Chapter 22
CHLOE
I haven’t been back to Tennessee in at least two years, and I can safely say I didn’t miss being here one bit. It might be March, but it’s somehow in the upper seventies, and I’m already dying in the sweater I put on this morning before taking the first flight out of Seattle.
Callum fell asleep around ten, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get my brain to stop spinning. It was like every bad thought I ever had about myself or my writing or my marriage just kept coming and coming. I could hardly make sense of any of it.
But there was one thing I could understand: I wanted to talk to my mom. I don’t know why. We’ve never had the kind of relationship where I just call her up and chat, but something told me to do it, and to do it now.
So, I got on my phone and booked a very expensive last-minute flight, then crawled out from under Callum’s hold and packed a bag. Now that I’m here, standing in front of my parents’ front door, sweltering, I have no idea what convinced me this was a good idea. It’s too late now, though.
I raise my fist and rap my knuckles against the giant white door that could use a new coat of paint. This is the same house I grew up in, and I don’t think anything has changed over the years. Hell, the mailbox is still crooked from when Talia backed into it a month after getting her license.
I hold my breath, waiting for someone to answer. I release it when I hear shuffling inside, and I smile, imagining my father pushing out of his old recliner with a curse. But when the door swings open, it’s not my dad at all.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her and truly looked at her.
Her hair, which has always been a few shades of red lighter than mine, is now white around the temples, showing her age.
And her brown eyes—the same boring shade as mine—look tired, like she’s been up working since the wee hours of the morning, and knowing her, she probably has.
She was always an early riser, even when we had nothing going on.
Give her five minutes, and she could fill a day with activities.
“Chloe? What are you…” She shakes her head like she can’t believe her eyes. “What are you doing here?”
“Surprise,” I say, but there’s no real enthusiasm behind it.
“Well, I’d say.” She smiles, then opens her arms. “Come here.”
The second I fall against her, something inside me breaks, and all the tears I’ve been holding back since I walked out of Callum’s apartment fall like a levee breaking during a raging storm.
“Oh, Chloe girl,” she says as she rubs my back, and I can’t remember the last time she called me that. Certainly not since I married Callum, that’s for sure. She’s been mad at me since then. “What’s going on?”
“It’s…everything.”
I feel her nod, then she’s ushering me inside.
“Honey?” she calls to my father. “Chloe’s here!”
“What? My little lucky charm?”
I hear my father push out of his chair, then the string of cuss words follows, and I smile. I try to wipe my tears before he makes it into the foyer, but it’s pointless. The second he sees me, he knows something is wrong.
“What did that boy do to you?”
I huff out a laugh. “No, Dad. I promise. It wasn’t him. It was me.”
My mother puts her arm on my shoulder. “We’re going to go out back and talk. Bring us some iced tea, will you?”
Dad nods, not taking his eyes off me, and I bet he’s already thinking of a medicine he could create that would kill Callum in an instant. But it’s not my husband’s fault I’m crying. It’s my own, and that’s the exact reason I’m here.
My mother leads us out back, and I realize right away I was wrong about the house not changing.
Instead of the old, rickety porch they had, there’s now a full patio complete with comfortable-looking rocking chairs and a table that has an umbrella poking out through the middle of it.
There’s even a firepit, which is the most surprising of all, considering my parents never used to like building fires when we’d go camping.
We settle onto two chairs, but we don’t say anything right away. My mother just lets me sit there, taking it all in. I watch the clouds move across the sky and listen to the birds chirp without a care in the world. Dad brings us two teas, and I wish it were Diet Coke, but I take a drink anyway.
“So,” my mother says, rocking back in her chair, cupping her hands around her glass after he leaves. “I’m guessing you’re not here because you have good news.”
“Actually, I do. I got a job offer. A paper in Seattle is branching out and starting a second paper. They want me to be the editor-in-chief, and I plan to accept their offer.”
“What?” She grins. “That’s incredible, Chloe!”
She sounds genuinely happy for me, and I can’t help but be a little suspicious of her reaction. She pushed me to take the internship to get me away from Callum once. Is that what she wants to happen now? Is that what I want to happen now?
No.
“I’m proud of you, you know,” she says, and my jaw slackens.
“You…are?”
“Of course. Why do you seem so surprised by that?”
“Because it’s not biology. It has nothing to do with the degree you and Dad paid for. Because it would mean I stay in Seattle with Callum. I don’t know. A whole myriad of reasons.”
She flattens her lips. “I suppose that’s fair.” She takes another sip of her tea. “I don’t hate Callum, you know.”
“Mom…”
“No, let me get this out, okay?”
I sigh, then nod. “All right. Say your piece.”
“I don’t hate him, Chloe. That boy has been nothing but good to you, and if I did hate him, that really wouldn’t be fair.
Yes, I pushed you into biology because it’s a much more stable career than writing.
I felt you needed that. Plus, I knew how much you struggled in your studies except for with that.
I thought it might be the safer choice, easier.
” She taps her wedding ring against the glass.
“I was wrong for doing that, but I was not wrong for pushing you to take that internship and sending you to London.”
I open my mouth to argue, to tell her if she hadn’t, maybe I wouldn’t be in this position with Callum now and we wouldn’t have lost three years of our marriage—but she holds her hand up to stop me, and I clamp my lips shut.
“I was married before your father.”
I shoot forward in my chair. “What?!”
“Shh!” she says, looking back into the house, where my father is focused on the news. He’s not paying us any attention at all. “Don’t be so loud.”
“Sorry.” I sit up straighter. “But what the hell do you mean you were married before? Does Dad know?”
“Of course he knows.” She leaves off the duh, but it’s still implied. “I tell your father everything.”
I snort. “But not your daughter.”
She gives me a hard look. “Now, don’t be like that. It’s not like I was trying to hide it from you. That was just a part of my life that happened a long time ago, way before you were ever even a thought. I didn’t feel like it mattered.” She sighs quietly. “Clearly, I was wrong about that.”
I tilt my head. “What do you mean?”
She doesn’t say anything right away, and for a moment, I worry she won’t elaborate at all.
Then she speaks.
“I was eighteen when I got married.”
Holy shit. That’s younger than I was!
“I met a boy in high school, and it took all of one month for him to become my whole world. I’m talking about applying to every college he applied to, canceling plans with friends in favor of being with him, breaking curfew for the first time in my life, and arguing with my parents when they tried to keep me away from him. I was in love. Truly, wholly in love.”
I can hear it in her voice. It’s almost wistful, like maybe a part of her misses him, whoever he is.
“So when he proposed just after we graduated, I said yes. It was the easiest decision of my life at the time. My parents tried to talk me out of it, much like your father and I did with you, but I wouldn’t hear it.
It didn’t matter what they thought—I wanted to be his wife more than anything in the world. I wanted to be his.”
I know exactly what she means. When Callum dropped to his knee and proposed after he was offered that first contract, all I wanted was him. It didn’t matter that I was scared or what everyone else thought. I was determined.
“I was…for, oh, about four years.”
“Did he…cheat on you?”
She laughs under her breath. “No, but it would have been a lot easier if he did.”
The number of times I thought that myself…it’s far too many to count. Of course I didn’t want to think of Callum with other people, but I didn’t want to think about him with me either, especially when I didn’t feel worthy of his love in the least.
“But the problem wasn’t him. It was me.” She points at her chest. “I soon realized that while I loved him, I wasn’t aware where I ended and he began.
We became one, and while that doesn’t sound like a bad thing straightaway, it gets very stifling after a while.
You start to wonder whether you like things because you like them or because they do.
You think about every choice you’ve ever made, and you consider if you made them because you were worried about how your partner would feel or if they truly were what was best for you.
You question everything, even yourself.” She gives a resigned smile. “Especially yourself.”
I understand what she means more than she could ever know. It’s exactly how I began to feel with Callum, and it was hard, because through it all, I truly loved him. There wasn’t a second that I didn’t. I just didn’t know how to love myself too.
“What did you do? When you were feeling like that, I mean. How did you handle it?”