American Wife (18 page)

I
did
trust him. I didn't bother checking on his phone or social media accounts—I didn't even write down the passwords, though he made no secret of them to me. Still, as confident as I was that he would remain faithful, there must have been a small sliver of doubt in my mind, given what had happened with the old girlfriend.

It was getting close to Christmas. My parents were visiting. I got up early and saw his iPad happened to be sitting in the kitchen. The screen was lit with a message stream from a young woman who had struck up a conversation. They'd exchanged over two hundred messages over the past month. Most of it was innocuous—at least from Chris's side.

HER: How old are you?

CHRIS: I'm an old man.

HER: Look at this buck I just shot.

CHRIS: That's a good one.

What bothered me wasn't so much the girl's obvious flirting, but the fact that Chris hadn't cut it off. I mean, two-hundred-plus messages?
Come on!

But my reaction may have been over the top.

“I don't need this shit!” I yelled, storming into the bedroom where he was still asleep. I threw my coffee—lukewarm, fortunately—all over him.

“What? What?” he mumbled, not yet awake.

“Get the hell out!” I screamed.

There were a lot of expletives. As a Navy SEAL, Chris had surely heard worse—even from me—but he was completely caught off guard.

“I'm not hiding anything!” he protested when he realized from my tirade what I was mad about.

I continued to let him have it.

“The kids can hear you,” he said finally.

“Good!” I screamed.

On and on—it was a good rant, let me tell you. I completely and totally lost it. Chris got up and left, wisely seeing that as the smart thing to do.

I was still frothing. My dad came in, no doubt wondering why his daughter had turned into the Wicked Witch of the West. I showed him some of the messages.

“Look at this! Look at this!” I shouted, as if my father were Chris's defense attorney. “What do you think of this? Why would he do this?”

“These are no big deal,” said my dad.

“It is a big deal. This how it starts.”

I was furious. If I hadn't had the one experience with the old girlfriend, maybe I wouldn't have gone so ballistic. In any event, I just saw red.

To his credit, my father remained calm, quietly pointing out that the evidence showed Chris wasn't doing anything more than responding in what by any interpretation was an innocuous manner.

I left the house and went over to a friend's, explaining what had happened. By the time I finished, I felt embarrassed, and had finally realized that—well, obviously nothing was going on and, yes, okay, I did totally overreact.

I called Chris and apologized.

“Please come home,” I told him.

He did. Later on, we talked. I let myself be vulnerable and honest, admitting that I still felt some hurt from the entire affair (or non-affair) he'd had with his old girlfriend. We talked about trust and how hard it was for me to completely let go of my fears, even though I knew he was at his heart an honorable man and faithful husband.

“I'm sorry,” I told him. “I don't want you to think that I'll never let it go.”

He turned off all the messaging on his Facebook account and took other steps on the others. “I don't need this,” he told me. “I'm sorry that it hurt you.”

Over the next few days, we talked about other things, things I'd been carrying around for a long time.

“Chris, I think you slept with that girl,” I told him finally, referring to the old girlfriend. “You just didn't want to admit it.”

He listened. He didn't say yes. He didn't say no. He just listened.

“I can do better for you,” he said finally.

Somehow, the strife made our marriage better. We got back to holding hands and making out on the couch, touching each other during the day, and cuddling in bed.

We'd been distracted by everything, and now we returned to what was important. We laughed; we had fun. I felt again like we were made for each other.

There is a point for everyone, I think, where physical attraction is everything, and it can lead to love. A person looks beautiful to you, and therefore you love them. Beyond that, as you grow with them, as your love deepens, your perception of beauty starts to deepen. At that point, what you love becomes beautiful—or rather, you are better equipped to recognize the inherent beauty.

We were there. Chris would gaze at me in the mirror from the bedroom as I was getting ready for bed, and his eyes would be filled with love. I would lie next to him on the bed and just feel loved, secure in the knowledge that the most amazing man in the world had me in his arms.

And yet, there was a little part of me, a nagging part, that told me I didn't deserve all this happiness. I remember calling a girlfriend around this time and raving about how our marriage seemed to have gone to a new level:
Amazing
.

Then I added, “But I feel like something bad is going to happen to one of us. Because it's just too perfect.”

Sometime in the fall of 2012, Chris told me he had found out some things that the two other principals in his company, Bo French and Steven Young, had done.

He knew they had started another company, this one called Craft International Risk Management (CIRM) LLC; it had been registered as a company in August of 2011. In his opinion, the two corporations were interrelated, except for one thing: Chris wasn't one of the owners of CIRM. That seemed very unusual to him, but he nonetheless agreed. Subsequently, though, Chris told me he was surprised and hurt to discover that they had borrowed money from Craft to start CIRM without telling him. He also worried that some contracts might be moved from Craft to CIRM.

Chris talked to them and they assured him it was always their intent to add him to the company and that they were paying back the money. (They later told me that they had paid back a little more than half.) They also told him that there were contracts they couldn't get because of having an American sniper on the paperwork. Some people in other countries they might want to work with would be averse to supporting an American sniper; this, they said, was the reason for the new company.

We talked about it quite a lot. It really bothered him; I wasn't sure what to make of it myself.

After a lot of thought, Chris told me he didn't think the arrangement was right. He was going to tell his partners in Craft that he needed to be officially a part of the new company. And it needed to be done immediately.

It was a major change for him. In general, Chris operated on a handshake, and was always willing to take people at their word. The fact that he might not get a contract for months after being told something never bothered him; he just trusted that people would do the right thing.

Coming from the pharmaceutical world, I looked at things quite a bit differently. But the business was his.

CHRISTMAS

A couple of days before Christmas 2012, I stood in the kitchen baking batches of cookies. Angel and Bubba were helping and playing with Chris at the same time; at some point, we spontaneously began singing Christmas carols.

It had been an incredible year. Chris's book had come out and become an international sensation. He was famous, not just in our house as a great dad but around the world as a hero. He'd been on the top television news programs and starred in a reality series. Corporations and organizations were vying to get him to speak. There was a movie in the works, another book, and talk of maybe another TV series and a string of endorsements. We'd traveled across the country and even to Europe.

For me, it had been a hectic and even harrowing twelve months. I'd seen a lot of the bad side of people, but also experienced much more of the good. Talking to people who came to the book signings, I'd had my faith in patriotism and our country renewed.

But for me, the best thing that happened that year was all of us standing in that kitchen, singing and laughing.

My husband was back. He was whole. The love of my life was once more a true partner in our marriage and a father who could romp with the kids and teach them everything we held dear.

It was a perfect, perfect moment, everything I had envisioned when we spoke those vows on the boat, everything I had hoped for when I clamped my arms around Chris when he returned from his last deployment.

Oh God, I thought, let this moment go on forever.

PHOTO SECTION

Even as a young 'un, Chris loved the Wild West . . .

. . . while I was a Big Wheel Mama growin' up.

Dad and his girls—Ashley
(middle)
and I enjoy the Oregon coast.

Chris as a cowboy—love those chaps!

Our wedding was like nothing I'd envisioned growing up. Yet it was perfect.

Chris kitted up and ready to fight during his first tour in Iraq.