Chapter 10 #2
My lips flatten. My pain and anger at his betrayal hasn’t gone away, but it’s manageable now.
Barely.
I can’t stop thinking about that day. A couple of minutes might have saved me heartache. If I’d walked into Jackson’s office two minutes earlier or two minutes later, what would I have seen?
Nothing at all? Or Rachel climbing into Jackson’s lap for a different kind of sex.
Don’t think about that now.
“I need to learn to live without you, and that means earning my own money. Maybe that eventually means we sell the house and I move somewhere else,” I say.
He frowns. “That’s our house, Ellie. For our family.”
Now would be the perfect time to tell him that I’m pregnant, and we need to figure out support for this child before a judge can sign off on our divorce after the mandatory six-month wait after filing.
I open my mouth.
“The house is yours, Ellie,” he says, reaching for my hand, but I pull it away before he can touch me.
A brief flicker of pain crosses his face, and he lowers his hand under the table, as if he knows I don’t even want to look at it, let alone have it anywhere near me.
“If you want to sell it to buy somewhere else, then that’s fine.
But it’s yours to do with whatever you want.
I promised you that I would always take care of you when I said our vows. I meant that.”
I feel my face go cold. “Don’t talk to me about vows, Jackson.”
He takes a breath and lets it out in a low, almost soundless exhale. “Sorry. I wasn’t saying it to hurt you. I just want you to understand that whatever you need, it’s yours. Um, I, uh, have to go or I’m going to be late.”
“You have a meeting around here?” Curiosity drags the question out of me before I intended to ask it.
He shrugs, looking slightly embarrassed as he lowers his voice to admit. “My therapist has an office near here. Dennis gives me a longer break so I can keep my appointments.”
I stare at him, too shocked to walk away as I’d intended. “You have a therapist?”
He nods. “I hurt you, and I don’t know why I did that when I love you. I need to know why, and I need to fix myself before I hurt someone else I love.”
“Like Rachel?”
I haven’t asked anyone about his assistant.
I haven’t been brave enough to. Not even Dennis, Jackson’s godfather, who called me to say that if I ever needed anything, he was there for me.
I didn’t take him up on his offer. I like Dennis, but seeing him would remind me of Jackson’s workplace. It’s still too raw, too painful.
He shakes his head. “Rachel quit right after what happened. She was ashamed of what we did and that you’d seen. She wanted to come apologize to you, but Dennis said you wouldn’t appreciate it.”
“He was right,” I say, wishing I could wipe the memory of that day from my mind.
I shudder at the thought of Rachel turning up at the house, knocking on the front door, and trying to apologize.
I try never to be rude. My parents raised Lila and me to be polite or say nothing when we didn’t have something nice to say, but I would slam the door in Rachel’s face so fast, I’d be in danger of taking her nose off.
Jackson continues, “I haven’t seen her since, and I don’t intend to.” He glances at his watch and stands up. “I’d better go. You have my number if you need anything.”
I watch him walk over to the counter. I don’t know what he orders, but Abby is seriously curious about him and doesn’t try to hide her interest as she makes up his drink while I sit at the table, thinking.
He’s been paying all the bills at the house.
The bills arrive, and I call to pay them, only to find out they’ve been taken care of.
Now he’s seeing a therapist? Since when?
And why is he still wearing his wedding ring when he signed and hand-delivered the divorce papers the day after he got them?
He glances at me after grabbing his coffee. I look away, pretending I’m focused on a man on his cell phone outside. Jackson doesn’t call out goodbye, though I feel him watching me.
I don’t look up again until the bell over the door chimes. Only then do I get up and return to the counter.
Abby’s eyes are big. “Was that…”
“Uh huh.”
She knows I’m married, that my husband cheated, and that we’re going through a divorce. I left out the specifics, not wanting to admit I walked into a sight that broke my heart.
“You didn’t say he was that hot.”
I stare at her. “Really?”
She smiles apologetically. “Sorry. It’s the time of the month and my hormones are too loud to ignore.
Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, he is absolutely the biggest turd in the world.
No amount of flushing would deal with him.
And if he eventually did get flushed, he’d cause a blockage that required a plumber.
I forgot to spit in his coffee, but I can totally do it if he comes back. ”
She draws a smile from me as I rejoin her behind the counter. “No need to spit in his coffee, Abby, though I do appreciate the offer. Do you want to go on your break now?”
She snorts. “What you had wasn’t much of a break. What did the cheating turd want?”
I shrug, my eyes sliding to the glass doors. “He wanted me to know that he was there if I needed anything. I asked what he was doing here, and he said his therapist has an office around here.”
Her eyes widen. “He’s seeing a therapist?”
“Apparently,” I mutter.
She tilts her head. “And you didn’t tell him to go?”
“I told him after he cheated that no amount of therapy is fixing our marriage, and I meant it.” I shoo her toward the end of the counter. “Now go take a break before we get the students in. I’ll need the bathroom a million times later, anyway.”
To throw up and throw up some more.
On my way home from work, I stop at the grocery store to pick up essentials to get me through to Saturday, my usual grocery shopping day. Ever since my morning sickness started, all I can keep down is dry toast, plain yoghurt, and ginger ale, and I’m out of all three.
Back at home, I fall back into my usual routine.
I make myself a cup of tea and sip it as I go through the mail, then I clean up the kitchen, do a load of laundry, and work my way around the house, avoiding looking at the empty walls missing photos of Jackson and me.
I thought taking them down would make it easier to live in this house.
In some ways, it has. But the absence of all those happy memories in gold antique-looking frames is so notable that it hurts in a completely different way.
I can shove the photos in a box and hide them in the garage.
That doesn’t mean I can forget they ever existed.
I run the vacuum around, clean the bathroom, and march past the spare bedroom we’d always intended to be a nursery for the baby we never had. Now that the baby is coming, I can’t even walk past that closed door without my eyes filling with tears.
I feel itchy at home, unable to keep still, and in every room, I see memories of my once-happy life with Jackson.