A Highly Forbidden Romance
After a devastating loss, it was clear that my marriage of 15 years was dissolving. Then, in my early 50s, I found love in the most unexpected place.
ICYMI: We’ve been publishing the winners of our True Romance Writing Prize collaboration with Belletrist and actress Emma Roberts these past few weeks (view the whole collection here), and today we’re pleased to bring you the latest. It’s the second of two finalists in the shortread category, and it’s the first one we read of all the submissions we received that we remember falling for. We asked Bar what her process was like writing the piece. She shared: “The remarkable thing about writing this story was that it came out of me as soon as I saw the request for submissions. I think the deadline was that night. Truth is, it was inside me waiting to be written all along.” We love when a prompt, deadline or opportunity sparks the immediate need to write. With that, Bar’s tale…
I was sitting on the floor, tucked in between a radiator and the recliner my father-in-law had died in the night before. A man walked in wearing jeans that showed off his runner’s legs and a well-pressed white cotton shirt with a monogram on the cuff. Six-foot-two, with a wide chest, silver-blue eyes and a subtle lift to his upper lip that told me he was gentler than his buttoned-down shirt would suggest.
It was 2004. I was 46. My only child, Forrest, had died two years earlier: liver cancer with metastases to his lungs and stomach, discovered when we thought it was just a tummy ache. I can’t tell you that without also telling you that Forrest’s life was far more than the cancer that took him. He went to preschool three days a week, had playdates and friends. He loved Lucia and Leo, Louise and Cheryl, Molly and Wyatt. He hosted imaginary tea parties, jumped on the bed, played Candyland, cheered when you won, and danced when he heard Paul Simon’s “Darling Lorraine.” I loved being his mom.
When Forrest was diagnosed in 2000, and all of our plans had to be canceled, our dreams reconsidered, I needed to communicate with the people in my life. I needed to share what was happening to me, to us, to Forrest. Sitting at a computer in the living room at the Ronald McDonald House in Albany, New York, I started writing hasty emails filled with details about the emotional and logistical trip we were on. Later in the day, my friend Steve would fax the responses I’d gotten, so that we could read them while Forrest wrestled with whatever treatment or exam he’d been through that day. Those messages kept us from losing our minds. I kept writing my emails long after Forrest was gone. One of the people reading them was the man with the monogrammed cuff.
I watched as he crossed the room, sat on the floor, the radiator between us. But this was a gathering for my father-in-law’s funeral. I needed to keep my head on straight.
My husband and I had always been honest with one another. Our marriage was more friendship than intimacy. It had been years since we’d felt any sexual attraction for one another. We were both lonely, broken and desperate. Distractions had become normal for us. We agreed that it was just a matter of time before one of us strayed, no longer able to tolerate our loneliness.
On September 9, 2009, I got an email from the white-cuffed man out of the blue. He’d just met a woman he thought I should meet — both writers, both in upstate New York. I wrote him back as quickly as I could but never reached out to her. Fifteen days and dozens of increasingly intimate emails later, I told my husband it was time to quit. He didn’t argue. We both knew this day would come. But I didn’t tell him the whole truth. I reasoned that I would never have a chance with this other man. Why tell my husband more than he needed to know? I convinced myself I just needed to be free and clear.
But it was too late for that.
This man, this beautiful, white-shirted man, with a smile full of vulnerability, had already captured me. This man I’d met a second time in 2004 at a family wedding when I’d arrived late and my husband had already gone to bed. This man wearing a metal-hinged brace to support an injured knee who asked me to dance anyway, leaned on my shoulder for support, put his right hand on my back, then cupped mine in his left and held me to his chest as we rocked back and forth. This man I would have kissed right then and there. My husband’s cousin. Married for 42 years, with four children and eight grandchildren who called him Pawpaw, all living in Louisiana. What hope was there for me? For us? How wrong was all of it? And how right?
I moved out of the house my husband and I had built together a few weeks after we’d called it quits. Left the family jewelry he’d given me on the kitchen table. Kept telling myself it was best not to tell him the whole story, that it wasn’t worth upsetting the entire clan we all loved so dearly when all I needed was to straighten out my heart and mind. Move on. Start fresh. Get real.
But that’s not what happened.
First, there was a two-night rendezvous in a cabin north of Denver four months after I left my husband. Testing. Making sure that if we went any further it was the right thing for both of us. Weighing the cost. Then a two-day rendezvous five months later, a week after he’d left his wife, gotten in his car, and driven nonstop from Baton Rouge to Colorado, a trip I felt compelled to make, worried that suicide was a risk for him. And finally, after his separation was official and my divorce was finalized, a five-day rendezvous full of passion and discovery, tears and emotional exhaustion. So much shame and guilt weighing us down. So much need filling us up.
Eight months later, seven years after my father-in-law’s funeral, having only spent nine days together, Brent finally came to New York. We filled a 16-foot U-Haul with everything I owned and drove west to start a new life. We thought of it as jumping off a cliff together: no turning back, and no sure landing.
That was 14 years ago. When people ask how we met, we tell them the truth.
Bar Scott is a singer-songwriter and recording artist. You can find her on Substack where she writes about everyday life, music, writing and long walks with her camera, or at her website, barscott.com.
This is a deeply moving story.
I love the way this piece ebbs and flows so easily, drawing the reader in, keeping them engaged until the very last sentence. The time stamps worked so well too - the days/weeks/years/moments. It's also loaded with honesty and a raw guilt that as humans we have all felt at one time or another. Thanks for this very cool story and congratulations!