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He pulls me tighter. “You were right to do it. You should have done it a long time ago. This isn’t on you.”
For some reason that just makes me cry harder.
* * *
I don’t remember walking to Brendan’s car or riding to my parents’ condo. I don’t remember any aspect of it until we arrive in the guest room and he lies down, pulling me onto his chest as he drags the quilt over both of us.
I am no longer crying, but I’m also not ready to sleep. My voice punctures the silence. “Why are you here?”
“I didn’t want you going through this alone. I know how your mom is.”
“But why?” I whisper. “The second Rob came back, you treated me like some one-time thing. Like you didn’t even know my name, and it never mattered. So why are acting like you care now?”
He pushes my hair off my face, pressing a thumb to the tear under my eye and wiping it away. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so fucking sorry. It just seemed easier that way. I wasn’t going to ask you to sneak around behind his back. And if I can’t give you the things you want, someone should.”
“Why didn’t you at least tell me that? You acted so ambivalent about it.”
“I acted ambivalent because I was pissed, Erin. You think this is easy for me? Every time I hear from Rob, it sounds like you’re back together, or on your way to it. So I was fucking pissed off and being a dick about it. A few hours after you left my place, he’s calling to tell me you’ve got a date that afternoon. I just didn’t know what to do, and I still don’t know what to do, but I’m sorry.”
“What about the girl?” I ask.
“What girl?”
“Crystal. Rob said she was at your place when he came by.”
Brendan gives a low laugh. “I’m not dating anyone. I had to say something to keep him from walking in. You never came back for any of your stuff. It’s all over my apartment.”
“I didn’t want to come get it. I thought it would be too hard, seeing your place. I was hoping you’d just drop it off.”
“And I never dropped it off,” he says, “because then you’d never have a reason to come back.”
“You put your arm around her,” I say, and my voice breaks all over again. “You were willing to let everyone know you were together last night, but you never did that with me.”
“Erin, you were getting back together with Rob, and it’s not like we live in a major city. If we’d been all over each other, what do you think the odds are that it’d eventually get back to him? I was doing it for you, and believe me, it pissed me off every time.”
“But…”
He laughs softly. “Baby, go to sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.”
“One more thing,” I say. “Who kept calling you at night? Was it Gabi?”
He pauses. The silence stretches so long that it seems like a confirmation in and of itself.
“No,” he finally says. “It’s her mom.”
66
Brendan
Present
Erin is the last person I want to tell about Gabi, but at this point I don’t have much of a choice. And while I hate what this story says about me, I can’t go on letting her believe that my inability to be in a relationship is somehow her fault.
So I start at the beginning. I tell her I was mad after the wedding, mostly at myself. That I couldn’t stand to see her with Rob, so I finally just left.
I tell her how hard it was, hearing about her and Rob as they got serious. And how, for a while, Gabi seemed like she could fix me. That I led her to believe we were something we were not, simply because I was hoping she could be someone she was not. And I let her keep believing it because it was easier than telling her I’d made a mistake.
And then I tell Erin how it ended.
