12 — Sex chess

How Stevie Nicks wrecked my marriage.

Where were we? Oh yes, the train from Sanfran to New York. September 2008.

Sorry. That’s not the story I feel like telling at the moment. I’ll get there. But you know I like to tell it backward. So let’s skip forward. Ten years, give or take.

2018.

There’s a man everyone assumes I left my ex-husband for. That story makes sense: he and I worked together, long hours. We were both lawyers. We both liked to read and climb.

We went climbing together and everyone knows climbing is foreplay. Then we had a brief affair and smashed apart our respective marriages.

So: I left my husband for him.

That story makes sense, it’s the story everyone knows.

But it isn’t true. That man is not why I left my husband. He’s not why my marriage ended. My marriage ended way before him.

He was the end-stage final fracture: the straw on the back of the long-laden camel.

The truth? It was all because of Stevie Nicks. It was all her fault.

Let me explain.