I stared at her.
"So you kept doing it?"
She nodded, ashamed.
"At first, I told myself I was trapped. But that's not the whole truth."
"How many times?"
"Every time you traveled after that."
I counted the trips in my head. There had been nine, including Karen's party. For years I had accepted that business travel was simply part of my role while David stayed close to the office. Now I had to wonder how many of those assignments had been arranged deliberately by my father so he and David would know exactly when the house was theirs.
"More than half a dozen times," I said. "Nine trips. And every time I left, you knew what was going to happen.
"That's months, Sonia. You had time to tell me. You had time to call the police. You had time to tell Cindy."
She looked away.
And somehow, before she said anything else, I knew.
"You kept doing it because eventually you wanted to," I said.
Her expression changed.
"Yes," she whispered. "I did. I hated how it started. I hate what they did that first night.
But later, when I could have ended it, I didn't. I discovered I liked things I had never expected to like. I was afraid of losing you, and I convinced myself that if it only happened while you were away, you'd never know."
The distinction mattered because the first night, as she described it, was not consensual. But it did not erase the betrayal that followed. Sonia admitted that after the blackmail had started, fear gradually mixed with curiosity, then desire, until there were later occasions when she was no longer merely complying with a threat.
That was the part I could not get past. If she had come to me after the first night, I would have believed her. If she had come to me after the first photograph, we could have gone to Cindy, an attorney, or the police together. Instead, she hid it for seven months and allowed the secret to become a second life.
"Were Dad and David the only ones?"
She shook her head.
"Your father brought the same three other men on three occasions," she said. "It wasn't a different group every time. It was the same three customers.
I felt sick.
"People I know?"
"Customers. I don't know whether you know them personally."
"So men I shake hands with at work may have been laughing at me behind my back."
"Maybe. I don't know."
I asked how she could claim to love me after seven months of that.
Sonia cried harder. She tried to explain the difference as she understood it: affection and loyalty were one category in her mind, physical appetite another. She said she had never stopped loving me, had never stopped wanting me emotionally, and had never thought of the other men as partners.
That explanation did not make the deception smaller. If anything, it made it stranger. She had apparently found a way to live two contradictory truths at once and expected one of them never to collide with the other.
"Because the sex and the love weren't the same thing to me. I know that sounds awful. You were never bad with me. You always made me feel loved.
What I discovered was that I wanted more frequency and variety than I had admitted even to myself. That doesn't make what I did right. It just means I don't want you believing you failed me."
I reminded her that she had repeatedly refused certain intimate things with me that she later allowed with them.
"The first time, they did things I had always been afraid to try," she said. "Later I learned I liked some of it. I thought about telling you, but I was ashamed because I'd refused you so many times before. I told myself I'd wait until you asked again. You never did."
She tried to turn the conversation toward reconciliation, even suggesting that if I stayed she wanted to be more open about what she liked and what I wanted. Then she told me something else I had not known: after my mother and Cindy threw Dad and David out, Sonia had allowed them to stay temporarily because she felt partly responsible for the disaster.
She claimed there had been no intimacy after they moved in. One night, when the two men tried to push the old arrangement again after drinking, she forced them out and made it clear they were never to return. That, she said, was why they were no longer in the house by the time I came home.
"Maybe if I were coming home," I said. "But I'm not sure I am."
Her face fell.
"Why not?"
"Because I don't know if I can trust you, and I don't know if the life you discovered you want is one I can live with."
"I don't need anyone else," she said. "I learned I liked more, but I don't need it. What I need is you. If you want revenge, if you need to be with someone else, do it. Just please come back."
I thought about Maggie, Sarah, Mary, Julia, and Jessica. I decided that was not the moment to discuss my own road trip.
Then the front door flew open.
David limped into the room using a cane. In his other hand was a firearm.
"I've been waiting for you to come back," he said. "I'm going to make you understand what you did to me."
I stood slowly.
"You slept with my wife. What exactly did you expect?"
He raised the weapon.
Sonia screamed and moved between us just as it discharged.
Everything after that happened at once.
Sonia dropped to the floor, injured. I rushed David before he could fire again, wrestled the weapon away, and struck him until he stopped fighting back. Then I turned to Sonia, called emergency services, and tried to stop the bleeding with a towel from the kitchen.
She looked up at me, terrified.
"Don't leave me," she whispered. "Please don't leave me."