CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I climb the porch steps to my parents’ house, breathing in the scent of lilacs. May is approaching, the last month of spring, one of my favorite months. I drove straight here after dropping Lisset off at school. Although her eyes are still red and puffy from her crying spell yesterday, she seemed to be walking lighter, as though her confession removed some of the burden from her shoulders.
Gideon kept up a comforting stream of messages last night, making sure we were both okay. He wanted to come over, but I was too physically and emotionally exhausted. We arranged to meet later this afternoon before I pick Lisset up from school. I have one shoot scheduled for today, an undemanding one where I’m required to whip up milkshakes, and it should finish before one. I feel wary of unburdening myself to him and aching for his support at the same time.
Grandma opens the door and welcomes me in. I called her first thing this morning, asking if we could talk. To her credit, she didn’t ask any questions, simply told me to come over when I was ready and she’d be waiting.
I decline her offer of coffee and we make our way to the living room. I deliberately chose a time when I knew my parents wouldn’t be here. They reserve Monday mornings for grocery runs.
“Something is troubling you,” Grandma says the moment we settle on the couch. “If I have to guess, I’d say that whatever it is has been troubling you for quite some time.”
I wrap my arms tightly around my middle, struggling to find the words.
She searches my face. “Tell me what’s eating you up inside.”
“It’s a monstrous thing,” I whisper.
“Then let the monster out so it can go devour someone else.”
Tears burn my eyes. “It shames me that I wasn’t brave enough to leave Oliver,” I finally get out in a tormented rush, almost choking on the words that have held my mind in a stranglehold for so long.
Grandma doesn’t say a word. She sits with me in the quiet following the ugliness of that confession and waits, as though she knows the rest of it has to pour out of me without interruption.
“I should have done the right thing and left him before he left me. I should have protected myself and I should have protected Lisset. Only I didn’t. I continued loving him, hoping he would change.” My voice cracks. “I stayed, even when his words got meaner, the shoves got harder, and the coldness became icy.”
I stayed when his hands fisted painfully in my hair. When he placed his forearm across my throat to cut off my breath. When he ignored me for days on end as though I was invisible.
Those are memories I can’t haul out for my grandmother, but from the pain etched on her face she comprehends on some level how bad it was.
“You stayed for the hope.”
My throat tightens at the gentle understanding in her voice. “While a part of me realized my marriage will only get worse, another part of me kept hoping we could return to the beginning when we were crazy in love with each another, when he was still charming and wonderful.”
She sighs softly. “Katherine, I want you to be at peace. Your life is not defined by the good or bad things that happen to you, but by your reaction to them. You’re so consumed by shame and regret that you’re exhausting yourself. You need to learn to forgive.”
“I can’t forgive him,” I say vehemently.
“I’m not talking about him.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You need to forgive yourself.”
I stare at her, stricken. Then I ask the question that haunts me. “Why wasn’t I brave enough to leave?”
“I don’t know the answer to that question. Neither do you. Maybe you were one step away from leaving. Who knows? But I want you to stop punishing yourself,” she says firmly. “And stop torturing yourself with the what-ifs. A better question to ask yourself is, what now ?”
I sit rigidly in my chair, trying to absorb her words, the loving wisdom in them.
She rests her hand supportively on top of mine. “You might not have been brave enough to leave, but now you have the chance to be brave enough to open yourself up to love again. And I want you to take it.”
I hop into the shower and change my outfit before Gideon arrives. Even though I wear an apron when I work, food smells tend to seep into my skin and clothes.
“Hey,” Gideon says when I answer the door, his eyes soft as they sweep over me.
“Hey.”
He gestures to my porch chairs. “Shall we sit?”
A ribbon of nervous tension coils inside me. “Okay.”
“How’s Lisset doing?” he asks, as soon as we’re seated.
My tension eases a fraction. It warms me that Gideon’s first concern is my daughter’s wellbeing.
“She pretty much cried herself to sleep last night but she seems better this morning.” When his face tightens, I add quickly, “She’s carried this secret around for months, bottling up her feelings. It sounds awful, but I think it’s good she got them out. I’m hoping we can move on from here.”
His eyes fasten on me. “What about you? How are you doing?”
“Me? I’m...”
How am I? I don’t know. Exhausted. Stressed. Sad. Grateful for his presence, while also a little nervous about his expectations.
Mostly, though, I’m full of longing for a different past.
I imagine an alternate reality where I met Gideon first and fell madly in love with him. Where I was still the Katherine who wore pretty floral dresses and smiled easily. Who didn’t flinch when a man raised his arm.
But thinking about what my life could have been is the path to bitter madness. And if I had met Gideon first, would I have Lisset? I wouldn’t change anything if it meant she wasn’t in my world.
“Kate?”
He’s still waiting for my answer. I twist my hands together in my lap and try to focus. “I’m doing okay.”
It’s clear he doesn’t believe me. To be fair, I don’t believe me either. It’s funny, even though he’s seated, hands clasped loosely between his legs, there’s a contained, restless energy about him.
“Tell me about your ex-husband.”
“Gideon,” is all I can say, my breath catching, my heart racing.
His eyes are darker than I’ve ever seen them, locked on my face. “Did he hurt you?” The question seems to come from a place deep inside him. A place full of fury and anguish.
I draw in a ragged breath. “Yes.”
“Kate.” He buries his face in his hands, overcome.
Then he lifts his head and shifts forward in his chair, as though he intends to comfort me, but I lift a hand to stop him. “Don’t,” I plead. “If you touch me, I’ll start crying and I don’t want to cry right now.”
After a lengthy pause, like he’s wrestling with himself, Gideon nods. “Tell me about him,” he says again.
I release a shaky sigh. “Why?”
“Because I think it will be good for you,” he answers. “Why don’t you want to tell me?”
“Because...” Pain squeezes my chest. “Because I’m scared you’ll look at me differently.”
His jaw tightens. “Do you think what that scumbag did to you in your marriage will make a difference as to how I view you? How I feel about you?”
“Yes.” A whisper. A confession.
There’s a flicker of something in his face. “How can you possibly think that?”
“I don’t like the person I was in my marriage.” My fingers twist. “I don’t even know if I like myself much now.”
“Fortunately, I like you enough for the both of us.” Gideon says it so firmly, so unwaveringly, a lump forms in my throat. “I like you enough to ask you to please tell me what happened with him, because I’m guessing you haven’t told anyone?”
I shake my head wordlessly. No, I haven’t told anyone. My family knows—or guesses—some of what it was like in my marriage, Grandma the most out of everyone, but I’ve tried to keep the full picture from them.
“You can’t keep bottling it all up,” he tells me softly. “Lisset was brave enough to unburden herself and you saw how much that helped her. You can do the same.”
It’s the one argument I can’t fight. Lisset reached a point where she could no longer carry the weight of her secret. How can I move forward with Gideon when I’m still shouldering the burden of my failed marriage? Maybe it’s time to shrug off just a little bit of that weight.
“Oliver wasn’t a great husband,” I admit, after giving myself a moment to shape my story. “We were both unhappy. Actually, he was more unhappy than I was and sometimes he took it out on me. In the end, it didn’t work out between us.”
Gideon stares at me. And in the fiercest tone I’ve heard him use, he says, “Don’t give me the sanitized version.”
I swallow. “It’s too ugly to tell you everything.”
His expression is bleak. “Kate, if you weren’t spared in your marriage, why should you spare me? Yes, it’s going to feel like a gut punch having to hear what you went through and knowing I wasn’t there to help, but please, for the love of all things still good in this world, don’t spare me.”
And so, with memories shuddering through me, I tell him.
I tell him how Oliver distanced himself from me after Lisset was born and what an awful thing it was to experience, your husband falling out of love with you while you’re still in love with him. To hear the impatience in his voice and view the contempt in his eyes. It shames me now how thirsty I was for his approval, how starved I was for his attention.
In a desperate attempt to recapture his love, I tried to mold myself into more of what I thought he wanted, making myself smaller and smaller and Oliver bigger and bigger, as if inflating him would somehow change his heart.
At work, I knew my own worth. I didn’t shape myself into someone else to please others. People respected me at work. So how could I have thought so little of myself in my marriage?
Ironically, the more I molded myself, the more Oliver’s disdain grew and his temper flared, showing up in bruises on my skin from him grabbing me, a swollen face from a slap, gashes from shoves into sharp-edged furniture. Yes, he hurt me physically, but he was also remarkably skilled at wielding his words like a baseball bat. And sometimes that hurt more.
The entire time I’m talking, Gideon doesn’t take his eyes off me, digesting everything, his body rigid, like he’s bracing himself against the onslaught.
Coming out of my narrative, I blink away the memories. “Oliver wrote in his letter that it was all my fault because I let myself go after I had Lisset.”
Gideon’s throat works. He has to give himself a moment before he can speak. “No, you didn’t let yourself go. He let you go. You and that beautiful girl. He doesn’t deserve either of you. He never did.”
Then he stands and pulls me to my feet, holding me tight against him, as if he can’t bear even an inch of space between us. His arms wrap protectively around me. It feels so good to be held like this. As if I matter.
“I’m so sorry,” Gideon whispers into my hair. “I wish I had been there to stop him from hurting you.”
Hearing Gideon’s desperate wish, feeling his arms around me, I feel another agonizing pull at my chest. My shoulders start shaking. If only he had been there to stop Oliver. How different everything might have been.
“It’s okay,” he murmurs. “You don’t have to hold back. You don’t have to retreat to the shower to cry alone. I’m here. You can let go.”
And I do. It’s like a tidal wave of pain and sorrow and anger crashing over me, submerging me. I sob into Gideon’s chest.
His arms tighten around me as I weep for that lost and lonely woman trapped in her marriage. I want to hug her and tell her she’ll get through it, that she’s stronger than she thinks she is. I want to tell her she’s not alone, that she has family she can turn to, family who will love and support her without question.
But I don’t know if she’ll believe me because her husband was so good at keeping her isolated. Moving her to another town, making sure the marriage was all-consuming, eroding her confidence so she doesn’t make friends and doesn’t reach out to anyone. Not even her own family.
I don’t know how much time passes before I finally stop shaking and my tears dry up. I feel drained, exhausted beyond measure.
Gideon presses a soft kiss to my hair. In a voice so quiet it’s terrifying, he says, “If Oliver comes anywhere near you and Lisset, I won’t be held responsible for my actions.”
I say wearily, “As far as I know, he’s living in France with the woman he left me for. I don’t know the details. I don’t want to know.”
“What about any of the people you knew from your marriage? Are you in contact with any of them?”
“No. I wasn’t close to anyone.” My voice is slightly muffled against his chest. “When I returned to Brown Oaks, I wanted to leave behind everyone and everything that had any link to Oliver. I wanted no reminders of my marriage. I still don’t.”
We lapse into silence. Surprise trickles through my veins when I realize how comfortable and safe I feel tucked against his chest.
Eventually, though, Gideon pulls back to look at me. “What is this letter Lisset mentioned?”
I exhale heavily. “I came home from work one day to discover that Oliver had taken all his stuff and left us. He didn’t even say goodbye to Lisset. The only thing he left behind was that letter to me, a litany of all my failings.”
He closes his eyes briefly in what looks like a grimace. “Why did you keep the letter?”
“I honestly don’t know. I kept thinking there had to be truth to his words and I needed to learn from them. Maybe I kept it as my punishment. Everything Oliver said was all twisted up in my head. It got to the point where I couldn’t distinguish truth from lies.”
“Please destroy the letter. For your own sake. For Lisset.”
For us .
He doesn’t say the words, but they hang in the space between us.
“I tore the letter up last night,” I tell him. Into hundreds of tiny pieces, in much the same way it tore my heart to pieces for so many years.
“Good.” He smiles at me, patient and tender. “Now we get to start afresh.”