TOUGH LOVE
TOUGH LOVE
ABBY
I pour myself another glass of whiskey in the kitchen and take a sip. I think when a relationship unravels, the way ours did, it’s impossible not to look back and wonder who was to blame. To relive the good times as well as the bad and wonder What if? A broken record of whys regularly spins inside my head but never plays the answer.
Memory lane is a dead end but if I close my eyes I can still remember the people we used to be. I can still feel his hands on my body, pulling at my clothes, impatient to unwrap me. Those first few years when we were together were the most passionate of my life. He had this way of making me feel as though I were beautiful, even the parts of me that never were.
I never wanted to leave my husband forever, that wasn’t the plan, but I knew I had to leave when I did. I have needed to put a physical distance between my past and my present more than once in my life, and sometimes there is no way back. My white lies have darkened over the years and my past caught up with me. There were things I should have said, but didn’t, because they were things he didn’t want to hear. But when what happened, happened, it was too late to tell him anything. I just had to go. I’ve always felt guilty about that—leaving without even saying goodbye—just disappearing from his life.
I know a lot about people disappearing, and not just because I did. Someone is reported missing every ninety seconds in the UK. That’s 170,000 people reported missing every year, and that’s just this little corner of the world. Sometimes when people disappear it’s because they don’t want to be found. I needed a fresh start, so I changed my name and started again, determined to become the me I knew I wanted to be. I’m old enough to know that tough love isn’t real love. The truth is that my life without him was less lonely than life with him, and I know in my heart that I did the right thing.
Grady has always believed what I say. It’s something I’ve always been baffled by—given how difficult he finds it to trust almost all other people—but I liked how it made me feel. For a while. As though he thought I was special. I’ve always found relationships hard to navigate, even as a child. I grew up in a home where there wasn’t quite enough love to go around, so I looked for it elsewhere. And I learned most of life’s lessons the hard way, but making mistakes is how we learn.
It felt strange coming back to the island after all these years. It was even stranger to visit the cabin when Grady wasn’t there and to be surrounded by my husband’s things. It made me miss him a little, but not enough to regret my decision to leave.
There are things I need to tell Grady tonight.
Things which will be difficult for me to say and for him to hear.
Truth is stranger than fiction and tends to hurt more too.