“I do feel the need to contradictonething you said,” he says as he opens the door to the bathroom. “You saidyourfailure was plastered all over the internet.” He looks at me, forcing eye contact with a kind and quiet intensity.
“But the cheater is the failure, Claire. Not the one who got cheated on.” He flips the light off and steps out into the kitchen.
The simple movement reminds me of Lennon’s words—“He flipped your switch”—and I have to breathe in a very long, very slow breath to calm the nerves that have bubbled up inside me.
Chapter 29
Fight or flight. Everything within me is shouting for the latter.
I sit in the passenger side of Miles’s Range Rover, trying to keep my lower lip from quivering.
I want to tell him to drive me home so I can crawl into my bed and stay there for a year.
My default is to retreat. But I’ve done that before. A part of me knows it won’t help, but right now I don’t care. I finally know what I want. Screwing up and not being able to have it is ten times worse.
After fifteen minutes of driving in silence, Miles parallel parks his SUV—and I have no idea where we are. Miles turns off the engine and gets out of the car without a word. He walks over to my side and opens the door.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“I’ll show you.”
I step out onto the sidewalk, and Miles closes the door, then starts walking down the block. We’re in an area of the city where I haven’t been before, so I take a second to look around. There are tall apartment buildings lining the street and a parking garage at the end of the block.
We cross the street, and I hear the sound of kids playing in the near distance. Miles leads me around the corner, revealing a large playground nestled at the back of two perpendicular buildings.
Half of the space is a playground. Rounded wooden structures, short climbing walls, rope bridges, all themed around what looks like a pirate ship. There’s a taller platform on one end with multipleships’ steering wheels and a circular “crow’s nest” platform in the center, complete with several telescopes on stands.
The other half is open green space. Bigger than the quad at my college. Families on blankets pepper the grass, and I can see two dads with dogs who have seemingly just met each other.
Kids are running around, chasing each other, shouting, maneuvering their way through tunnels and on top of spring-loaded mushrooms. A small group of tiny humans is jumping on large, painted circles lining a sidewalk that runs the perimeter of the whole park.
The entire area is brightly colored with pockets of plants and flowers, and there’s plenty of space for parents to sit and watch their kids play.
The park is interactive and obviously meant to encourage kids to use their imaginations, intricately planned and executed with children in mind.
I follow Miles straight to the center of the park, a divide between the open space and the playground. Colorful, comfortable benches face both directions, toward the kids and toward the grass, and he sits on a bench facing the playground, motioning for me to do the same.
We’re both silent for a few long moments.
There’s a little girl who climbs a rope ladder to the top of a slide and scream-laughs the whole way down. Over and over again.
A trio of boys are taking turns crazily jumping off a mushroom into the mulch, where each one tries to land in a superhero pose. They laugh every time, because they fall over every time.
A dad gently pushes his small daughter in a swing—but the thing that strikes me is that his daughter is in a wheelchair, and the swing is a larger platform that the wheelchair expertly fits on. It was built and designed specifically for kids like her in mind. She throws her hands in the air on every push, and the look on her face is pure joy.
For a second, I forget that my life is falling apart.
Again.
“A couple years ago, I almost sold my business,” Miles says, eyes trained on a man throwing a Frisbee to a golden retriever in the distance.
My gaze latches onto him, but I don’t say anything.
“I found out my wife, Elizabeth, was having an affair with my VP. Brent.” Miles says this quickly, like it’s a memorized line and not the first time he’s explaining the source of so much pain. “He was the guy I’d hired straight out of school and mentored, thinking that he could keep things going while Elizabeth and I traveled, you know, after the girls grew up and moved out. I had a whole plan.”
I shift slightly, angling my body toward him, resisting the urge to reach for him even though I know reliving this cannot be pleasant. I think of the night I told him about John and Misty. How hard it had been to get the words out—and how Miles wasn’t ready to do the same.
Somehow it makes this moment feel even more important.
