Chapter 25
I had been rehearsing this conversation in my head for two weeks and none of the versions I had practiced felt anything like what was actually happening in this living room right now.
Brendon was sitting on the edge of the couch looking up at me and his face was doing something I had never seen it do in three years.
Not angry, not cold, just completely open in a way that made him look younger than he was, like every layer of composure and polish that he walked around with every day had just fallen off and what was underneath it was just a man who didn’t understand what was happening to him.
“I don’t understand,” he said. For the third time. “Ivy, I genuinely do not understand what you’re telling me right now.”
“I know,” I said. “I know this feels like it’s coming from nowhere and I’m sorry for that. I am. But I need you to hear me when I tell you that this isn’t about something you did wrong.”
“Then what is it about.” Not a question. A statement that was waiting to become one.
I looked at him and I tried to find the version of this that was kind without being dishonest and I kept coming up empty because there wasn’t one. There was just the truth and the damage it was going to do and the fact that I owed him the truth more than I owed him comfort.
“We’re not a good fit,” I said. “Not the way two people need to be when they’re building a life together. I’ve known it for a while and I kept telling myself it would work itself out but it hasn’t and it won’t and staying isn’t fair to either one of us.”
He stared at me.
Then he got off the couch and got on his knees in front of me and I felt my chest crack open because I had never seen Brendon on his knees for anything in his life other than to propose and he didn’t want to get down then, honestly.
“Don’t do this,” he said. His voice was different now. Lower. Stripped of everything. “Ivy please don’t do this. Tell me what’s wrong. Tell me what I need to fix and I will fix it. Whatever it is. I will fix it.”
“You can’t fix it Brendon.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do know that.” I looked down at him and felt every complicated thing I had been carrying for weeks move through me at once.
“You deserve better than this. You deserve a woman who is all the way present, all the way in it, somebody who fits the life you’re building without having to reshape herself to do it.
That’s not me. I’ve been trying to be that and I can’t keep doing it. ”
“What does that mean.” He searched my face. “What do you mean reshape yourself.”
I exhaled. “When I’m with you I have to be a different version of myself.
The version that fits your image, your world, the way people see you.
I smoke. I like to go out, I like to be in the streets sometimes, I’m not a stay home and host dinner parties woman and every time I’m around your people I feel like I’m performing something I’m not. ”
“I don’t care if you smoke,” he said immediately. “Smoke. Just do it outside because of my allergies, that’s all I’ve ever asked.”
“See.” I looked at him gently. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Even that. Even something that small has a condition attached to it and I understand why, it makes complete sense, but that’s not— I can’t explain it better than that Brendon. We just don’t fit. And I am so sorry.”
He stayed on his knees for a long moment.
Then something shifted in his face. The grief was still there but something was moving underneath it now. Calculation. The part of him that had built a career on finding leverage and using it.
He stood up slowly.
“I am two days away from closing the biggest deal of my career,” he said.
His voice was different. Steadier. Like he had found a foothold.
“Two days. I need you to give me two weeks after that closing. Just two weeks of real effort, premarital counseling, both of us fully committed. And I will write you a check for five hundred thousand dollars to just try.”
I stared at him.
Then I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Not because it was funny but because the absurdity of it confirmed everything I already knew. He had just offered me half a million dollars to stay in a relationship. And all it did was make me more certain.
“I have to go,” I said.
I walked to the bedroom and pulled my bags out of the closet and started moving through the room methodically. Clothes, shoes, the things I would need immediately. I would send movers for the rest throughout the week.
Brendon appeared in the doorway.
“So that’s it,” he said. “You’re just packing and leaving.”
“I’ll coordinate with you to get my things out of the house. I’ll keep it clean and organized and it won’t take long.”
“Ivy.” His voice broke on my name. He was crying now, really crying, not quietly either, and some part of me that still cared about this man felt the weight of it.
“Three years. We built something. You’re just walking out like none of it meant anything.”
“It meant something,” I said. “It meant a lot. You are a good man Brendon and I genuinely mean that.”
“Then stay.” He crossed the room and grabbed my hands. “Please stay.”
I held his hands for a second. Then I gently pulled mine back and kept packing.
The crying shifted. I heard it change in real time, the grief curdling into something else, something that had edges. I had heard that shift before in my life growing up and I recognized it before he even opened his mouth.
“You know what,” he said. His voice was flat now. Cold. “You were nothing when I met you. Your businesses were barely breathing. You were three months from closing the tax company when we got together.”
I stopped moving but didn’t turn around.
“All those clients that came in your second year,” he said. “You remember how your business turned around almost overnight? That wasn’t luck. That was me. I made calls. I sent people to you. I built your reputation in this city and you don’t even know it.”
I turned and looked at him.
“I was going to turn you into something,” he said. “And you want to walk out and throw all of that away.”
“I built my businesses my damn self,” I said evenly. “I appreciate anything you contributed but I put in the work and don’t you minimize that.”
“You know what else, I was sleeping with my assistant this whole time.” He said it like he was commenting on the weather. “The whole time. Since the beginning. So you’re not leaving me for something you had. You’re leaving because you never had what you thought you did.”
The room went completely quiet.
I looked at him and I looked at his face and I knew it was true. Not because of how he said it but because of how he looked immediately after he said it. The micro second of satisfaction before the regret moved in.
“Thank you,” I said.
He frowned. “What?”
“Thank you for finally showing me who you are.” I zipped my bag and picked it up. “Because I have been feeling guilty for weeks. I have been tearing myself apart over doing this to a good man. And you just took all of that off me.”
“Ivy I was just—”
“Don’t.” I picked up the second bag.
“Don’t tell me you were joking. Don’t take that back. We both know you meant it.”
I moved toward the door and he grabbed my arm. Hard.
“Let go of me.”
“We’re not done talking—“
“Let go of my arm Brendon.”
He didn’t. He pulled me back toward the closet and I stumbled slightly and felt the heat of it move through me fast. I set my bags down and reached past him to my safe on the shelf, put in the code, and had my hand around the grip of my gun before the door fully swung open.
I turned around and pointed it at him.
“Get out of my face,” I said. Completely calm. “And let me leave.”
He looked at the gun and his hands came up slowly. The Brendon I thought I knew was completely gone. What was standing in front of me was a man I had never actually met before tonight.
“Step back,” I said.
He stepped back.
I picked up my bags without taking my eyes off him, walked out of that closet, walked through that bedroom, walked out the front door and put my bags in my truck and pulled out of the driveway.
I drove three blocks before I had to pull over.
I sat there on the side of the road and pressed both hands flat on my steering wheel and just breathed.
In and out. The gun was back in my purse.
My hands were steady but my chest wasn’t.
Everything I had just done and everything he had just shown me was sitting in the car with me all at once and I needed a minute before I could drive again.
He had been cheating since the beginning.
The only good thing about that was that the trifling dog didn’t bring me back any STDs.
I just had my yearly check up a month ago, and for his sake, he better be lucky.
I was still gonna make another appointment, because hearing him say that was making me feel sick.
I had been tearing myself apart with guilt over a man who had been lying to me from the jump. Now, I didn’t regret anything I did.
After a few minutes I picked up my phone and called Griz.
He answered on the first ring.
“I’m on my way,” I said. “I already have the address from the tracker I put on your car.”
—
The next week moved the way things moved after a storm.
Slow and necessary. Brendon and I had minimal contact, just what was required to untangle three years of shared assets and joint accounts.
I moved my money first, transferred everything that was mine into accounts that were mine only, had my name removed from anything we had shared that I didn’t want attached to me anymore.
He asked me almost every conversation if there was someone else.
I never answered.
He offered me a portion of the money from the house closing and I declined every time. I didn’t want his money. I wanted it clean and I wanted it done.