The Luxury of Being Second

The thing about a secret is that it has a shape. It has weight and texture, a temperature. Some secrets are cold and heavy, like a stone in a coat pocket. Others are warm, humming with a low current, like a phone set to vibrate resting against a thigh. For a certain kind of woman, the second kind is the only kind worth having.

In Saskatoon, where the South Saskatchewan River carves a brown-green line through the city and the winters are long enough to make you forget the sun, secrets are a form of currency. Everyone knows everyone, or at least knows of them. A secret here is not just a private thing; it’s a public achievement. It’s the one thing you own outright.

She doesn’t think of herself as a mistress, not in the way the word sits in the mouth, heavy, theatrical, a little desperate. She thinks of herself as a woman who has made a choice. A choice that, unlike the weather, never gets cold.

A City of Concrete and Light

The city is changing. You can see it in the cranes that dot the skyline like metal herons, in the new condos rising along the riverbank, in the way the old grain elevators are being repurposed into breweries and art galleries. According to the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, the city is in the midst of a building boom, a fact that was underscored recently when a 41-year-old worker was killed in a construction accident on the south side of the city. The news was a grim counterpoint to the optimism of the developments, a reminder that the city’s growth is not without its costs.

She read about it over her morning coffee, the print edition spread across her kitchen table. She’s a creature of habit, and her habits are deliberate. The coffee is a dark roast from a local roaster on Broadway Avenue, the milk is from a dairy farm outside of Dalmeny, and the newspaper is a daily ritual that anchors her in the reality of the city she loves. The story of the worker made her pause, her finger tracing the headline. She didn’t know him, of course, but she felt the weight of his loss, a family, a home, a life cut short. It was a stark reminder that fragility is the only constant, that a life can be rewritten in a single, terrible moment.

It also reminded her, with a sharp and almost guilty thrill, that her own life, the life she lives in the margins of her other life, is a deliberate act of defiance against that fragility. She is not waiting. She is not passive. She is choosing, every single day, to take what she wants.

Her name is Wren. Not a common name, not a name you hear shouted across a parking lot. It’s a name that feels like a secret in itself, small, quick, a flash of brown and grey disappearing into the brush. She’s 29, which is an interesting age. Old enough to have stopped pretending she knows everything, young enough to still be thrilled by the things she doesn’t.

She is a lighting designer for live theatre. Not the big touring productions that come through the TCU Place, but the smaller, more experimental stuff, the fringe festivals, the university productions, the original plays that premiere in converted warehouses and repurposed churches. Her work is to shape darkness, to make light fall where a story needs it. She understands shadows better than most. She knows how they can hide, and how they can reveal, and how the right kind of light can make a person lean forward, pulse quickening, waiting for something to happen.

The Shape of the Wait

Her family situation is the kind you don’t put on a holiday card. She is not married. She has no children. For the last six years, she has been in a relationship with a man named Anders, a geotechnical engineer who specializes in slope stability for pipeline corridors. He is a good man, kind, smart, steady as the ground he studies. They met at a house party in Varsity View, and he made her laugh with a terrible pun about bedrock. He is her partner, her companion, the person she has built a home with.

And he is not the man she sees on Tuesday afternoons.

This is not a story about Anders. It is a story about the other one. The married one. The one who, for four years now, has been the fixed point around which her Tuesday afternoons revolve. He is not a monster, nor is he a villain. He is a successful architect, a man who shapes the city’s skyline, who has a wife he respects and two teenage daughters he adores. He is kind, and he is attentive, and he is profoundly, achingly unhappy in a way that he has never voiced aloud. She saw it in him the first time they met, at a gallery opening for a mutual friend. He was standing near the window, looking out at the river, and there was a stillness about him that was not peace but pause.

Their first conversation was about light. She had commented on the way the dying sun slanted through the glass, and he had turned to her with a look of such grateful recognition that it stole her breath. He saw that she saw. That was the beginning.

What she offers him is not a threat to his marriage. It is not a competition. It is a room of her own, a quiet space where he can be something other than a father, a husband, a provider. He doesn’t come to her to escape his family; he comes to her to find the part of himself that gets lost in the day-to-day. She is not his escape hatch. She is his oxygen.

And what does he offer her? Freedom. Pure, unadulterated freedom. She does not ask about his weekend plans, because she knows he will spend them with his wife and daughters, building LEGO castles and attending hockey games. She does not wonder if he will text her back, she knows he will, when he can, and that the response will be deliberate, measured, full of a longing that matches her own. Their love is not a diluted version of a traditional partnership. It is a concentrated essence, a distillate of all the things that would be diluted by daily life. There is no bickering about groceries. No arguments about which Netflix show to watch. There is only the pure, electric hum of two people who have chosen each other, across a great and uncrossable divide.

That is the power of being the mistress. You are never taken for granted, because you are never a given. You are a choice, made anew every single time. Every Tuesday, when she clears her schedule, when she locks her studio door, when she feels the particular silence of the afternoon settle around her, she is making a choice. And so is he. Their complicity is the architecture of their bond, stronger than any legal document, more binding than any vow.

She has a memory, a bright shard from her childhood on a farm near Swift Current. She was eight, and a windstorm had knocked out the power for three days. Her father, a taciturn man who fixed tractors, had taught her to read by the light of a kerosene lamp. She remembers the smell of the oil, the dance of the shadows on the wall, and the way a story seemed more vivid, more vital, when told in that fragile, liminal light. She thinks of that sometimes, when she is designing a lighting scheme for a play. The best moments are always the ones lit by a single source, the rest of the world falling away into darkness.

It’s the same with their Tuesday afternoons. They meet in her studio, a converted room in a former seed warehouse on Avenue C. The space is filled with gels and gobos and the skeletal frames of lighting rigs, but for those hours, it becomes a world unto itself. There’s no music, save for the hum of the old radiator. There’s no pretense. There’s just the sound of breathing, the rustle of clothing, the murmur of conversation that is deeper and more honest than anything they could share in a crowded restaurant.

They talk about his latest project, a new performing arts centre on the east side. They talk about her latest design challenge, how to create intimacy in a cavernous black-box theatre. They talk about everything and nothing. She is not interested in his wife, and she is not jealous of her. She is grateful to her, in a way, for providing the structure that makes their time together so precious. His wife is the reason he is so good at being with Wren. She has honed his attention, sharpened his appreciation for the gift of a quiet moment.

The last time they were together, he had brought her a small sketch. It was a drawing of a single light bulb, suspended from a wire, casting a perfect circle of illumination on the ground. Underneath, he had written a single word: Here. She keeps it on the wall above her workbench, tucked behind a photo of her and Anders at a lake in northern Saskatchewan last summer. Two different worlds, two different truths, separated by six inches of drywall.

Anders knows nothing. He is in La Ronge this week, on a site visit, and he sends her a text every evening, telling her about the boreholes and the soil samples. She replies with emojis and encouragement. She is a good partner to him, in the way that she is able. She cooks him dinner. She laughs at his jokes. She listens when he talks about his anxieties about the future, about the ethical dilemmas of his work. She is present, but she is not entirely there. A part of her is always in a room on Avenue C, waiting for the light to change.

This is not a betrayal. It is a compartmentalization. A necessary division of the self. She is both the woman who makes a careful risotto on Sunday nights and the woman who locks the world out for two hours on a Tuesday. She has learned to be fluid, to move between these selves without spilling. It’s a skill, a craft, honed like any other. She is an expert in the art of the pause, the meaningful look, the long silence that says more than words ever could.

The City Never Sleeps

Sometimes, after he leaves, she walks along the riverbank, down by the weir. The city hums around her, the traffic on the bridges, the laughter from the patios on Broadway, the distant sound of a train. She thinks about the news story from the paper, the construction worker who would never see his family again. She thinks about the fleeting nature of everything, the thin ice of life upon which we all skate. And she feels no shame. She feels only a profound sense of gratitude for the moments she has claimed for herself, for the light she has found in the shadows.

The newest public art installation, a series of luminous orbs in Friendship Park, has just opened, and she had a hand in the lighting for the opening celebration. She walked through it last night, watching the light play on the faces of strangers, seeing how it drew them together, creating a communal intimacy that she found both moving and ironic. She knows more about secrets than any of them. She is a keeper of her own.

Her cat, a grey tabby named Doppler who sheds on everything he owns, meows at her as she comes back into her studio. He doesn’t care about her secrets. He only cares about dinner. She feeds him, then stands by the window, looking out at the city lights beginning to twinkle against the deepening dusk. The winter is coming, and with it, the cold and the dark. But she isn’t afraid. She has her work. She has her freedom. And she has Tuesdays.

The affair is not a symptom of a lack. It is a symptom of abundance. She has so much life, so much vitality, so much desire that it cannot be contained in a single relationship. She is not taking anything away from anyone. She is adding to herself. She is a woman who has learned the liberating truth: you are not the sum of your choices. You are the sum of your moments. And she has curated a collection of moments that are luminous, perfect, and entirely her own.

She is the mistress, and she has never felt more powerful. This is a story of that power. It is a story of winter light slanting through a dusty studio window, of a sketch of a single light bulb taped to the wall, of the hum of a radiator and the weight of a chosen silence. It is a story of a woman in Saskatoon, 29 years old, who knows exactly what she wants and has the audacity to take it, without apology, without guilt, and without ever looking back. The city will keep building, the river will keep flowing, and the cranes will keep swinging against the sky. But none of that matters as much as the small, perfect, secret world she has built for herself. And she wouldn’t have it any other way.