“Ridge, it’s okay,” Violet said in a soft voice to try to stop me.
“No, it’s not. She took and took and took and then hurt you and your brother. If I had lost you… I couldn’t even remember our last conversation. I am so damn sorry for that. For all of it. I wish there was a way to erase it all.”
“I don’t.”
“Why?” I asked Violet, because that seemed preposterous.
“We have Liam, we’ve both grown. If I could, I’d spare you from being a victim, and my brother and I from being physically harmed, but the rest, I think we needed it.”
“No, we didn’t.” I scoffed at the idea. “We had a perfect marriage.”
“Yes, we seemed to until we didn’t. Imagine if things hadn’t happened the way they did and further down the road, after years of Fiona - or another employee - getting in your ear about things, you finally cracked and stumbled. Or maybe I would have. We have no way of knowing, but at least this way, we both know exactly what we stand to lose and how to make sure it never fucking happens again.”
The way our therapist smiled at Violet, I knew her brilliant take on things was correct. Maybe we were a little too lax before because we thought we were perfect and untouchable.
“So, where do we go from here?”
“You just keep putting in the work and never forget how easily it can all slip away when you take it for granted.” That seemed like the same shit Violet had just said twisted and turned around by the therapist who charged us a solid $550 an hour. It didn’t matter. I’d pay it because it made my wife happy that we were putting in the work. And yes, one day she would be my wife again.
Chapter 29
Violet
Ridge took me out at least twice a week since that fateful night when he hijacked my dinner with Justin. The past few weeks felt like a whirlwind between the dates, parenting, and therapy sessions. In all honesty, I didn’t think we needed the therapy sessions anymore, but I was afraid to discontinue them because part of me worried that Ridge hadn’t dealt with what was done to him. It was something I planned to broach at our next session.
“Can we bring Liam with us, tonight?” I asked.
“You never have to ask if our son can tag along with us, Vi. Of course, he can.”
“Good because he’s been a bit off all day. I think maybe he’s teething or something.”
“Do we have one of those frozen rings? We can bring one with us.”
“Yes!” I called out as I handed Liam off to him and made my way to the freezer. It felt normal. From the “Do we have...” statements, like we were a family living together again. I knew that Ridge didn’t even realize how he slipped like that all the time. He treated my apartment like his own until it was time to leave at night. The only times he ever got to stay past our goodnight routine for our son was on date nights. Even then, he usually went back to his own place -which I recently found out was a mixture of his parents’ house and the couch in his office - by midnight. I wondered why he hadn’t bothered to get a place of his own, but I thought I knew. He was waiting for us to get a place together.
As much as I wanted that, it also worried me. I didn’t want to go back to a place where we made our marriage vulnerable again. I didn’t want to get attached to another house only to have something go wrong and him to sell it out from under us. It wasn’t fair because I was the one to walk away, to file for the divorce, but the sale of our home was still a wound that felt a bit fresh.
I supposed there was more than one reason to continue with therapy, but we would get there eventually.
“Did you find one?” Ridge asked as he bounced our son gently on his hip.
“Sorry, yeah, I did.” I turned with it in my hand and shut the freezer door.
“You looked lost in thought there for a minute. Everything okay?”
“Sure,” I said quickly. Then, I thought better of it. “Actually, no. Can we cancel and stay in? I think there are a few things we need to talk about, and I don’t want to do that while we’re out in public.”
The smile dropped off his face in an instant, and I reached out to put my hand on his free arm to reassure him. “I promise, it’s not a ‘We need to talk’ moment.” Neither of us laughed as we made our way back to the living room and placed Liam in his bouncy seat.
“Let’s hear it.”
“There are some things that I didn’t even realize were still bothering me, but in the spirit of therapy and open communication and all that, I guess now is as good a time as any to get them off my chest.”
“Okay,” Ridge agreed.
“First, the house. Earlier you said, ‘Do we have any…’”
“About the frozen teething rings?” Ridge asked, obviously confused by where I was going with that.
