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19. Laurel
20. Luke
21. Laurel
22. Luke
23. Laurel
24. Luke
25. Laurel
Chapter one
Laurel
I stared at my computer. My entire body refused to move, as if I’d stood in cold rain for too long.
In front of me, my glowing laptop screen seared the words and images into my brain. Two years of my life unraveled in an instant. Two years. All down the drain. The plug pulled by the well-intentioned hostess from the restaurant of all people.
The subject line, “I’m So Sorry, Laurel,” only made things worse, in my opinion.
In front of me were many, many screen shots of texts that my fiancé Mark had sent to a coworker. Most of them were the usual light-hearted romantic things (like kissy face emojis, texting ‘I love you’ thousands of times, and such), but there were a couple of conversations that absolutely made my blood boil. His intentions to do more than just text were irrefutable. He hadn’t even said stuff like that to me, the woman he was about to marry. To be fair, I probably would’ve slapped him if he had. It was so gross.
What hurt the absolute most was the fact that he had clearly indicated he preferred her choices in lingerie to what I had been thinking about buying for my honeymoon with him. A heart emoji after pictures of that had been the worst of it all. With one text, Mark had crushed my hopes, my dreams, and my heart.
Alex and I had been work friends for a while. I worked as the head pastry chef in the kitchen, and she managed the dining area with the poise appropriate to such an expensive restaurant. I’d never expected our work-friendship would ever reach such intimacy. I managed to craft a somewhat normal response to Alex, thanking her for saving me the cost of a divorce, before doing two things. The first was forwarding this email to my personal, private email so that I could confront Mark later, and the second was shutting my computer off. For once, I was glad that a coworker had reached out to me on my day off.
I wiped the tears from my eyes, not realizing they had spilled over. I tried to steady my breathing, but my whole body shook, and I gave up after a few deep breaths. The tears needed to come, and I was too crushed to stop them.
The only good thing was that Mark typically worked nine to five every Monday to Friday at a very boring desk job as a lawyer. Earlier that week, I’d bemoaned the fact that he couldn’t work from home so we could spend more time together on my days off. I was suddenly glad that he worked elsewhere, and not out of the apartment we shared, because this would have been the hardest thing to do if he had been home.
In the interest of attempting to appear like I hadn’t just had my heart shattered into a thousand pieces by a well-meaning friend, I opened the fridge and started planning dinner. My mind felt scattered, and I stopped mid-way through chopping onions to text a friend. I couldn’t stay here tonight. I needed to pack a bag. I needed to…
I didn’t even know where to begin.
I hastily packed a duffle bag and tossed it in my car. I figured I could get the rest of my stuff later, but I only focused on the basics right now. After about twenty minutes, I was back in the kitchen, chopping the rest of the onion.
My phone buzzed, and I felt my stomach twist in fear of more earth-shattering news.
It was just my friend, letting me know I could stay as long as I needed.
I made myself make dinner, just to make sure that Mark wasn’t suspicious that anything had happened to tell me that he was cheating on me. I don’t know why, but it felt important for me to be the one to bring it up. I didn’t want him to know right away that he’d broken my heart.
I babied a sauce on the stove all afternoon and made homemade spaghetti for him. It’d be the last good meal, and if I was lucky, it’d stain his carpets good if we got in a fight. Which I had a feeling would happen.
“I’m home, Laurel!” Mark came in the front door as he always did, loudly singing his presence.
His voice no longer brought happy butterflies to my stomach. However, I did walk out to meet him in the living room. My heart thumped against my chest like I had just ridden a roller coaster that had gone much faster than I had expected it to, and I worried that he would notice that something was wrong.
“Welcome home, Mark,” I said softly.
It took everything to keep my voice at least a reasonable level. All I wanted to do was yell at him for breaking my heart in this manner, but it did beg another question: if Alex hadn’t reached out to me, would he have ever told me that he was cheating on me?
“Laurel, is everything all right? You look like you’ve been crying. Did you watch another Hallmark movie?” Mark screwed up his face in an expression of mock-concern. “Come here.”
He walked over to me for a hug, but I moved away. The last thing I wanted right now was a hug from a man who wouldn’t even remain faithful after he had paid a pretty penny for the ring on my finger. He’d gotten me a large emerald ring with a halo of smaller diamonds around it all set in eighteen-karat gold. A beautiful ring, but something about it felt as soulless as his texts to me the last week had now.
