In the grand scheme of things, it couldn't have made much difference in how Stephanie and Mike fell out of love with one another, for there could have been many reasons, many brief, transitional moments where one felt slighted by the other, where the thin threads of a web were pulled apart, to drift in the breeze.
Mike had moved on years before. Now, his life was consumed with his grand passion, building a cabin in upstate New York with their son, Andrew. It was the momental achievement, for Mike had absolutely no skill with the simplest tools. It was something that he had to prove to himself, more than anything else in his life. In an indirect way, it was perhaps his mid-life crisis, but instead of the buxom blond affair, or even the vintage sports car that collected dust in the garage, it was a log cabin that had arrived in a kit, with presawn logs and a set of instructions that were the size of a slender phone book for a town of 10,000 people. To be completely fair, it's bulk was in part from it's being in English and French.
This project was well underway, and gave Mike an excuse to vanish on weekends, to "work on the cabin". In reality, he would often camp there on the site, watch a movie on his laptop, and finally sleep to the sounds of crickets in the night, without actually doing any work at all. He just wanted to get away.
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