My Aiden is notmine.
We met eight years ago. I was so young. Just twenty-two, studying to become a kindergarten teacher. He was thirty, having already completed the educational part of his life, and was working at his family’s business.
I had no money. He had too much.
I had no family. He had everyone, even grandparents.
Nothing much has changed, has it? I still have no money. I still have no family.
We live in a very nice home in Burlington, Vermont, one we bought together. Withhismoney, obviously. But he always said everything he had was mine. It wasourmoney.
It felt like a dream. Like I’d won the lottery, not thefinancial kind but the kind of love I thought only happened in movies.
The first time he saw me, I was shelving books in the children’s section of the bookstore where I worked part-time. He walked in, tall and polished in a charcoal-gray coat, lost in the stacks like he didn’t belong among the tiny tables and mismatched rugs.
I asked if I could help him. He wanted to buy a book as a Christmas present for his two-year-old nephew. I recommendedCorduroy.
He thanked me. Said I had beautiful eyes.
He kept coming back.
Every Friday at 4 p.m., like clockwork, he would buy another book for his nephew.
When he finally asked me to dinner, I said no the first time. And the second.
I knew who he was. In Burlington, everyone knew the Winter family. They were wealthy beyond belief.
He kept asking, especially when I told him that he was not in my league. He said he loved that about me, that I wasn’t like the women he knew. That I sawhim, not his bank account.
He made me feel special.
Chosen.
That’s the part that hurts the most now.
Because when he kissed her, Diana Valentine, heun-choseme.
After all these years of loyalty—of swallowing my pride and putting up with his family because he lovesthem—even though they treat me like dirt ground into their custom Persian rugs…he still discarded me.
All the times I smiled through his mother’s digs about my wardrobe being ‘too schoolteacher-like’, sat through dinner parties where she practically introduced me as Aiden’s charity case, swallowed his father calling me barren, endured his sister’s little jabs—like saying I probably couldn’t even spell “fiduciary”—and his brother and sister-in-law’s constant reminders that we were childless because my body had failed Aiden….
And what do I have to show for it?
Nothing.
No—that’s not true. I have a broken heart to match my broken uterus.
It wasn’t like this all the time. I wonder how many women, who see their marriage disintegrate, say that.
Before Aiden took over as CEO, he would wake up before me, make me coffee, and we’d drink it together while we ate breakfast. He was always home for dinner. He sent me text messages all day.
Even after the doctors said I had endometriosis, which had made me infertile, he never made me feel bad about it. When I suggested we should adopt, he told me that would be a bad idea, considering his parents would have a problem with it. We talked about surrogacy. We talked about a lot of things regarding having children—not once did he tell me that he resented me for us not being able to have children.
All that changed when he became the CEOandDiana returned to Burlington.
It started slowly, the way these things usually do.
A missed dinner—followed by an apology.
