I Forgave You Once (The Rewrite the Ending #2)

Prologue

Harper

Red panties.

Not subtle red either. Not the deep, mature almost-burgundy kind women in wine commercials wear while pretending to enjoy jazz and emotionally unavailable men.

No.

These were bright, aggressive, midlife-crisis sports-car red. The kind of red that screamed: I make terrible decisions and look fantastic doing it. And unfortunately, the panties currently dangling from my fingers were definitely not mine.

You know the saying about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results? Apparently, that makes you insane.

Ten years ago, my husband had an affair. We did everything right after that. Therapy. Date nights. Transparency. The hard conversations that left us both hollowed out for days. Somewhere along the way I convinced myself we had stayed because we still loved each other. I thought we had survived it.

And yet, standing in my laundry room with a pair of red lace panties that definitely do not belong to me tangled in my husband’s work trousers, I can’t stop thinking that maybe I am not forgiving. Maybe I am just stupid.

Now, before you start mentally calling me an idiot, let me explain. Actually, no. You can call me an idiot. I’ve earned it.

But to really understand why finding another woman’s panties in my husband’s laundry basket feels less like a surprise and more like some kind of sick cosmic punchline, I need to take you back thirteen years. My husband and I were high school sweethearts.

Yeah. I know. Insert every eye roll and statistical warning people love to throw at couples who met at sixteen and thought they had beaten the odds.

The thing is, I really believed we had.

I was painfully in love with him back then. The kind of love that makes you stupid in ways only teenagers and people in Hallmark movies can justify. The kind where your entire future quietly reshapes itself around another person without you even noticing it happening.

We had been together for three years when we left for university.

I got accepted into an English program on scholarship. He got into architecture at a different college three hours away. We promised each other that the distance wouldn’t matter. We promised we were solid enough to survive a few years apart.

Then one weekend, he disappeared. Completely.

No texts. No calls. No replies. At first, I thought he was busy.

Then worried. Then furious. Then terrified.

By day four, I was alternating between imagining him dead in a ditch somewhere and imagining him realizing he didn’t love me anymore. Turns out reality was somehow worse.

When he finally called, I knew immediately that something was wrong. He sounded wrecked. Crying. Barely coherent. He told me he’d gone out drinking with friends. That he’d caved to the peer pressure. That he’d kissed another girl.

Except it wasn’t one kiss. It wasn’t one night either. Apparently, his brief little lapse in judgment turned into four straight days of sleeping with her, partying with her, and forgetting I existed altogether.

I know what you’re thinking. Believe me, I’ve thought it too. Nobody accidentally cheats for four days. But we were nineteen.

And when someone you’ve loved since you were practically children is calling you and crying hard enough to make himself sick, apologizing over and over like he’s trying to crawl out of his own skin, it does something to you.

Maybe it broke something in me. Or maybe it just exposed something that was already there. Because I forgave him. Not immediately or easily mind you. But eventually I did. And to his credit, he worked hard for it.

He stopped drinking. Came to therapy. Drove hours every weekend just to see me. Learned my friends’ names. Sat through counselling sessions where we picked apart every ugly piece of what he’d done until there was nothing left but raw nerves and exhaustion.

He spent two years proving he could be better. By twenty-one, I believed him and we got married.

I moved closer to his university while he finished architecture school, and I started writing.

Here’s the really pathetic part. I write cheating romance for a living.

I know every warning sign. Every change in behaviour. Every statistic. Every lie. I have built my entire career out of fictional men ruining women’s lives.

Which means I should have seen this coming from a mile away.

Instead, I folded his laundry like an idiot and found another woman’s red lace panties tangled in his trousers.