We worked mostly in silence, the way you do with a friend who understands you well enough not to fill the air with noise.
"You don't have any regrets?" he said at one point.
I thought about it genuinely. About leaving? No. About the marriage being what it was? Yeah, of course.
You think she ever crossed a line with him?
I honestly don't know, I said. At some point, I stopped being sure and at some other point I stopped being sure it was the most important question.
Todd nodded. What's the most important question?
Whether I was willing to spend the next 30 years feeling the way I've felt for the last year. And the answer to that was pretty clear.
Petra had a conversation with her sister Vera, who lived in Bellevue. Vera reached out to me.
I've always liked Vera. She's direct the way Petra sometimes wasn't, and she asked if we could talk.
We met for coffee at a place near the Eastside Rail Station.
She's devastated, Vera said. I believe that. She doesn't understand how you went from zero to Singapore in one week.
It wasn't one week, I said. It was a year of one week at a time.
Vera looked at her coffee. She says, "You never really told her how bad it was."
I told her, I said. In November, in February, in March. The words came out of my mouth in the kitchen of our house and she pivoted every single time to telling me I was being unreasonable.
Vera didn't argue with that. She just sat with it for a moment.
"What do you want her to understand?" she asked.
"I want her to understand that the ultimatum she gave me last Sunday was the most honest communication we'd had in months. She said it as a threat, but it was actually a clarity. She was telling me what her priorities were. I just finally believed her."
Vera drove home to Bellevue and I drove back to what was increasingly becoming just an apartment I used to live in.
6 days before my flight, Petra came to me with a conversation I hadn't expected.
She'd been staying at her sister's some nights, at the townhouse other nights. We'd been navigating the same space with the careful choreography of two people trying not to cause any more damage than had already been done.
She sat down across from me at the kitchen table and said, "I ended things with Damon."
I looked at her.
"I mean, we were never... It wasn't what you thought," she said quickly. "But I ended the friendship, the whole thing. I blocked him on everything. I told him I couldn't have him in my life anymore because he'd cost me my marriage."
I didn't know what she expected me to do with that. I'd spent a year watching a pattern that had a clear shape and a clear trajectory.