window.
The affair suddenly felt smaller.
Painful, yes.
But smaller.
“Why would Derek challenge me to fight over the house?”
Rebecca inhaled slowly.
“Because I don’t think the fight is about the house.”
Friday arrived.
Now Derek was in front of me again, breathing harder than he should have been.
Three minutes remained.
He had underestimated my conditioning.
That was understandable.
I looked fifty when my knee hurt.
I was forty-six.
Derek was twenty-eight.
But endurance isn’t always youth.
Sometimes endurance is spending seven hours pinned behind a concrete barrier in 120-degree heat waiting for darkness.
Sometimes endurance is dragging a wounded friend seventy yards while your own leg is leaking blood into your boot.
Sometimes endurance is coming home from war and learning how to sit through Thanksgiving dinner while everyone asks if you “ever killed anybody.”
Derek threw a right cross.
I parried.
His elbow opened.
I could
have dislocated it.
I didn’t.
He tried a knee.
I turned.
He lost balance.
I guided him into the fence.
Not slammed.
Guided.
The humiliation made him furious.
“What are you doing?” he hissed.
“Surviving.”
He shoved away.
Claire yelled, “Derek, finish him!”
That one landed harder than his punches.
I looked toward her.
She froze.
For fourteen years, I had slept beside that woman.
Held her through her mother’s funeral.
Built shelves in the nursery we never got to use after our second miscarriage.
Learned to make the ridiculous lemon cake she loved because a bakery had stopped selling it.
And now she was screaming for another man to knock me unconscious.
Something inside me finally stopped hurting.
Not healed. Stopped.
Those are different things.
Healing comes later.
Sometimes indifference arrives first.
Derek saw me glance at Claire and rushed me.
He threw a hook.
I ducked.
Then came
