You never know enough about a person when you first start dating to understand what they’re made of. They’re a black hole of sorts. You know they’re composed of a density of associations and people and experiences, but you can’t actually see any of that. You know that everything about them reinforces a certain theme of their character. But you can’t see that either. Not at first. Not until you get closer. And by that time they have pulled you in past the point of no return and you’ve lost your objectivity. You’ve become part of their density, and when that happens you can no longer escape.
    So I had questions without any good answers and no foreseeable way of finding any either. But it was clear that there was something, some things, about Sean that I hadn’t been able to see.
    If it had just been the lie about the faucet, I might have gone into our room and rifled through his clothes—which, yes, were still there—looking for signs of lipstick or sniffing for the scent of an alien perfume. Or any perfume, really, because I didn’t wear any. Much to my mother’s chagrin.
    But it wasn’t just the lie.
    It was the idea that Sean thought Sam might be in danger. Sean had worn a green beret. It’s not like he didn’t know what danger was. It might seem strange that I’d never asked him much about his time in service. Probably made me seem impossibly naïve, because that’s what pillow talk was for, wasn’t it? But I was raised in a military family by a four-star general. Any information I was given had been strictly on a need-to-know basis. And one of my family’s cardianl rules was Don’t Question What You’ve Been Told.
[…]
So, knowing Sean’s background and that he was worried about Sam’s safety? That was big news. That meant I should be worried too.
    It led me to question my understanding of reality as I folded laundry that night.
     In order to make sense of our unanswerable questions in physics, we scientists have begun to think we might have to jettison all of our assumptions and leave behind everything we know. The answers are staring at us, they are right in front of our eyes, everyone knows they are; we just can’t see them because they’ve camouflaged themselves in our reality. The key to unlocking the mysteries has to be things we’ve seen a million times and always managed to overlook.
    So that was the challenge. How could I unknow the Sean I’d married? How could I re-see the man I’d once known? I need to look, not for clues, but for something obvious. Something, perhaps, that had been there the whole time.

Taken from State of Lies by Siri Mitchell
Copyright © 2019 by Siri Mitchell
Used by permission of http://www.thomasnelson.com/