▸ Column · Mid-1950s Metropolis — the hidden second phone becomes a folded slip of paper with a private telephone exchange number and handwritten notes found in a suit jacket pocket.
SUPERMAN replies.
Replied to by Superman, with a rebuttal from Lex Luthor.
The letter
Last Tuesday I found a folded slip of paper tucked inside my husband's suit jacket — a private telephone exchange I don't recognize, with several notes in his handwriting signed only to someone he's called "K." When I asked him about it, he told me it was an old work contact he'd never bothered to clean out of his pocket, but the notes were dated this week. He's been furious ever since that I went through his things. I haven't slept in three days. Do I sit him down and lay out everything I found, or do I speak to a family attorney quietly before I say another word to him? — Wide Awake in Akron
Superman replies
Growing up in Smallville, my dad had a line he used whenever someone got caught doing something wrong: you either own it, or you make a story. The story's always about what the other person did. Notice which one your husband picked.
I've been a reporter in Metropolis long enough to know what it looks like when a man pivots from the evidence to the finder. Going straight to your being wrong for looking — that's not confusion and it's not hurt feelings. People with nothing to hide get flustered. They get embarrassed. They show you the phone and the contact at the office and the whole paper trail because they want to. They don't put you on trial while you're still standing in the hallway.
Your instinct about the attorney is right, and I want to be specific: call a family law office this week — not to file anything, not because the marriage is already over, but to ask three things. What am I legally entitled to access in this marriage? What should I be documenting right now? What does the process look like from here? You don't have to do a thing with any of those answers. But having them means the next conversation with your husband happens on solid ground instead of at three in the morning when you're exhausted and he's already had four days to practice being angry at you.
Akron isn't that far from Smallville. I know what it takes to put something like this into words. Finding that slip of paper wasn't the wrong thing to do.
— Superman
Lex Luthor weighs in
Oh, sweetheart. Clark is handing you a map to a conversation you've already had. You confronted your husband. His answer was fury — perfectly aimed, I'll note; it cost him nothing and bought him three days of your insomnia while he recovered his composure. That was the confrontation. He answered you.
The frame you're working in — confront or lawyer — assumes the confrontation is still ahead of you. It isn't. Call the attorney today. Don't announce it, don't hint at it. One call. Then sleep, because he is currently considerably more rested than you are, and that gap is the only advantage he has left.
— Lex Luthor