Now I think it exposed something worse.
How easily love can become an excuse for deciding what another person deserves to know.
Ben told himself he was protecting me.
Protecting Lily.
Protecting our marriage.
Really, he was protecting himself from one terrible conversation.
Every month he avoided it made the eventual conversation worse.
We’re still married.
Not because what he did was small.
It wasn’t.
We’re still married because he finally stopped asking me to judge him by what he meant to do and started taking responsibility for what he actually did.
As for the replacement desk?
It doesn’t have a lock. Ben picked it himself.
When the salesman showed us one with a locking drawer, I looked at him.
He said, “Absolutely not.”
For once, we agreed immediately.
Do you think Ben was truly trying to protect Claire, or was he mainly protecting himself from a painful conversation?
If this story made you think about the damage one hidden truth can do, you may want to read what happened when another family discovered that a stepfather had lied for years about why a teenage girl disappeared from their lives. Click here to read the full story.
