The Other Woman Speaks

The Other Woman Speaks
It was a safe place to do it, and more productive.”
Mr. Hertwig, looking back on the encounter four years later, had a similar assessment of his
conversations with Ms. Chaulk, who had “experienced the flip side of the coin,” he said.
But, as Mr. Hertwig wrote, he and the woman, then identified only as “Catherine,” did meet later at a cafe to talk about their estranged spouses’ affair
and the swirl of emotions it had stirred up in each of them.
Sitting outside the office of a therapist, where he had gone to work through the end
of his marriage, Mr. Hertwig spotted another waiting patient, a woman he recognized.
“Rereading it puts me back in a place where I was the most honest I’ve been with myself,” Ms. Chaulk said.
For one thing, she was able, through Mr. Hertwig, to “piece together some of the timeline,” she said, to better
know what had happened by comparing their spouses’ behavior and schedules over the previous months.
Being able to share that with someone was intimate in its own way.”
These days, Ms. Chaulk is a nurse in the same Canadian city where the story takes place.