I always knew this would happen, but I didn’t expect it to happen now. Not, at least, after 10 years of marriage. I thought it would happen much sooner, or at least have it told as we lay dying together. Despite all my efforts, I was caught in the act.

It should’ve been obvious that something suspicious would happen as I bought my wife plane tickets for a girl’s weekend out. What I didn’t know for sure, however, was when she would be home. Airlines have a tendency to not arrive on time. Then, passengers have to deboard the plane and deal with all the lines at the airport just to find their way out. Once you’re finally outside and taking in that deep breath of fresh air, you’re finding your ride home and traveling all the way home. Anything can happen between any of those moments where time is added or subtracted to the point where predictability is unreliable.

She arrived home at an unexpected time, as I should’ve suspected would happen. She didn’t do anything at first. She stared at me. It wasn’t anger, jealousy, or pain. Rather, it was almost an expectation. I had a strange feeling she expected this to happen. Maybe she planned for it to happen. The face she wore almost said, “of course.”

I kept pushing it off for reasons that are unacceptable. In hindsight, maybe I should plan better and even schedule this to happen. Add it to the calendar. Not weekly, but maybe every couple of weeks or once a month. Though, it should’ve been obvious I was doing it. Bathrooms just don’t clean themselves, so someone has to clean them and I took it upon myself to take that responsibility early in our marriage. But now, for the first time in our marriage, I had finally been caught in the act of cleaning them.