Fly Away Home by Jennifer Weiner

until the very end. Richard, as usual, had fallen asleep almost immediately, but Sylvie lay awake, listening to Richard breathing beside her in this strange little house, as the wind whistled through the trees, thinking that she had never felt so safe, so content, so loved.
    In the back of the car, through the bottom of her purse, she could feel her telephone buzzing and burping. She pulled it out and looked at the screen, hoping, again, for Ceil. Instead, Richard’s face flashed into view—Richard in their bedroom, smiling at her as he stood in front of the blue-and-white wallpaper. His hair was mostly gray now, but his optimistic grin hadn’t changed at all since she’d first met him. Sylvie punched IGNORE . She wasn’t ready for that conversation. Not now. Not yet.
    Donor-funded junkets to beach resorts , the newscaster had said. She remembered a trip Richard had taken to Martha’s Vineyard, a three-day weekend that spring, a Democratic National Convention retreat where current congressmen could look over the party’s new faces and decide who had a future, who would get their endorsement and their time during the coming campaign season. Richard himself had been coronated at just such an event, that one at the South Carolina shore. Sylvie would have tagged along, but it was Ceil’s birthday and they’d made plans to go to the Museum of Modern Art and a spa after, and a new sushi place after that. Richard had dug his golf clubs out of the storage unit in their building’s basement, and Sylvie had tucked a bottle of sunscreen into his suitcase because Richard always forgot. He’d come home on Monday afternoon, the top of his head bright red the way she knew it would be (the next day, it would start to flake and peel, and she’d remind him to exfoliate in the shower and moisturize when he was done). When he’d kissed her, before dropping his suitcase off in the bedroom for her to unpack, she hadn’t felt like anything was off, or wrong, even though it seemed that he’d been sharing his bed with his aide for those three nights.
    Sylvie yanked at her waistband, wishing she could take off the too-tight skirt, feeling, again, like she couldn’t breathe. Her phone was buzzing and beeping and belching. She glanced at the screen. Richard, again. She ignored it, thinking about e-mails and photographs, wondering how bad this could get. Numbness was creeping over her body, freezing her toes and her fingertips, turning her legs and arms into blocks of wood. Her brain, however, was no longer clamped shut. It was clicking and humming, whirling and turning, busily dredging up scenes and sound bites from political scandals both recent and long past. There was the senator who’d been busted in an airport men’s room after soliciting sex with strangers (male strangers, and how Sylvie’s heart had broken for his poor wife, standing beside him as he insisted that it was all a misunderstanding, that he wasn’t really gay!). There was the governor whose aides had said he was hiking the Appalachian Trail when in reality he was visiting a ladyfriend in Argentina. That one had been a big topic around her house for weeks. “Do you realize,” she’d told Richard, sitting cross-legged in the armchair of his office, “that I’ll never get to be anyone’s Argentinian mystery woman? Do you understand what a tragedy this is?” Richard had kissed her, saying, “Don’t be so sure. You’ve still got time.”
    Was he cheating on her then? Had the joke been on her, the gullible, guileless wife who was just as much a dupe as poor Jenny Sanford down in South Carolina? Her hands tightened into fists as her telephone sounded. Richard again. She clicked IGNORE , and then, squinting at the tiny screen, she accessed the Internet and made her way to the most recent news story, which she read with one eye open and one at half-mast. Sources say the senator took his mistress on a taxpayer-funded long weekend in the Bahamas, where they shared