PART 5
It’s been a year and a half since that afternoon in Gavin’s apartment.
Rosalind moved into a smaller condo across town, a space entirely her own for the first time in over three decades, and has, somewhat to her own surprise, found genuine contentment in a life considerably quieter and less consumed by surveillance and suspicion than the one she’d built for herself during the marriage.
Her relationship with Willa, initially strained by the discovery of the duplicate key and months of quiet monitoring, has slowly, carefully rebuilt itself into something considerably warmer than it had been even before the affair came to light. Willa, to her credit, extended a kind of grace Rosalind hadn’t necessarily expected, once it became clear the surveillance had stemmed from genuine, if badly misdirected, maternal anxiety rather than any deeper malice.
“I understand wanting to protect Gavin,” Willa told her, during one of their now-regular Sunday dinners. “I just needed you to understand that protecting him doesn’t mean monitoring me. There’s a difference.”
“I know that now,” Rosalind said. “It took nearly walking in on my own husband’s affair to finally understand it clearly, but I do know it now.”
Gavin, for his part, has maintained a considerably more distant relationship with his father since everything came out, still processing, over a year later, the particular betrayal of having his own trust and generosity used as unwitting cover for infidelity. He sees Bernard occasionally, careful, brief visits that neither of them has yet found a way to make feel entirely comfortable again.
