Now that he’d met Kristin, he wrote, he’d lost his “deep feelings for Nicole” and wasn’t sure if he could ever get them back. He was having a hard time pretending that everything was fine at home and wanted to talk to Nicole about it, but he knew she’d be tremendously upset.
Three days later, Michael used his personal e-mail account to send Kristin a short note and some photos of his sister’s wedding.
“Thinking of you and missing you already,” he wrote.
By the following week, he and Kristin were professing their eternal love for each other.
“I want nothing more than to give my all to you,” Michael wrote her on May 16. “My life, my love, my world.”
“I’ll be thinking of you and all that the future has to offer,” Kristin wrote Michael on May 18. “I can’t wait for it to begin.”
That same day, Kristin wrote an e-mail to her brother Brent, expressing regret that she hadn’t called off the wedding and that she’d let their parents convince her she was just having “cold feet.”
“Mom and Dad encouraged me to go through with it and…they had invested so much time and money into the event by then, I guess I felt that I didn’t really have a choice,” she wrote. “Well, here I am a year later, and looking back, I wish I hadn’t gone through with it.”
As she weighed the good and the bad aspects of staying with Greg, she said, it all boiled down to not wanting to disappoint her family. “And that is not a very good reason for staying married,” she wrote. Feeling “so torn apart inside,” Kristin asked Brent for his feedback. There was more to tell, she said, but that would come later. She never mentioned that she’d started an affair with her boss.
Brent wrote back, offering his complete love and support for whatever decision she would ultimately make. He said he didn’t think she should stay with Greg just to avoid disappointing their parents.
“Sure, no one wants this to happen, but if you are not happy, which is all that matters in this case, then it is justified,” he wrote.
He also underscored how proud their parents were of her, constantly bragging about her accomplishments.
“They want what is best for you and will no doubt act accordingly,” he wrote.
Kristin told Brent how much she appreciated his support and thanked him for listening to her troubles. “Now I’m stuck with the heavy realization that I married the wrong person,” she wrote.
A couple of days after Kristin and Greg’s first anniversary on June 5, Brent checked in with his sister by e-mail. He apologized for not calling but said he didn’t feel comfortable wishing them a happy anniversary after what she’d told him.
Kristin wrote back and said she was “hanging in there.” She’d made a nice candlelight dinner for her and Greg and bought him a few gifts. “He didn’t even bring home a card,” she wrote. “But that’s okay, I guess, because he was sick.”
Kristin wrote Brent again on August 9, letting him know that she’d discussed her marital problems with their parents over the weekend and they were very supportive. “I wish I knew what to do,” she wrote.
A week later Kristin received a confirmation by e-mail that she’d used her Visa card to pay $60 for a two-month subscription to an apartment rental service.
After the CAT conference in May, Michael and Kristin continued to express their feelings for each other in a consistent stream of greeting cards, letters, and e-mails, developing their own shorthand language for the powerful emotions they were experiencing. Both said they’d never felt this way about anyone else, repeatedly using dramatic words like always, forever, destiny, fate, adoration, and passion. They constantly talked about getting married to each other, having children, and growing old together.
They often left the office for lunch, and on at least one occasion, came back with wet hair. One day they were gone for ninety minutes, and Kristin was seen eating lunch in the coffee room after she got back.
On Friday, May 19, Kristin took Michael to the SDSU Chemistry Department picnic. She thanked him in an e-mail later that afternoon and said she wished she were better at articulating her feelings for him.
The following Tuesday morning, Michael e-mailed Kristin to thank her for “dropping by,” apparently at his apartment. He said he’d intended to make her a cup of tea, but “one thing led to another….”
The next morning he e-mailed Kristin to tell her he loved her. “I’ll tell you more slowly at lunch,” he wrote.
The aftermath of their lovemaking must have been quite obvious to their coworkers, because Lloyd Amborn confronted Michael about “their conduct” that Thursday. Amborn said the other toxicologists were complaining that Michael was having an inappropriate relationship with their newest and youngest colleague. Michael denied that anything was going on, then e-mailed Kristin right after the meeting to warn her that Amborn planned to call her in that afternoon. Amborn, he wrote, had noticed the two of them “being a little too close” and told him that such behavior needed to stop.
“I need a ‘Hi, it’s all going to be okay’ kinda hug, but I guess that would be inappropriate, hey?” Michael wrote.
He also suggested that Kristin delete all his e-mails after reading them.
“Any snoop can check your ‘inbox’ while you’re out if no one is around, and my e-mails to you may not be well received,” he wrote.
After their respective meetings with Amborn, they stopped going to lunch together in the same car. But their coworkers still noticed that they were gone at the same time, often leaving and returning within five minutes of each other.
The two lovers could not and would not stay away from each other during the week. Over the weekend, though, they had to.
On Sunday, May 21, Michael wrote her a note from the nearby Ralph’s supermarket, where he often stopped at the computer café to send her weekend notes on his way to play Australian football.
“At 9 A.M., my missing you has been officially upgraded to ‘intensely,’ soon to move to ‘unbearably,’” he wrote, fantasizing about the time they could be together on a Sunday morning so he could tell her in person.
He wrote her again from Ralph’s the following Sunday afternoon at 2:30. Kristin was graduating that day, right about that time, and he wanted to let her know he was thinking of her.
“Dear Adrenalin,” he called her, explaining that the nickname stemmed from the physical sensations she caused in him. He told her he wished he could be there to “cheer from the back row. I’m cheering on the inside.”
Most of Kristin’s coworkers, including Michael, met Greg for the first and only time at a going-away party for a colleague at the 94th Aero Squadron restaurant in Kearny Mesa that spring.
Throughout the summer, Michael and Kristin met after work at a place just blocks from each of their apartments in University City. They dubbed their meeting place “the Willows” for the trees that grew where Regents Road dead-ended near a path at Rose Canyon. It was a secret spot, where Kristin once instructed her beau to “bring your biggest muscles.” They would meet there for a walk, a talk, and who knows what else. They also met a number of times during the lunch hour
