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He’d been on a path he didn’t feel like he’d chosen. He hadn’t understood what love was until he met Ashley. He had married Elizabeth because it had seemed logical. They’d been in love since high school, you married your high school sweetheart.
He’d never really known how happy he could be, not until he met Ashley.
Well, she called absolute bull crap on that. They’d been happy. They had been.
And it wasn’t fair for him to say all of that when... In the end, she...related to his words. That was what hurt so much.
He wasn’t wrong.
He had acted wrongly. But when it came to assessing the state of their marriage, he wasn’t wrong.
She had married him because he’d been there. He’d been the only guy she’d ever dated, ever been with, ever kissed. He’d asked her to marry him, and she hadn’t been able to imagine a life without him – not because their love was so intense – because she could hardly remember not being with him.
She hadn’t loved him passionately, but she’d loved their life.
She’d spent the last six years trying to figure out what her world looked like now, and it had taken her all this time to get brave enough to really change things.
They had built a life and now the life was gone. It didn’t seem right or fair. It wasn’t because she was still in love with him.
It was because he’d left her without the skills to figure out what the hell she was supposed to do.
But she was over that. Done living in wreckage.
And he could be as mad as he wanted to be, but it wouldn’t change a damned thing.
He’d claimed a new life for himself. Wasn’t she allowed to do the same?
“I hate it,” Benny said.
“You haven’t even seen it. The house is really cute. I saw it a few months ago when we were first planning the move.” Of course, it hadn’t been livable yet, but the bones had been nice.
It had taken time to get everything in order, it had taken time to get the custody arrangement adjusted so that the move could be approved.
It was frustrating, because she knew that Carter didn’t actually care. How could he? He was an absentee dad when he lived nearby. He was just pretending that he cared, and that he had never been so outraged, because he intended—of course—to spend endless quality time with his son at the drop of a hat.
All of that had somehow gotten in her mother-in-law’s head, and eventually she’d made comments in front of Benny, who had taken his grandmother’s opinion on everything to heart. She found it all enraging.
Because of that she was stuck with a sulky eight-year-old boy who felt like she was the enemy because every other adult around him treated her as such.
“I miss my friends.”
That did make her feel guilty.
“I know,” she said. “But there’s a better life for us here. You get to go to school in a one-room schoolhouse.”
“That seems weird.”
“It’s an adventure. It’s like Little House on the Prairie.”
“I hated those books,” he said, sullen.
That made her heart kick hard. She had read him those books when he was little. He hadn’t seemed to hate them.
Not then.
But maybe she had lost him even more than she’d realized. Maybe occasional visits to Carter and the Xbox, PlayStation and everything else at that house had won.
She was the real parent. The one who made him go to bed on time, brush his teeth and do his homework. The one who had to discipline him. Carter got to step in on weekends and give him fun, only fun.
