Page 100

Never wanted to breathe the same air.

It’s funny how all of your priorities can change in a moment. I wondered, somewhat idly, if they’d been changing for a while and I just hadn’t been willing to acknowledge it.

I shook off the thought. None of it mattered.

I’d never agreed to this. This was not in the contracts.

I had sold myself; my body, my face, my time.

But I had never agreed to sell my heart. To have it ripped from me. To have it stomped into the ground under his heel.

I didn’t care about the money anymore. Simply did not give one single fuck about it.

This hurt too much. No fucking thing was worth this kind of hurt. Certainly not money.

I didn’t just have regrets. I had every regret. I regretted every moment I’d ever wasted on my despicable, faithless husband.

I regretted it enough to walk away from every single thing I’d been promised.

“Were you sleeping with her the whole time she was married?” I asked him.

He didn’t have to say the words, the guilt was painted all over his face.

“Look I was not a good guy for a while there,” he said haltingly. “But I can be better. I want to be better. I will be better.”

So many years they’d played this disgusting little game with each other. Adultery must get them off. As disgust mixed into my bloodstream, it helped to mitigate some of the pain. “You’ve been carrying on with her all along,” I told him in a hollow voice. “We haven’t had one moment together that wasn’t tainted by her, have we?”

He shook his head, but his eyes were too desperate to trust anything about to come out of his mouth. “That’s not true. I swear—”

“Don’t swear to me. Don’t swear anything to me.”

His eyes were wide and wild, and his hands kept reaching toward me. Every time he did it I flinched, but though he kept checking himself, he couldn’t seem to stop. “Look, I messed up. I messed up bad. But I thought I hated you then. It was only during that first month after the wedding. I was a mess, and I did all kinds of messed up shit right after, more than I can even remember or name, but I’ve never lied—”

He was right. He hadn’t lied to me. He hadn’t needed to. I had done all of that work for him.

As soon as I’d started falling for him, I’d started deluding myself without him ever having to utter one deceit. It was no consolation at all.

“I don’t fucking care!” I was mortified that it came out as a rabid snarl. There was so much venom in that it made him gasp. “Lies. Truth. Nothing you could say or have said makes any difference. You fucked another woman after you fucked me. You fucked her.” That. Right. There. Her. That was the part that hurt the most. No. Not quite. Her having his baby. Them being tied together forever. That hurt the most. “Nothing else matters. We’re finished.” I laughed bitterly. “We never started. This was never a love story, but whatever it was, I want out.”

I didn’t have anything else to say. I tried to walk out of the room without another word.

He tried to stop me. The second he grabbed me, I screamed bloody murder.

He recoiled. “Don’t. Please. Don’t let her do this.”

My eyes narrowed on him malevolently. It was only as my vision blurred through narrow lids that I realized tears were running out of my eyes, down my cheeks unheeded. “She’s not the one who did this,” I told him quietly, every syllable vibrating with my hatred. With my pain. “This was always a mistake.” The words held as much undiluted ache as they did truth. “All of it. I have so much more to offer than this.”

“Please, don’t do this,” he said. “Can we just talk about it some more?”

I hesitated. Even after everything that had happened, I fucking hesitated. When I realized that, it made me so angry that I didn’t bother to answer him. He’d see. “Get out.”

CHAPTER

THIRTY-FIVE

Life is full of giving, taking, borrowing, and moving on.

And balance. For the first time in my life, I meant to find mine.