Chapter 37 There’s No Logic in Love
M ary and Stella left shortly after dinner ended.
Stella didn’t give Mary enough time to say goodbye to any of us before they left.
The moment Mary returned with Monica from outside, she grabbed Mary by the arm and told her they were leaving, and that was that.
Truthfully, I think she was embarrassed by her behavior and by having her son put her in her place.
With everything I knew about Stella, I’m sure no one had ever done that before, let alone her son.
In Stella’s world, people did what Stella wanted, and it wasn’t so hard to imagine why Ethan had gone along with what she wanted for this wedding for so long.
I woke up some odd-time later, my mother gently shaking me awake and telling me to go to bed. I did as she said, kissing both her and my father goodnight and then making my way up the stairs to my room. Arriving on the second floor, my eyes went right for Monica’s bedroom door.
Closed.
Light bled from underneath so I could assume they were both still awake, but that’s as far as I could assume. Wanting so badly to stop and listen at their door but refusing myself the guilty pleasure, I passed their bedroom and went straight to mine.
I waited up for another hour before I finally heard Monica’s bedroom door open and shut. Then came the creak from the second step on the stairs, telling me that someone had gone downstairs. And if I knew Ethan as well as I thought I did, I knew exactly which room of the house he was going to.
I was out of bed and quietly closing my door behind me before I could really even think it through. Ethan was waiting for me in the kitchen which had somehow become our meeting spot over the months, and I had to know what was going on.
I needed to know why he just spent over two hours with my sister alone in her bedroom.
The second step from the top creaked just the same for me as it had for Ethan as I descended down the stairs in relative darkness.
The house was a particular kind of silent that pumped the blood through my heart fast. I felt like I was sneaking around, tip-toeing behind everyone’s back to do something bad.
In all truth, that’s exactly what I was doing.
Late night, secret meetings with my sister’s fiancé was indeed a very bad thing to do.
Except when I stepped foot into the kitchen, it wasn’t Ethan I found alone in the pale glow coming from the overhead light.
It was Monica and her bloodshot eyes that landed on mine the moment I entered.
A breath shocked my lips apart in a short gasp. The blood racing through my veins felt the shock too, propelling my heart to thump harder with the sensation of being caught red-handed.
“What’re you doing down here?” Monica’s voice came out hoarse and ached with exhaustion.
“Uh—” Lie, quick. Lie quick or else. “I was just coming to get some water.”
“How about something a little stronger?”
Before I could protest, Monica was pouring me a glass of wine. She handed over the glass, and I noticed that there was no glass for her sitting around.
“Aren’t you having one?”
“Yup,” she replied, tilting the bottle of wine back against her lips and gulping back the chardonnay without batting an eye.
Oh no.
I knew it wasn’t, but I asked anyway, “Everything okay?”
She took in a breath through her nose, her lips still pursed together, and shook her head.
“No. Everything’s not fine.”
My stomach buckled down, caving into itself out of guilt because it knew.
I knew it before she said it, even though Ethan said he would wait until the trip was over.
The pieces were easy enough to fit together.
Bloodshot eyes, excessive drinking, and for someone who had the exterior of a rock, Monica looked like she might crack open with a simple touch.
“There’s not gonna be a wedding.”
Monica’s voice broke halfway through telling me, and so did my heart for the billionth time today.
He did it. Ethan finally did it.
The engagement was over. Ethan was a single man. He chose his happiness over what everyone else wanted him to do—myself included—and I wanted to love him more for that. It was the right choice.
The right choice didn’t feel like the right choice though. It felt like my head was being pushed underwater and no matter how I breathed, all I got was more stinging water in my lungs.
Neither Monica nor I would be the same after this. Monica now bared the scars of a broken heart, something she’d never experienced before now, and I had to bear the scar of knowledge that I was the one who broke her heart.
Ethan might have been the one to cut their ties, but I was the one who handed him the scissors. And now, I had to dig the blades in deeper, carving out the letters to spell how much I hated myself for the sick show I now had to put on.
“What? Why?” I forced myself to ask, hearing the shame burning through my own voice.
There was just too much of it to hide.
“Because he doesn’t want to marry me. I tried to talk him out of it and reason with him, but it didn’t matter what I said. His mind was made up.”
The bottle of wine lifted to her lips, staying there for many seconds before she brought it back down. “I even told him I loved him like a fucking idiot.”
Freezing cold horror washed the blood from my cheeks.
“What?”
“I said it and—” She sniffled, and I willed the room darker so I couldn’t see her tears I helped cause. “And he couldn’t say it back.”
Before I could think, I asked, “Did you mean it?”
If she meant it, I was done for. Dead. Buried. Put a nail through my own heart.
“I didn’t love him,” she started, her voice heavy.
“Not when he first proposed. I just said yes because I was scared, but somewhere along the way… I think I started to? Without really realizing it. He was just there, and I knew he was always going to be there, and I fell in love with the idea of always having someone there. Since Ethan was that someone, I guess I fell in love with him too because of it.”
She brushed her fingers across her cheek, staring at nothing. “I just didn’t realize it until he had one foot out the door.”
I heard it said somewhere that someone with a conscience who had done something bad—something sinful—that their conscience will be their greatest punishment.
They would never be able to escape the acknowledgement of that sin, and that in and of itself would be their own self-entrapping purgatory for the rest of their lives.
And this was mine.
In the end, I’d become the one thing I promised myself I never would.
After all the tears, heartbreak, and betrayal I’d gone through, it still didn’t stop me from becoming the other woman.
I was the worst kind of hypocrite there was, because I went one step further than the people who did it to me.
I did it to someone that I loved and who loved me back, and there was no excuse good enough, no love pure enough, no connection profound enough to justify that kind of betrayal.
Sorrow and shame squeezed around my neck with both unforgiving hands, and I choked on my guilt. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s my own fault for trying.”
“What? No it isn’t.”
“Yes it is. We tried to force a relationship out of circumstance, and I should know that never works out because I see it all the fucking time at my work.”
She pulled back a quick swig while I looked down at my untouched drink.
“We get more divorce cases at the firm than anything else—people who got married for all the wrong reasons—and I just thought I was smarter than that. I thought that I could logic my way into a stable marriage, but there’s no logic in love.
It’s just a crap-shoot of dumb luck and dumb people. ”
She might have been tipsy, but she wasn’t wrong.
“What’re you going to do?”
“Well,” Monica sniffled again, eyeing down the hole of her wine bottle.
“I told Ethan he could sleep on the upstairs couch for the night so I don’t have to tell Mom and Dad first thing in the morning and can spare myself a few more hours of dignity.
Then, we’ll all go home and… I’ll start over. All fucking over again.”
There was the anger that was bound to show up any second now.
How could it not? Her entire future just turned messy and uncertain, and she had no idea the real cause of why.
Part of me wondered if I should tell her, but the thought of her never speaking to me again tied my mouth shut.
Telling her would only incite more pain, and there was already enough of that going around these days.
“Is it something about me?” she asked, sounding truly curious. “Is there something about me that makes me fundamentally unlovable?”
Shaded by the darkness in the kitchen, a wet tear splashed against my face.
“I love you.”
At that, Monica nodded and a half-hearted smile twisted onto her lips, but fell quickly after it appeared.
“Thanks, sis. I just want more… and I thought I had it.”
Monica finished her bottle of wine, and I handed her my glass. We hugged, and I tried not to break down in her arms. I had failed her so fantastically. She sent me back up to my room and not a moment too soon as I was one heartfelt comment away from complete meltdown.
When I reached my bedroom door, my lips were trembling and my throat was screaming for a release of the cries I was holding in. Everything hurt. All I wanted was to throw myself on my childhood bed and cry until I didn’t have a voice.
But as I opened up the door and stepped into my room, my heart pulled me back as I saw him sitting on the bed, waiting for me. Ethan looked up, his eyes sinking to mine and burning my whole world up with one look.
“Hi,” he spoke, voice soft and low.
I should have told him he shouldn’t be in here. I should have told him to go to the couch where Monica expected him to be. I should have said or done a lot of things.
Instead, I closed my bedroom door and locked it behind me.