When she got pregnant, I decided to do the right thing, and Percy told me he was proud of me and came to the courthouse wedding.
He gave a toast at the dinner.
Throughout our twenty-one-month marriage, my oldest friend has been the most consistent advocate for my wife.
“You’re making a mistake,” he warns.
I blow out a breath and shrug.
Percy thinks divorcing Lucy is a mistake.
I don’t.
Love matters to me in a marriage. I’ve never wanted what my parents had—a deal dressed up as a union. The irony, then, is that I didn’t do much better. I married a woman because she was pregnant with my child.
There’s nothing wrong with our marriage.
Sure, my family doesn’t like Lucy, and she can’t stand them.
No big deal.
I can’t stand them either.
She doesn’t fit into my world of old Tennessee money—but that’s just snobbery, and I don’t give a shit about it.
The sex is good—great even. We even have fun when we do get to spend time together. She’s easy to be with, comfortable. Her affection is warm, and she cares for me. I suspect she loves me.
ButI’m not in love with her.
Not the way I was with Reina—who was my first and only serious girlfriend.
Reina comes from another old Tennessee money family. We were called “John Junior and CBK of Nashville” when we got together.
The relationship lasted four years.
It ended slowly and painfully.
We both made plenty of mistakes. We got busy with our lives and careers. She is a high-profile country music executive. I run an event management company.
Then there was the fact that the media was relentlessly talking about her closeness to one of the artists signed to the label she worked for.
I should’ve paid attention to that, but I trusted Reina.
That went up in smoke in the way of a country music song—on the lines she left me for another man—when I found the now-has-been country singer (I made sure of that) balls deep inside her in her hotel room in Memphis, where I’d come to propose to her.
It was going to be a surprise.
And, man, were we both surprised!
I want to be clear; I don’t have any such current feeling for Reina now. But it was after I had lunch with her—it was business—that I was reminded of how I used to feel about her, how much I loved her, and how that’s not what I feel for my wife.
The thought came to me then that I needed to end our marriage before we hit the two-year mark.
It was time to end the charade.
But it’s not an easy thing to do because Percy is right, Lucy is good people. Not just that. She’s kind, sweet, and generous. She’s the type of woman who takes soup to someone’s place because they’re not feeling well.
“Fox, what you’re thinking you had with Reina…that wasn’t love.”
