The Wife Who Took the Reins – Part 1

The cottage on Lake Muskoka had no Wi-Fi, which was the whole point.

Rachel had booked it in secret. Three days. No phones. No laptops. No David answering work emails at the dinner table while she stared at the side of his face and wondered when they’d stopped looking at each other.

“Three days,” David said, standing on the dock with his phone in his hand, staring at the zero bars. “Rach, I have a client call on Monday.”

“It’s Friday.”

“I need to prepare.”

“Give me the phone,” Rachel said.

He looked at her. She held out her hand. Something in her voice made him stop arguing. Slowly, he put the phone in her palm.

She dropped it in the pocket of her jacket and zipped it shut.

“Thank you,” she said. And then, before she could lose her nerve: “David. We need to talk. And I need you to just listen until I finish.”

---

They sat on the dock with their feet in the cold water while the sun went down over the lake, orange and pink, the pines going black against the sky.

Rachel had practised the speech for three weeks. In the shower. In the car. In front of the bathroom mirror at 2 a.m. She forgot all of it.

“I’m tired,” she said. “Not of you. Of us being polite. We’re so polite, David. We say please and thank you and have a good day and we haven’t really,” she stopped. “We haven’t really been together in a long time.”

He didn’t say anything. He was listening, like she’d asked. That alone was strange.

“I want to try something,” she said. “Something I’ve thought about for years. And I’m scared you’ll think I’m strange, or that I’m trying to control you, or,” she took a breath. “I want to be in charge. In our marriage. Some of the time. Maybe more. In bed and out of it. I want to decide things, and I want you to let me.”

There. It was out.

The lake was very quiet. A loon called somewhere far away.

David was staring at the water.

“Rachel,” he said slowly. “How long have you wanted this?”

“Honestly?” She laughed shakily. “Since about our second year.”

He turned to look at her. His face was doing something she couldn’t read.

“Ten years,” he said.

“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to,”

“Ten years,” David repeated, and started laughing.

Rachel stared at him. Her stomach dropped. “Don’t laugh at me.”

“I’m not laughing at you.” He was laughing so hard now he had to wipe his eyes. “Rach. I’ve wanted the same thing. Since about our second year.”

---

They talked until the stars came out.

About the things they had both wanted and never said. About the article David had once left open on the family computer, hoping she would see it, and how she had closed the browser without reading it. About the time Rachel had told him to sit down and let me handle it during a kitchen renovation, and how he had thought about the way she said it for a week.

“We’re idiots,” Rachel said, lying on her back on the dock, looking up at the Milky Way.

“Twelve years of idiots,” David agreed.

She sat up. She looked down at him, lying on the old wooden boards, his face pale in the starlight.

“Okay,” she said. “Rules.”

He sat up too. She pushed him gently back down with one hand flat on his chest.

“Stay there,” she said.

He went very still. She felt his heart speed up under her palm.

“Rule one,” Rachel said. “You tell me the truth. Always. Especially when it’s hard.”

“Yes.”

“Rule two. If you ever want to stop, you say Muskoka. And I stop. No matter what.”

“Yes.”

“Rule three.” She leaned down until her face was very close to his. “For the next three days, you don’t make a single decision. Not what to eat. Not what to wear. Not when to sleep. Nothing. I decide.”

David looked up at her, his wife of twelve years, with the stars behind her head and a look on her face he had never seen before.

“Yes, Rachel,” he said quietly.

---

What happened that night belonged only to them: to the old cottage with its creaking floorboards and the fire crackling in the stone fireplace, to the lake lapping softly at the dock outside the open window, to a marriage being rediscovered from the very beginning. Rachel had never felt so sure of herself. David had never felt so completely at peace.

In the morning, she made him pancakes and wouldn’t let him help.

In the afternoon, she took him out in the canoe and made him close his eyes and just listen to the water for twenty minutes, and when he opened them, he was crying a little, and he didn’t know why.

On the last night, she sat in the big armchair by the fire and he sat on the rug at her feet with his head against her knee, and she read to him from an old paperback she’d found in the cottage, her fingers moving slowly through his hair.

“David,” she said, closing the book. “When we go home. Does this stop?”

He was quiet for a long time.

“Do you want it to?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then it doesn’t,” David said. “Your rules. At home too. As long as you want.”

---

On Monday morning, back in Toronto, his phone was still in her jacket pocket.

She handed it to him at 8:30 a.m., at the front door, as he was leaving for work.

“Your client call,” she said. “Go. Do well.” She straightened his tie, slowly, the way she never had in twelve years. “And David?”

“Yes, Rachel?”

“Home by six,” she said. “I’m deciding dinner.”

He grinned at her like a teenager.

He was home at 5:52.

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Next: Part 2, Home Rules. A promotion, a suitcase, and a marriage that has to keep its rules across a continent.