Well-Intentioned

I felt like throwing up, both from the pain in my head and the betrayal that tore at my heart. I almost laughed at the thought, as if I hadn't betrayed Lance this entire time. Instead, though, I shoved at the ground, trying to bring myself to standing. My stomach lurched, but I managed it. Barely.

"I'm not your goddamned son, Bob."

Lance turned back towards me, ready to go again, but he stopped when he saw me holding something out towards him in one hand. In the dusk, before the streetlights came on, he would have had trouble discerning it by its outline, clutched tightly as it was.

Ella recognized the object that would doom her before anyone else. Horror spread across her face as she comprehended what its presence meant, gasping, "Don't--!" just as her voice from days before sounded from the device's speaker.

"I know you want me, Doug. I want you, too, and I have for a long time. Even before you knew... before you knew what I'd done, I thought about approaching you for this help. I wanted to be with someone I actually liked, that I actually wanted in more than a sexual way. Someone who could be an actual friend with benefits instead of just a guy I fucked."

Lance's adulterous wife screamed, lunging forward, trying to grab my phone. I was taller than her, though, and kept it out of her grasp, holding her at bay with my other arm as she flailed ineffectually.

"I know it's a lot to ask, another secret to keep, but I promise you that I'll make it up to you. When I need to get fucked, I'll... God, I'll do just about anything you ask. You can make me feel like a dirty little whore, or you can treat me like a lover, or just bang me like one of those sluts you brought home from the clubs. However you want me, as long as you can help me take the edge off."

Smartphones had been around for a while, but most folks didn't think about their ubiquity back then and what that ubiquity meant for their privacy, especially if they were over thirty. Ella hadn't realized that when I'd gone to get drinks, I'd turned the recorder on, then put it on the table alongside my beer once I returned from the kitchen.

Current her screamed, trying to drown past her out, but the damage had already been done. Lance's voice quailed, "Ella?" with all the pain one would expect of a loving husband so profoundly betrayed by his spouse. She kept clawing at my arm, though, Pandora vainly trying to close the box after her misfortunes had fled into the world.

Tears fell from Lance's eyes as the modern miracle in my hands detailed his wife's lies and infidelities, both real and attempted. Kathy eventually approached Ella, whose words had long since transformed to unintelligible, dolorous cries. Glaring at me, Mrs. Grayson pulled her younger counterpart away and hugged her, trying to tell her everything was going to be alright.

It wasn't. I'd make sure of that. The Drifter wanted revenge for the harm inflicted on Marshall Duncan by the iniquitous townsfolk. My thumb slid along the touchscreen to seek the segment that would damn at least one of them.

"You said that you talked to some of the others? Our neighbors? Who?"

"Oh, Julia, Mary, a few others. They know... Well, everyone knows what a good friend you've been to me, and they all appreciate that you kept my secret. Our secret, all of ours. They trust you to keep this one, too. *chuckle* Like you said, if you've got me on tap..."

"Yeah. But what about the others? The ones you didn't talk to?"

"They'll come around. I've talked to Kathy and, well, Bob's going to be pissed, but she's sure she can get him to see my- our point of view."

Kathy Grayson went stiff. Bob Grayson's face twisted into a mask of rage; I'd never seen that before. "You knew? You knew she was going to do this?"

His wife tried to placate him. "Bob, please--"

The elder's mouth opened for a moment as if to bellow, then slammed shut. He shouldered his way past Lance and past the two women that now both sobbed. He glared at me for a moment before his face softened, but said nothing. What could he say? What mea culpa could make any of this right? The tears in his eyes spoke volumes, though, as he stepped around me and left the Jenkins' yard.

I took a step closer to Lance, still wary of the fury he'd displayed earlier. Whatever spirit animated the man before had deserted him, though, leaving only a husk.

"Lance--" He shook his head, and I didn't continue. No apology existed that would make my role in this right, either, even if I had ultimately clued him in. I wasn't a hero, not a marshal nor wild west gunslinger nor vengeful spirit. I was just a man that had valued what was easy over what was right, no different from the rest of the townsfolk, even if I told myself otherwise. Doing the right thing after the fact only meant that I'd done the wrong thing for too long.

After texting the recording to him, I left without saying another word. The lights in the houses to either side of us had gone out, and as I walked back towards my home, I saw the silhouettes in the windows across the way had gone, too. The showdown was over; no one had won.

Change came, as it often did, in measures both fast and slow in the following weeks. Most immediately, my neighbors ceased to be my neighbors, instead becoming simply people that lived in houses near mine.

Eventually, they ceased to be even that. Within days of the showdown, the King's Forest HOA began issuing citation after citation to me for minor infractions that had never been enforced on anyone in my entire time there. I thought about fighting them, but then wondered, 'Why bother?' I'd gone from project to problem to pariah. Why fight to live in a place where I had no friends and a history I'd like to forget?

My business dwindled, too. A large portion had come from my neighbors, and that was gone. Some of it came from referrals that they gave; most of those stayed, but I lost one or two there as well. I'd bought my house as an investment as much as a home, and I decided that I'd rather put my money towards growing the business again.

Lance and Ella didn't make it; no surprise there. He moved out within a few days, leaving behind two crying children who didn't understand why Daddy wasn't going to come home, and a basketcase for a Mommy. The neighborhood women--minus Kathy Grayson--came to her aid, organizing the usual meal trains and helping out with the children as she tried to find her footing once more. Zoe sometimes saw me on the street before I left and called out, "Unca Doug!" Knowing how much she and Hunter hurt and not being able to help them grieved me worse than almost anything else.

I did see Lance one more time. He'd parked a rented U-Haul van in front of his house, not unlike the one I'd come to the neighborhood in. It was midday, and the kids were at school or with Mrs. Alvarez, while Ella was out, I presume, sweating and grunting with someone for money as opposed to pleasure. I approached him as he rested between trips back and forth to his house, wanting to offer a helping hand. I didn't even get that far.

"Go the fuck away."

"Lance--"

He got in my face, and I flinched, remembering the last time he'd lunged at me. His bloodshot eyes burned. "Go. The. Fuck. Away. You ruined my life, Doug. I was happy. I was stupid, but I was happy. All you had to do was keep your fucking mouth shut. You didn't have to fuck Ella, but you didn't have to tell me what she'd done, either. You could have told her to go to counseling or- or..."

Lance ran out of steam with that, his next few words mournful rather than angry. "She's going to get the kids, and the house, and half my business. I'm going to see my son and daughter maybe once every couple weeks if I'm lucky, and that's only if I can find someplace to live that's big enough for them to visit." He sighed. "Just... Just go away, Doug. Leave me the fuck alone." With an unhappy nod, I did, heading back down the block with my tail between my legs.

In the years following my time in King's Forest, I threw myself into my work. I moved a couple of towns away and grew my business through marketing and advertising, no longer relying on friend-of-a-friend referrals. I didn't turn those down, of course, but I swore to never put myself in a position where falling out with a group of people could put me in the place I'd been early in my career.

I didn't shy away from making new friends, but I chose to make them based on shared interests rather than shared geography. When I did eventually move into my own place again, I held the neighbors at arm's length, never being unfriendly, but also not putting too much effort into the relationships I had with them unless I would have done so even if we hadn't lived within walking distance of each other.

After a few false starts, I got back into the dating scene, too, even falling in love twice. The first relationship ended when she had to leave because of her career; the second ended in our divorce.

I don't know if I dated and then married a career woman because of everything that happened with Ella and Lance, although it certainly wasn't an intentional choice. Maybe subconsciously I feared a similar downfall if I wed a woman who hoped to be a stay-at-home mom while I ran my own business. I'd thought about that a lot since I filed.

Caitlyn worked in advertising, and our jobs brought us into contact several times before we started dating, usually when her firm needed an app or website developed. We clicked almost immediately, but it took a little while to make the time to see each other outside of work. Once we did, though? We got on like a house on fire.

It took us a couple years to get to the altar, but when I married Caitlyn, I meant every single word of my vows. It turned out she didn't, or at least she eventually came to change her mind about certain finer details. I thought I'd made clear to her my beliefs on fidelity, but I guess she didn't believe me.

Or maybe she just thought I'd never find out. That turned out to almost be the case, at least until one of her co-workers clued me in. The affair hadn't gone on long--only two months--but it was still enough to end our marriage and upend the lives of our two kids, especially once I confronted her and she tried to trickle truth me.

Cheating would have been enough; lying about it, too, even after someone else had given me pics of her sucking face with some dude she met at a conference while they fumbled with both a hotel room door and their clothes? No. Fuck no.

The divorce could have gotten pretty ugly, and it did in certain ways, but I'd made certain other choices that absolutely were intentional after what happened with Lance and Ella. I'd had an ironclad prenup drafted, so my business was safe. Her alimony would have been minimal, since she made only a little less than I did, but the prenup, with its infidelity clause, took care of that, too.

What it couldn't take care of was our kids and our house. Since we split the childrearing duties before the divorce, custody ultimately came down to the judge's decision, and the one we drew had a very old-fashioned approach to custody: mom gets it unless she's currently serving time for a felony, and dad gets visitation as long as he's never had a speeding ticket. Well, it seemed that way to me, at least.

The house went with the kids. I'd get the vast majority of the proceeds once we sold it when they were eighteen, because that still technically honored the pre-nup, but until then, they got to keep living in it, so she got to keep living in it.

I tried to remind myself, over and over, that I'd come out way ahead of where most fathers do in the divorce. I wasn't living in a shoebox, and I'd kept my business. Being away from my kids hurt like hell, though. In the time before we reached the settlement, Caitlyn had been very careful to not prevent me from seeing them; she said she wanted to be a good co-parent, even if she'd been a shitty wife, which I thought surprisingly enlightened.

Once the divorce came through, though, my now ex-wife made it very clear that she planned to enforce the visitation schedule rigidly, "for the kids' own good." Not because she was pissed that she'd lost most of what she'd hope to claim in the divorce! No, of course not! Because it was important for them to have "stability," according to whatever handbook she'd been reading. Right.

The first week where I didn't get to see them was torture. Yeah, I hadn't actually gotten to tuck them in for a while, and I had acclimated--intellectually, at least--to the notion that this was our new normal. But after a couple of days, it really started to sink in: my kids were going to grow up without me. I'd be, at best, a Disney Dad and, at worst, "Daddy Doug" once Caitlyn remarried and the kids were almost 24/7 around their new stepfather. The thought of that made me feel sick.

That sick feeling is what led me back to the town where I'd bought my first house, waiting for the ex-husband of the woman who'd first visited me there. The one whose life I had ruined. I thought I had understood the kind of pain I was about to put him through back then, but I did it anyways, so sure of the rightness of my cause. Now, having felt even a sliver of what I'd subjected him to, I couldn't shake the idea that I needed to try again to apologize for what I'd done.

After that first hour in front of his building, I wondered if I'd made a mistake in not going inside. However, I didn't want him to have security bounce me from the building, so I thought instead to wait until lunch and approach him then. He might still tell me to get lost, but at least I could get a glimpse at him and see how well he'd recovered from what I'd inflicted on him when I decided to blow up his life.

When Lance came out of the building, I almost didn't recognize him. He wore a nicely fitted suit, and while he'd aged--God knows I had, too--he wore the years well. He'd grown a neatly-trimmed beard and it, like his full head of hair, had shifted towards salt-and-pepper. Most notably, he looked trim, unlike the entire time I'd known him. That threw me more than anything.

In fact, if he hadn't recognized me first, I don't know that I'd have spotted him. Lance saw me standing there like a process server waiting for his prey, and I watched his face as he went through seeing me, trying to place my face, recognition, and, finally, uncertainty as he approached me. "Doug? Doug Richards?"

"Hey, Lance." Idiot. I hadn't thought about what I was going to say next.

He broke into a big, goofy grin and thrust his arm forward for a handshake. "Oh my God! It's great to see you, man!"

I took his hand, bewildered. "I, uh--"

"Wait! Wait." He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, opened them once more and earnestly said, "Doug, I am so, so sorry for the way I treated you the last time I saw you. The last couple of times, actually. I should have come looking for you, but I just couldn't. I was too ashamed. Will you accept my apology?"

"... What?"

Lance peered at me. "For yelling at you? Cursing at you? Hell, hitting you? I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have done any of that. Well, maybe a couple of punches for not telling me sooner, but as for the rest..." He sighed. "I have no excuse. It was wrong, and I'm sorry"

"I- I... Um, sure, Lance. I accept your apology."

His face lit up. "Thank you! God, thank you, man. This has been weighing on my conscience for years. You were the only person in that whole goddamned neighborhood that did the right thing and--"

Finally, I blurted out, "I ruined your life!"

"What? No, you didn't. I know I said that, but--"

"I did! I... God." My shoulders slumped. "I came here to apologize to you, Lance. For... for everything. For telling you, and for not telling you, too. For taking you away from your kids and your happy life. I..." The enormity of my own situation seemed to leap up and land on me with both feet as I thought about my children. "I didn't understand back then what that really meant. Lance... Lance, I'm so sorry. Whatever you said or did to me then--"

He put his hand on my shoulder. "--Was an angry man lashing out at the wrong person, because he needed someone to blame. Doug, I was shooting the messenger. Man, you saved my life. You didn't ruin it." He took a second look at me and began to understand. "Look, I know we were never all that close, but it seems like you're... maybe going through some shit of your own?"

I nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, I am."

"Ah." He pulled out his phone and looked at it for a moment. "What are you doing for lunch? Hell, what are you doing for the rest of the day?"

The man whose life I apparently had not ruined brought me to a nice Italian place where everyone seemed to know him and got us a quiet table in the corner. Over the next hour, as we ate, I told him everything that had happened to me since our last encounter, up to the previous night when I'd looked up his business address after deciding to come make amends. Throughout my accounting, he listened patiently, occasionally asking questions to clarify, and only a couple of times asking me to pause while he sent or answered a text on his phone.

When I finished, Lance exhaled slowly. "Yeah, I can see why that would make you feel like..." He shook his head. "I know right now that it seems like nothing's ever going to be okay again. That you're going to be dealing with this bitch of an ex-wife who's going to keep you away from your kids and try to replace you with another man. And... I'll be honest, maybe that will happen. But it doesn't have to. It doesn't."

He leaned back in his chair and took a sip of his iced tea. "Look, I'm not trying to get into a dick measuring contest here, but when things ended with Nora--" My brows furrowed. "--Sorry, Ella. I'll explain in a bit.

"Anyways, when things ended with her, everything you just said to me was true, but worse. She tried to keep me in the marriage by threatening my business. We didn't have a prenup. She didn't try to keep the kids from me, not exactly, but she also didn't make it easy for me to see them, either. I had no friends, I was living out of a suitcase, I was trying to support two households on a salary that barely supported one... it was a mess.

"But here's the thing: I made my way back from that. You will, too. It only seems like your life is ruined, man. It isn't, and I will do whatever I can to help you, just like you helped me back then. Just like you helped me, and my kids, and Nora, too."

"You keep saying 'Nora.' What--?"

He chuckled. "Yeah, that took me a while to get used to. I suppose you told me yours, so now I'll tell you mine.

"When all this went down... God, has it really been twelve years? Man. Anyways, everything went to shit for a while. I'll admit that. All the stuff I said before and worse. Nora and I pointed fingers at each other, and the kids got caught in the middle. That's what actually ended up pulling us out of the nosedive: we both loved our kids more than we hated each other. That gave us a place to start from.

"I had rejected any idea of going through marital counseling out of hand. There was no way I'd ever get back with her after what she'd done. An old college friend, though, suggested we go to family counseling sessions instead. They're sort of similar, but the focus is less on the marriage than it is the family as a whole. It's about making sure that we could get past our shit well enough to do what was right for them. However, that still meant that we had to own up to both of our failures."

I snorted. "The fuck? She cheated on you for--"

He raised a hand to stave off my objection. "Hey, I hear you. Trust me, I do. The blame in our divorce fell way, way on her side of the ledger. She'd agree with me on that if she were here, too. But..."