I Idolized My High School Teacher. Then I Dated Him.

"We had done such a seamless job believing that our history didn’t matter, but what if we were wrong?"

At 15, I was his standout student and his kids’ occasional babysitter, unabashed in my adoration. I looked forward to his classes with a thrill that could make me feel sick. I studied harder for his tests than I would ever study again. When he and his wife were out on dates, I would sit at his desk after their kids were asleep, beneath bookshelves full of thick spines, spillover stacks surrounding his computer, some volumes splayed open to pages littered with underlines, and think, Someday I’ll find someone like this. I was in my late 20s and living in Brooklyn, nearly 3,000 miles across the country, when he left the desk and the house and the wife and stored all of his books in a shed outside a tiny rental cabin at the top of a cliff.