She just needed to do it.
She took a deep breath and walked into the hospital room. She didn’t even know if he remembered the one interaction they’d had when he’d regained consciousness. He had been totally hopped up on pain meds, and mainly delirious.
“Nora.” He looked completely shocked.
“Yeah. Me.”
“It’s good to see you.” His tone was warm and calm, and she hated it.
“Maybe don’t be too emphatic about that until I tell you what I have to say. I want a divorce.”
“Nora . . .”
“I know you cheated on me.” She wasn’t even going to get into how she’d found out.
“I was on a trip to try and reevaluate life. I wasn’t cheating, I ...”
“Oh, were we on a break?”
“I thought it was implied that, during the separation, we could explore the things we need to explore.”
“That’s weird how you didn’t say that explicitly,” she said. “Almost like you didn’t actually want me to take you up on that.”
“Nora, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t communicate more clearly with you. But you know I love you. I got a little bit lost. But I have clarity now.”
“She loves you, by the way. I read all her frantic texts.”
Ben looked distressed. Genuinely. It would have been funny if it weren’t so pathetic. “But she’s not who I want with me right now. She’s not who I want to care for me while I recover.”
“That’s ... You have to be kidding. That’s how you’re looking at this? That’s your lens? You want to have me take care of you? Suddenly you realize maybe the twenty-year-old bohemian chick you banged up on a mountain isn’t the one. You didn’t say we were on a break. You’re just a liar. You are so good at packaging it into something palatable. Pretending you’re so rational and cool, and I am ... a mess. You’re the one who ran away from our marriage. You’re the one who couldn’t have a conversation. You’re childish. Because you’ve never experienced astruggle in your goddamn life, and mine terrify you. That’s it, isn’t it? I make you feel breakable and fragile. Because I’ve actually lived through things. I’ll live through this too. But we aren’t going to make it.”
She turned away from him.
“This is rich, Nora,” he said, his voice suddenly hard, his entire demeanor different. “You taking this moral high ground when getting you to share anything is an uphill battle. When you have Sam loitering around constantly. Are you going to tell me that you never slept with him?”
She closed her eyes. “No, Ben, I never did. You’re right. I do have him. He means a lot to me. But I’ve never cheated on you. I thought we were happy. I can see now all the ways in which we weren’t. I can see now that I had blind spots, but if you had tried to work on our marriage, if you had talked to me, I would’ve done whatever I could to fix it. But you didn’t. You lied to me instead, and now you’re trying to turn it around and make it seem like it’s my fault. I’m not going to say I didn’t make mistakes. That I didn’t freeze you out sometimes. That I didn’t ... have emotional intimacy with a friend that may have kept us from being closer, but I thought it worked for you. I would’ve changed for you. So thank God that you left. That you lied to me. That you didn’t stay. Because if I’m going to change, it needs to be for me. I think if you hadn’t done this, I wouldn’t have realized that.”
She turned and walked out of the room, and she wasn’t sure quite what she had been expecting. For him to try to bargain with her. For him to yell that she wasn’t going to get anything. She didn’t want anything. She just wanted to start over.
She didn’t cry because she could see the reality of their relationship too clearly now. She’d needed him to make her feel normal, safe, like she was okay.
But not now.
Now she finally felt powerful. She wasn’t going to hang on to a broken marriage just for the sake of having a marriage. Not when she could have everything. Even if everything felt like a risk.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Soraya
Your heart is your North Star, your compass, and your truth.
—Rules for Witches
The lavender dress had seemed perfectly reasonable in that shop, and she’d felt pretty in it. She still did. She just had this concern that it was too much.
That she was too much in it.
No. No, she wasn’t going to do this. She’d bought this dress in a moment of total empowerment, and she wasn’t going to backslide now.
