Dani Shapiro

I looked at my parents across the table.

Is that what they really thought?

How could they just sit there?

Some small piece of me wanted my father to fling me over his shoulder and carry me kicking and screaming to the car he had parked outside.

I secretly wished that they would drive me home, deposit me in my childhood bedroom, and feed me chicken soup and saltines.

I wanted to start my life over again, but I didn't know how.

In the face of the most tangible proof that Lenny had been lying to me all these years, I remained with him.

My little girl is dying, he would say, whenever I noticed the discrepancies in his stories, or my children's mother is having electroshock therapy.

When I couldn't take my own confusion anymore, was Lenny lying to me?

Was I going crazy?

I decided to hire a detective to get to the bottom of it.

By this time, my parents knew all about me and Lenny in theory, but it wasn't something we could talk about.

When I think back to my younger self rifling through the New York City yellow pages in search of a private investigator, I feel like I'm watching a movie about someone else, a girl so clueless she really didn't know that her desire to hire a detective was all the answer she needed.

I chose a detective agency based on nothing more than its good address in the East 60s, a neighborhood filled with private schools and shrinks.

This isn't what you think, I told the detective.

I'm in a relationship with a married man and I want you to find out if my boyfriend is cheating on me with his wife.

At this, his eyebrows shot up.

Come again?

He claims his wife is in a mental hospital.

He told me he hasn't been with her in years.