “Look, I know we were never all that close, but it seems like you’re… maybe going through some shit of your own?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I am.”

“Ah.” He pulled out his phone and looked at it for a moment. “What are you doing for lunch? Hell, what are you doing for the rest of the day?”

The man whose life I apparently had not ruined brought me to a nice Italian place where everyone seemed to know him and got us a quiet table in the corner. Over the next hour, as we ate, I told him everything that had happened to me since our last encounter, up to the previous night when I’d looked up his business address after deciding to come make amends. Throughout my accounting, he listened patiently, occasionally asking questions to clarify, and only a couple of times asking me to pause while he sent or answered a text on his phone.

When I finished, Lance exhaled slowly. “Yeah, I can see why that would make you feel like…” He shook his head. “I know right now that it seems like nothing’s ever going to be okay again. That you’re going to be dealing with this bitch of an ex-wife who’s going to keep you away from your kids and try to replace you with another man. And… I’ll be honest, maybe that will happen. But it doesn’t have to. It doesn’t.”

He leaned back in his chair and took a sip of his iced tea. “Look, I’m not trying to get into a dick-measuring contest here, but when things ended with Nora–” My brows furrowed. “–Sorry, Ella. I’ll explain in a bit. 

“Anyways, when things ended with her, everything you just said to me was true, but worse. She tried to keep me in the marriage by threatening my business. We didn’t have a prenup. She didn’t try to keep the kids from me, not exactly, but she also didn’t make it easy for me to see them, either. I had no friends; I was living out of a suitcase, and I was trying to support two households on a salary that barely supported one; it was a mess.

“But here’s the thing: I made my way back from that. You will, too. It only seems like your life is ruined, man. It isn’t, and I will do whatever I can to help you, just like you helped me back then. Just like you helped me, and my kids, and Nora, too.”

“You keep saying ‘Nora.’ What–?”

He chuckled. “Yeah, that took me a while to get used to. I suppose you told me yours, so now I’ll tell you mine.

“When all this went down… God, has it really been twelve years? Man. Anyway, everything went to shit for a while. I’ll admit that. All the stuff I said before and worse. Nora and I pointed fingers at each other, and the kids got caught in the middle. That’s what actually ended up pulling us out of the nosedive: we both loved our kids more than we hated each other. That gave us a place to start from.

“I had rejected any idea of going through marital counseling out of hand. There was no way I’d ever get back with her after what she’d done. An old college friend, though, suggested we go to family counseling sessions instead. They’re sort of similar, but the focus is less on the marriage than it is the family as a whole. It’s about making sure that we could get past our shit well enough to do what was right for them. However, that still meant that we had to own up to both of our failures.”

I snorted. “The fuck? She cheated on you for–”

He raised a hand to stave off my objection. “Hey, I hear you. Trust me, I do. The blame in our divorce fell way, way on her side of the ledger. She’d agree with me on that if she were here, too. But…”

Lance’s expression turned pensive. “I think–no, I know–that we both kind of got caught up in the whole ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ thing. For me, it was trying to prove that I could meet the financial obligations that we’d foolishly taken on. I was the one that pushed for us to move into that house instead of a smaller one, because I thought the gravy train was never going to end. 

“Then, when it did… well, I saw all these other folks–all these other men–managing to make their way through the recession while making it look easy. It stung my pride that Nora needed to reach out to our neighbors for tips on how to make ends meet, and it made me feel… inadequate, I guess, that she seemed to get through this all with such aplomb. 

“This was before she cheated, mind. They turned her into… what did she call it? Superwife? And I was just getting fatter and more tired and more desperate. When she started doing the personal trainer thing, it got worse; I knew that… I mean, yeah, she’s great at that, but I also knew her clients were mostly a bunch of horndogs that wanted to ogle her as much as they wanted to work out. Maybe more. So I felt like I was… almost pimping her out.”

Lance chuckled. “I didn’t say any of this at the time, though. I should have talked to her, but I didn’t. Maybe if we’d been listening to the right people, we would have, but…” 

His face went grim. “That fucking neighborhood. I can’t blame them for everything that happened. Nora tried to for a while, just like she tried to blame you, and she tried to blame me. I can blame them for a lot of it, though, and for the things that came before. Moving there was the worst decision we ever made. Everyone was so goddamned helpful, and pretty much always in the worst ways they could have been.”

He nodded at me. “You didn’t see much of that until the end, I don’t think. Most of their advice for you turned out well. If you’d stuck around until you had a long-term girlfriend, though, or, God forbid, a wife, I think you might have ended up like us. We were supposed to be a team, but their advice, and our willingness to listen to it…”

He was right. Their advice to me had mostly seemed good up until the end. “How do you mean?”

Lance leaned forward once more, slightly over the table, head inclined towards me. “Let me ask you a question: outside of the barbecues or the parties, how often did you see the men and women of King’s Forest mixing together? The Alvarezes’ canasta night, the bowling team that Bill Redmond started… anything else?”

I thought about it for a moment. “Nnno, I don’t think so.”

“Right. The husbands and wives were almost never in the same room together, and even when they were… Think back to the barbecues. There’d be the sort of meet and greet as everyone came in where the couples would go around together, the same when they left, and then in between, the guys stayed with the guys and the gals stayed with the gals. They thought it was weird that I wanted to be around Nora so much, and I heard a couple jokes about how much you helped out in the kitchen and the like. Or did you not notice that?”

“I did, but I didn’t think much of it. I mean, my folks… Well, they could be like that, too. I was kinda used to it. It just seemed silly to me, and no one said much about it directly to me, so…”

He nodded. “Trust me: if you’d gotten married? They’d have started being a lot more forceful about it. I think since you were the youngest, they still thought of you as a kid, and kids are allowed to help with the ‘women’s work.’”

After mulling that over for a moment, I agreed. “Yeah, I can see that being true. I remember, at poker nights or whatever, how much… Man, some of them really did not seem to like their wives. Or respect them, for that matter. I tried to think of it as just jokes back then, like maybe I was being too sensitive, but…”

“I hear you. And according to Nora? The women were even worse. They all talked about how men needed to be treated like children and tricked into going along with their wives’ wishes or bribed with sexual favors. That the wife should never directly ask for what they wanted, instead doing what ‘needed’ to be done and then smoothing things over later if needed.” 

He snorted. “God, that Julia fucking Alvarez took that attitude to an extreme. Did you know she actually encouraged Nora to cheat on me after she walked in on her and that shithead? ‘He doesn’t need to know, as long as he’s happy.’ What a pile of shit.

“I get Bob’s reasoning for trying to cover it all up, given that sob story of his. Mary’s, too. Even the ones like Sam Henderson, where they fucked their own lives up and didn’t want to see that kind of fallout for us. I don’t agree with a single one of them, but I get it. But do you have any idea how many of the women either said, ‘Get what you need to’ or looked the other way before it came to a head? Not that some of the guys were much better; they were just quieter about their own affairs.”

He sat for a moment, collecting his thoughts, then said, “You know what’s really fucked up, though?”

“What?”

“I think, for the most part, they meant well. It’s what they were taught; it’s what kept their marriages together–no matter how much they bitched about their spouses–and it’s what they thought would be best for us. I think some of it was generational, and some of it was just fucked up interpersonal dynamics, but almost none of them were, like, intentionally evil. None of them were playing with our lives to play with our lives.

“Look at Bob Grayson, for example; I know he carried a ton of angst over all of this. He sought me out a few years after it all went down and almost fell down on his knees, begging me to forgive him for what he’d done. I’d had just enough therapy by then to be able to accept his apology, and when I did, it was like the Pope had blessed him. He really did mean well. Most of them did; some were just covering their own asses, but the others really thought this was the best way to help us. How fucked up is that?”

“Pretty fucked up,” I acknowledged.

Lance laughed, “Yeah. Yeah.” His smile turned sad. “I really loved her, you know? God, if I could change any one thing, it would be for us to have never moved there. But we did, and we tried to keep up with the Joneses–her by being Superwife and me by turning into Captain Workaholic even after things got better with my company–and we stopped being a team. We were even, in some kind of fucked up way, competing with each other. All we had to do was talk, really talk, and maybe…” 

He shook his head. “Ah, well. It is what it is. If we hadn’t moved there, then we probably never would have gotten divorced, and I never would have met Kylie.” Lance held up his left hand and wiggled the ring on its fourth finger. “And then I wouldn’t have Alex or Samantha. Might-have-beens aren’t ever going to make you happy, you know? My wife does, though, and my kids do. Hell, even Nora does now, once we got our shit straightened out in family counseling. She’s been a completely fantastic co-parent, and she and Kylie get along great.”

I sat there shocked for a moment, then stammered out, “Really? That’s… Wow, that’s amazing.”

He laughed at my reaction. “I know. It sounds nuts, but it’s true. It took her some time to come around to really accepting her role in all this, but once she did… Well, that’s where the name change came from. ‘Nora’ is so disgusted by what ‘Ella’ did that she can’t stand the name anymore. She’s not, like, dissociative or anything; she owns what she did. But she needed a way to leave the past in the past, and that was a good place to start.

“Even before that, though, she really did her best to make amends. Once she got it through her head that the advice she’d followed had brought her to this, she stopped listening to the women who told her the way to get me back was to threaten my business. It’s such a dumb idea anyway; it’s not like I owned a factory or a mechanic shop or anything. The only assets she could have sold were… what? My contact list? A couple of laptops? Just another example of the silly notions they put in her head.

“We came up with an equitable split. It hurt me financially, but Nora didn’t want to put the screws to me. She never hated me, you know? She was just hurt that… Well, I’m sure you’ve probably heard some variation of it in the recent past.”

I mimicked Caitlyn in a singsong voice, ‘’Why can’t we move past this? It was just sex. I only loved you.’”

Snorting, Lance admitted, “Yeah, that sounds pretty familiar. Anyways, once she did get past that stage, we worked together for a while to make her more self-sufficient, to take her personal trainer gig and turn it into something more professional, more full-time. In turn, she started being more flexible on things like visitation and alimony. Give and take, you know? 

“Nowadays, our lives… Well, they’re not separated, and they never will be. I’m still paying child support, but I would never have shirked that anyway. Sometimes we have a difference of opinion about this or that for one of the kids, but even then, eh. Hunter’s eighteen now, and Zoe’s just turned sixteen. They kind of have their own opinions, too, and we try to listen. That’s made things easier. But, honestly, I think we probably get along better now than we did for most of our marriage.”

“What about having to deal with a stepdad? Did she ever remarry?”

A familiar voice answered from behind me. “No, I never did. Lance set the bar pretty high.” Two women brushed past, one leaning over to kiss Lance on the top of the head and the other taking the seat next to mine. “Hey, Doug. Long time no see.” 

If Lance had worn the additional years well, Ella–no, Nora–might as well not be wearing them at all. She looked amazing. If I had just met her for the first time, I could have easily believed she was thirty-five, tops, instead of her actual early forties. She still had that firm fitness instructor body, too, although today, she wore a sundress rather than the yoga mom gear.

“Uh, yeah. It’s… good to see you?”

Nora laughed at the statement I’d unintentionally phrased as a question, a gently mocking smile on her face as she retorted, “It’s good to see you, too?” Then her expression and her tone shifted to one of gratitude mixed with relief. “God, it really is good to see you, Doug. I have… just, God, so much I want to say to you. When Lance texted us that you two were here, Kylie and  I rushed right over.”

Lance interjected, “Doug, this is my wife, Kylie.”

A slender, pretty woman about his age with dark brown hair smiled and waved as she sat next to him. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Doug. Lance has always spoken so highly about you and what you did for him–” She nodded at Nora. “–For them.”

“It’s nice to meet you, too.” Her words suddenly sunk in. “Wait, really?” I turned to look at Lance’s ex-wife. I understood his thanks, but hers?

Nora chimed in, “Yes, Doug, really. I know…” She bit her lip, a penitent expression on her face. “God, I know I was so shitty to you back then, even before… before that night at our house. Putting you in that position was just so wrong. I can’t thank you enough for standing up and doing what was right when no one else would.” 

She chuckled, then said, “I mean, I wanted to kill you that night, and for quite a while after, too, but now? I can’t begin to tell you how grateful I am. I think about what might have happened if you’d agreed to what I suggested, or even if you just kept my secret, and…” She shuddered. “Thank you. Really, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.”

I breathed out, too stunned to speak and beyond choked up. For over a decade, I considered that night to be one of the greatest failures of my life, and now, here sat the people whose lives I thought I’d irrevocably damaged, thanking me profusely. Finally, I managed, “Thank you for saying that.” Tears started to form in my eyes, and I angrily swiped them away. With the divorce, missing my kids, and everything else going on in my life, this sudden change in fortune was more than I could handle. “I- I, uh… I really needed a win right now.”

A chorus of “Hey, it’s going to be okay,” and “Really, I mean it,” and all sorts of other affirmations from the three of them didn’t exactly help with my attempt at a stoic demeanor, but I kept it together. It was a narrow thing.

The women had just finished their shopping and wanted lunch, so we all occupied that table for another hour. It seemed so unreal, sitting with these two people I was sure would want to kill me and probably each other, talking and laughing and trading tips about how to survive my newly divorced status. 

Trading gossip, too. Apparently, once the scales fell away from Nora’s eyes, she went scorched earth on the King’s Forest power couples. At the last barbecue before she moved away, a place she knew they’d all be, she came loaded for bear with every single dark secret, piece of gossip, nasty accusation, and vague rumor that she’d heard in her time there. 

More than a few rounds in that parting volley landed. Within a year, a half-dozen more For Sale signs appeared around the sleepy little neighborhood, most of them due to the community property laws in our state’s divorce statutes.

Maybe I should have felt better about that. Vindicated. Instead, it made me a little sad. I’d had years to nurse a grudge after how they’d treated me, and I did. But I also remembered everything they did for me, too, before things went bad. I remembered the poker nights and the fishing trips, the barbecues, and the Christmas party at the Graysons’. 

What they did, to Lance and Ella and to me, was wrong; I felt more sure of that than ever. But so much of what they did was right, too. They welcomed me into their community and made me a better person in many respects. Their ways had worked for them; why wouldn’t they want to impart them to a younger generation? 

But they didn’t work, did they? They seemed to work, but only if the world never changed. Only if Dorothy didn’t look behind the curtain and find the Wizard to be just an old man making things up as he went along. Only if the Drifter didn’t come to town and hold them accountable for the sins they were willing to overlook in order to pretend that the façade was real.

The ladies finished their lunch, and we all headed out, promising to keep in touch. Lance gave me the number for the family counselor that had helped him and Nora navigate their post-divorce lives. Nora gave me a kiss on the cheek before we parted and a wistful smile as she got in her car.

The day after our meeting, she texted me. Nothing big, just a How are you doing? To check on me. That text led to more, then to a phone conversation a few days later, which led to more. We danced around the topic of our time at King’s Forest at first, with her instead focusing on helping me get through my new normal. 

She came by a few weeks later and invited me to an impromptu dinner. Why was she “just in the neighborhood,” as she put it, when she lived two towns and forty-five minutes away? “To have dinner with an old friend.”

We didn’t try to rebuild our old friendship, though. That would have been impossible. Twelve years later, we were both different people, especially Nora. She wanted almost nothing to do with the person she’d been back then, holding onto most of her memories from that time only as cautionary tales about losing sight of what mattered. 

Instead, we tore the whole thing down and started over, like razing a building to the foundation in order to make something better. Long conversations, some that ended in tears, tore us down. Nora had embraced radical honesty to distance herself from Ella, telling the truth even when it hurt her to do so in order to avoid causing more pain later. She encouraged me to do the same, and I found it surprisingly freeing. 

Time spent together, getting to know the new us, built a sturdy framework. Sometimes, something ugly came out of it, leaving us too angry to speak to each other for days, but when we cooled down, it always left us with a more honest understanding of who we were and what we wanted out of our friendship. And, as was often the case with this kind of teardown-and-rebuild, picking through the rubble of the old structure turned up bits and pieces that we wanted to keep, ones that held a special beauty or sentiment to us. 

The years since we’d last seen each other had made us into a pair that fit together like a lock and a key. Nora had parlayed her personal training business into a small gym of her own, so we could talk about all the kinds of things that only small business owners have to deal with. We both had kids, hers almost grown and mine still barely school-aged. 

And, of course, we were both divorced. She helped me navigate post-divorce life, giving me insights into what Caitlyn was thinking and why she acted how she did. My ex-wife did ultimately go to counseling with me, and Nora helped me cope with some of the revelations that came out there: how the agency Caitlyn worked for had always been rife with adultery, but she’d hidden it from me; the way her admiration for striking out on my own eventually turned to resentment at feeling stuck in a job she didn’t enjoy; her anger at me for taking such a black-and-white stance on infidelity, since she was certain she’d have been more “mature” if I’d strayed.

It took a while, but Caitlyn eventually took responsibility for her actions. Some, anyway. She budged more on visitation, eventually admitting that she could use the help. I wouldn’t say that I became a fixture in my old home, but I also wasn’t banned from it, either. 

I’d chosen a condo nearby, so Caitlyn agreed to let the kids stay on a weeknight once in a while, then a few more, and then a few more, which eventually turned our arrangement into something closer to a fifty-fifty split than the “two weekends a month, two months during the summer” plan the judge originally assigned us.

Through all this, my friendship deepened with Nora, but we didn’t try to be more than friends for quite some time; didn’t try, but ended up there anyways. A little too much wine, a slow dance that outlasted the music, a kiss that started in the living room but ended in the bedroom. Incredible sex that night, the best I’d probably ever had. Regrets the next morning. Distance the following week. A repeat not too long after. 

It was great. It was terrible. It was everything we wanted and everything we were afraid of, all bundled into one. I worried that deep down Nora was still Ella; she did, too. Nora was afraid I’d never really trust her; I was too.

During the intermission of the third go-round of the “Doug and Nora Fuck and Ghost Show,” we laid in bed together without speaking. She broke the silence first. “I don’t want to do this.”

“This?”

“Us. Like this.” Nora pushed herself up on one elbow. “I… I love you. I think you love me, too. I want to be with you. But, hon, we have too much baggage. More than we seem capable of handling. Where do we go from here? Dating? Married? What happens when we fight one morning and I come home too late that day? Are you going to wonder if…” She shook her head. 

“I haven’t been with anyone in a long, long time, and I’m so glad that I’ve had this… thing with you, whatever it is. I’m glad that… Well, that I’ve gotten to be with you. But if there’s no future in us, I can’t keep doing it. I just can’t. It breaks my heart every time, and it’s no good for you, either. We should stop before we wreck what we do have.”

A pause that lasted just a little too long said everything that needed to be said. 

—

I’m lying awake in the dark now, too jetlagged to sleep. The noises of an unfamiliar city woke me an hour ago, and my own internal clock has kept me from slumber. Two days after I got off the plane, I still haven’t quite settled; home is literally half a world away, and I should be having lunch, not staring at the ceiling. 

The darkness brought all these memories back, the darkness and the future that lies before me. Six years since that late-night post-coitus conversation with Nora, and I can still hear the anguish in her words, the wish for a different way forward.

The memories of that conversation brought me back to the memories of the way we met that second time, at lunch with her ex-husband. Those led me to the first time I met Ella, my second day in my first house, and everything that had gone into making us 'us,' all the lies and fear and the good and bad through those years and beyond. Of cowboy movies and showdowns and heroes that ride off into the sunset alone.

—

She was right. In another time, another place, another world, a different us might have existed. This wasn’t that world, though, and as much as I trusted her and, yes, loved her, the doubts would always exist. Maybe that wasn’t fair; people change. I had. I believed she had, too. I truly did.

There’s belief, though, and there’s acceptance.

People are pattern recognition machines. We excel at it. The birth of twins causes too much strain on a tribe’s meager resources, so twins must be a curse. An allergy to a certain food causes anaphylactic shock in the child of a king, so that food must be unclean. A swelling population of cats in a medieval town coincides with a plague; they must be the cause, not the rats that they feast on. 

A young man is tutored by his elders in the ways of their tribe, leading to great success in his life; he accepts their wisdom when asked to go along with something he knows is wrong. 

A young husband sees the success of his fellows and strives to be like them, not understanding the hollowness of that success, how much more it takes than it gives. 

A young wife pushes herself to perfection for her family’s happiness, unable to see that the wise women gave her advice that only barely worked even in their time and their context; when she breaks, as many of them did beforehand, they encourage her to follow them in their selfishness and dishonesty, insisting she’s doing it for her family.

An old man, terrified that a tragedy from years ago might repeat itself, encourages a community to hide a young wife’s lie, not knowing how many other lies he’s papering over with his decision.

Two people that had come through hell, first as friends, then enemies, then friends again, then lovers. Two people who danced around infidelities that she’d committed against another man, almost a decade and a half before, and around belief versus acceptance. Two people in a pattern that could destroy their friendship if they didn’t stop.

All of us, stuck in toxic patterns we didn’t see in time to change them.

I didn’t have an answer for her that night. She wasn’t wrong about any of it, but that didn’t mean she was right, either. I just couldn’t find a way to make it right, to make us right. We were perfect for each other, even if it had taken us a lot of mileage, a ton of therapy, and almost a decade and a half to get there.

It wasn’t until the night after she left my bed that third time that the answer finally came to me. A minute after that, I was out the door to tell her.

“Friendship.”

She’d been crying before I’d banged on the door, and her voice croaked, “What?”

“Friendship. That’s the answer.”

Nora snorted, tired, eyes rolling with indignation. “Yeah, no shit. That’s what we’re going to be now, I guess. Just friends.”

“No! No.” I shook my head. “Not ‘just’ friends. Not just ‘friends with benefits,’ either. I want more, too, but… I don’t want to get married again. I’ve had my kids, I don’t want to deal with any of the legal bullshit, and I don’t need a piece of paper to tell me who I belong with.”

With a deep sigh, she asked, “Okay, and?”

“What’s a marriage?” She opened her mouth, but I answered my own question. “Besides the piece of paper, besides the ceremony and the flowers and the joint tax returns and all the other stuff? It’s a friendship. It’s a friendship that lasts your whole life, if you do it right.

“It’s not dating. It’s not… trying things out and kicking the tires. It’s a commitment to keeping this friendship going, for working at it as hard as you need to, for as long as you can. For a lifetime, if you can be honest enough and love each other enough.

“That’s the question, then: Is this a friendship that you want for the rest of your life? Not dating. Not kicking the tires without committing one way or the other. I don’t need the words on the paper or the ceremony. I don’t want it. I don’t want to define who we are by… by what didn’t work for us before. By the things we thought we should do because the people that came before told us we should.

“I want to be your friend for the rest of our lives. I want that friendship to come with certain benefits that you only provide to me–” She grinned through new tears. “–and once we’ve committed to that, I want you to be as honest with me as you’ve been since we started getting to know each other again. 

“I don’t want to rely on good intentions and oaths and guessing games to keep us happy and together. I don’t want to get stuck in a pattern that can’t work for us, one that we’re supposed to just because everyone else we know has. Can you–”

“Yes!” Nora’s joyous shout could have been heard a block away as she threw herself into my arms. “Yes. I want to be your friend, your only friend with benefits, for the rest of our lives. I want to be the drinking buddy you come to when work sucks, and I want to be the bitch that tells you when you’ve fucked up. I want to, I want to.” My best friend-with-benefits kissed me deeply, molding herself to my body. “I want to take you inside right now and show you how good of a friend I’ll always be. Can we do that?”

–

We could. We did. We still do. 

No piece of paper legally binds us. No rings signify our commitment. No label defines us. We could walk away from each other today without needing to do more than break the lease on a condo and divvy up our book collection. Because of that, because the only things that bind us are love and honesty, we don’t. We found a new pattern, one that works for us.

When she has an unpleasant truth she needs to tell me, she does, albeit with kindness. I do the same. Whether it’s “Yes, your butt looks big in that,” or “I got kinda turned on when that guy at the gym checked me out,” truths that might create cracks in other peoples’ relationships strengthen ours. We talk about problems before they happen instead of after, and without pretending that making vows is the same thing as honoring, loving, and cherishing each other.

“Babe?” Nora’s sleepy voice shakes me from my reverie. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Just thinking about things.”

She curls up to me, stroking my chest. “Go back to sleep, babe. Busy day tomorrow.”

“Yeah, I know. Can’t, though.”

Yawning, she asks, “Jetlag still?”

“Mostly. Get some rest. We can talk tomorrow.”

“I know we can, but I want to talk now.”

“C’mon, babe. Zoe’s going to be pissed if the mother of the bride looks like a zombie.” Neither of us are thrilled with the destination wedding thing, but Lance had been willing to pay for it, so who were we to say no?

“If you want me to sleep, then tell me what you were thinking about.”

Snorting, I say, “Fine. Cowboy movies.”

“Ooh.” She knows the whole story from my side of things. That had been part of building our new friendship, talking about everything that had led up to each of us leaving King’s Forest. ‘Cowboy movies’ is our shorthand phrase for the whole mess. “You okay?”

“I am. Love you. Get some sleep.”

“Love you, too.” She drowsily grins. “You tired me out earlier, you know? Did I not do the same for you?”

“Of course you did, but you know how I get when I can’t sleep.” She’s had six years to learn, after all.

“I do.” Her hand slides under the sheet as she runs it across my chest and down to my stomach. “Mmm, I know how to help you sleep, too.”

“Thought I tired you out.”

Nora kisses the side of my neck and rubs my hardening cock. “You did, but I’m jetlagged, too. C’mon, marshal.” She casts the sheet with a chuckle, slaps her thigh, and invites me into her embrace. “Mount up.”

Grinning, I eagerly take my leading lady into my arms. “Yes, ma’am.” Together, we’ll ride off into the sunset. 

Hey, there has to be a sunset somewhere, right?