“Tell me,” he yelled, his words tearing through the silent night. “You want me to ask questions, well, I’m asking.Tell me.”
“My scar!” My hands shook as I made two fists. “How could you have never asked about it—notonce?”
He sat in silence, watching me with wary eyes. When he spoke again, his voice was low and uneven. “I knew it had to do with the night your dad left your mom. And you never want to discuss the divorce.”
“You never wanted to know where it came from? Your own wife?” I asked. “It never occurred to you that it was a source of pain and sadness and regret? You never wanted to know what it represented? To make me tell you, no matter how much it hurt me?”
“Of course I wanted to fucking know, but whenever I bring up the divorce, you shut down.”
“It scared me to think,” I said quietly, “that no matter how I explained that night, you might’ve taken her side anyway.”
He turned away, rubbing the inside corners of his eyes.
My heart sank as moments passed without his response. “What?” I asked.
“She didn’t mean to hurt you, Livs. It was an accident.”
My lips parted. My mom and Bill had their own separate relationship, but considering how Bill dodged the subject, I never would’ve guessed they’d talked about that night. “You knew?”
“Your mom told me once,” he said, still avoiding my eyes. “She and your father had an argument. You jumped in the middle and she stabbed you by accident. And that’s what prompted the divorce. She was trying to explain her side of the story.” He turned his head, meeting my gaze again. “You can’t blame her for assuming that you, my wife, had already told me about the most traumatic night of your life.”
And still, he hadn’t brought it up to me. “I don’t even know what to say.”
“And I don’t get how this relates to sleeping with another man. Are you trying to tell me that—” He glanced down at my side, staring daggers at the scar just underneath my t-shirt. “Thatheasked? And youtoldhim?”
“He wouldn’t take no for an answer,” I said. “He knew it was painful, but he wanted to take some of that pain away.”
“Well, this just keeps getting better. Are you . . . this guy, David, do you have . . . ?”
My breath caught as I waited for his question. I didn’t know how I would tell him the truth, but if he asked, I would do it. I would find the strength to tell him that what David and I had went beyond the physical.
But instead he shook his head and turned forward again. “Never mind.”
“Never mind?” I asked.
“It hurts that you’d share something like that with him, but you didn’t with me.”
“I know,” I said. Ihadknown, while it was happening, that it was wrong. But I’d done it anyway. So, there was nothing else I could say except, “And I am so, so sorry.”
“You say there were problems between us, but I didn’t see anything beyond normal marital stuff,” he said. “I thought, like a fool, that we were happy.”
“We are happy. But it doesn’t change the fact that everything is moving too fast for me, and I want to slow down.”
He snorted. “Well, this is certainly one way to slow things down.”
I tried to hide the relief in my sigh. “So can we? At least until we sort all of this out?”
He was quiet for a long time. “It’s like you’ve put this . . . void in my chest. As if something’s gone missing, something that’s supposed to go right here.” His hand clapped over his heart. My breath caught audibly, and he turned his head to me. “Emptiness. Nothingness. That’s how this feels.”
“I’m empty inside, David, and I did that to myself. You don’t understand. There’s nothing left to give.”
Tears burned my eyes, but I blinked them back. “I understand,” I whispered.
“How could you understand?” he asked simply.
Because I, too, had lost something. And sometimes I thought my hollow chest might collapse from the weight of my grief.
Bill looked away again. “None of this is fair. I don’t know what I did wrong, that you’re saying and doing these things to me.”
