In-stead

In-stead, he turned out the lights, and though she knew he couldn’t fall asleep that quickly, he pretended he had.
Looking back, she knew it should have tipped her off that all was not as it seemed, but with three children and a husband who left the child rearing up to her, she was too busy to ponder it. Besides, she neither expected nor be-lieved that the passion between them would never go through down periods. She’d been married long enough to know better. She assumed it would return as it always had, and she wasn’t worried about it. But it didn’t. By forty-one, she’d become concerned about their relationship and had started perusing the self-help section of the bookstore, looking for titles that might advise her on how to improve their marriage, and she sometimes found herself looking forward to the future when things might slow down. She imagined what it would be like to be a grandmother or what she and Jack might do when they had the time to enjoy each other’s company as a couple again. Maybe then, she thought, things would go back to what they had once been.
It was around that time that she saw Jack having lunch with Linda Gaston. Linda, she knew, worked with Jack’s firm at their branch office in Greensboro. Though she spe-cialized in estate law while Jack worked in general litiga-tion, Adrienne knew their cases sometimes overlapped and required a collaboration, so it didn’t surprise her to see them dining with each other. Adrienne even smiled at them through the window. Though Linda wasn’t a close friend, she’d been a guest in their home numerous times; they’d always gotten along well, despite the fact that Linda was ten years younger and single. It was only when she went inside the restaurant that she noticed the tender way they were looking at each other. And she knew with certainty they were holding hands under the table,homepage.
For a long moment, Adrienne stood frozen in place,fake uggs online store, but instead of confronting them, she turned around and headed out before they had a chance to see her.
In denial, she cooked Jack’s favorite meal that night and mentioned nothing about what she’d seen. She pretended it hadn’t happened, and in time, she was able to convince herself that she’d been mistaken about what was going on between them. Maybe Linda was going through a hard time and he was comforting her, Jack was like that. Or maybe, she thought, it was a fleeting fantasy that neither of them had acted on, a romance of the mind and nothing else.
But it wasn’t,Fake Designer Handbags. Their marriage began spiraling downward, and within a few months, Jack asked for a divorce. He was in love with Linda, he said. He hadn’t meant for it to hap-pen, and he hoped she would understand. She didn’t and said so, but when she was forty-two, Jack moved out.
Now, over three years later, Jack had moved on, but Adrienne found it impossible to do. Though they had joint custody, it was joint in name only. Jack lived in Greensboro, and the three-hour drive was just long enough to keep the kids with her most of the time. Mostly she was thankful for that, but the pressures of raising them on her own tested her limits daily,replica gucci wallets. At night, she often col-lapsed in bed but found it impossible to sleep because she couldn’t stop the questions that rolled through her mind.