He Rejected Me For His Ex (A Wife's Retribution #7)

Chapter 1

Ialmost didn’t make dinner tonight.

It’s been one of those weeks where I’ve run out of ways to pretend everything’s fine, and the honest answer is that I don’t know what I’m still pretending.

Something’s been wrong with Drew for a month, maybe longer.

He’s present but not here. Sitting across from me at this same table every night, answering when I talk to him, but there’s a delay now, like my voice has to travel farther to reach him than it used to.

I make the chicken anyway, because that’s what I do.

I handle things. The dishwasher’s dying, so now I wash everything by hand.

The mortgage company sent a letter I haven’t opened yet.

Drew’s mother called twice, and I called her back both times so he wouldn’t have to.

I’ve been managing the edges of our life so quietly that he probably doesn’t notice the edges exist.

He comes in through the back door at six fifteen, right on time, and I almost feel silly for worrying.

He kisses my temple the way he always does.

He asks about my day. He opens a beer and leans against the counter while I finish the potatoes, and for a few minutes the kitchen feels like ours again.

Then I bring up Sabrina and the whole thing shifts.

I don’t bring her up with any weight. There’s no reason to.

Donna mentioned at the grocery store that Sabrina Keller moved back to town, leased the old Merrill place out on Route 9, apparently for good this time instead of just visiting her mother.

I repeat it the way I’d repeat any small-town gossip, already half thinking about whether the potatoes need more salt.

“Huh,” Drew says. “That’s... Yeah. I heard something about that.”

He takes a drink of his beer. A long one. He’s not looking at me anymore. He’s looking at a spot on the counter instead.

I almost ask. Almost say, does that bother you?

But I don’t, because why would it? Sabrina is a name from before I existed in his life.

A girl he dated in college, the kind of story that starts with back when I was twenty-two and ends with a shrug.

He told me about her early on, the way people hand over their history when they’re falling in love.

She left. It wrecked him. He got over it, met me, built a life.

Ancient history, Rach. His exact words, and he said them so many times in those early years that I stopped needing to hear them.

So, I add salt to the potatoes and change the subject.

Over dinner he moves food around his plate more than he eats it. I tell him about the dishwasher repair I booked for the morning.

“Good,” he says, which isn’t the right word for a repair bill that might make it more feasible to just buy a whole new dishwasher, but I let it go.

I ask about his latest work project, and he gives me three sentences where he’d normally give me ten.

I ask if he’s feeling okay and he says he’s fine, just tired.

Tired has been his answer for weeks. Tired from work. Tired from the stress of the business carrying too much debt. Tired the way people get in their mid-thirties when the thing they built starts feeling heavier than it looked.

“You’re sure you’re all right?” I try one more time. “You’ve seemed off lately. And not just tonight.”

He sets his fork down. He puts both hands flat on the table, fingers spread, and stares at them like he’s checking that they’re still attached.

“Rachel,” he says. The whole name. Not Rach like he normally would.

“Yeah?”

“Can we talk after dinner?”

My stomach drops, but my first though is money.

That’s where my mind goes. The business is in worse trouble than he’s told me, or there are repairs to the building that need done that I’m not aware of, or he’s thinking about taking it in a new direction…

In any case, we’re about to have the kind of conversation that starts with I didn’t want to worry you.

I’m already building the plan. We’ll refinance.

We’ll cut back. I’ll pick up something part-time until things level out so we don’t have to dip into our savings and retirement accounts.

“Of course,” I say. “Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out.”

Something crosses his face that I can’t read. He picks up his fork and pushes a potato from one side of the plate to the other. We finish dinner, I clear the plates, and wash them by hand because of the broken dishwasher. I’m drying the last one when he speaks from the table behind me.

“I don’t know how to say this without it sounding terrible.”

I put the plate down carefully, turn around, and lean against the counter, prepared to be calm and soothing like I always am when he’s in crisis mode.

“Just tell me,” I say. “I’d rather know than guess.”

He won’t look at me. His thumb is working the edge of the table, back and forth.

“Something happened to me when Sabrina came back,” he says. “Something I wasn’t expecting.”

The sentence sits between us. For a second I don’t understand it. Those words in that order, Sabrina and happened and something, refuse to arrange themselves into anything that belongs in my kitchen. I thought we were about to talk business and money and… Not whatever this is.

“What do you mean, something happened?”

“Nothing physical. I swear. I haven’t touched her. I wouldn’t.” He says it fast, like the denial was the first part he rehearsed. “But when I found out she was back, I felt... I don’t know. Like a door opened that I thought was sealed shut.”

I don’t move. My hands are wet. The dish towel is right beside me and I don’t reach for it because reaching for anything feels like agreeing to keep going with this conversation, and if I stand very still maybe he’ll hear how insane he sounds and take all of it back.

But he doesn’t take it back. He keeps talking, and every sentence is worse than the last. He’s been fighting it. He tried to ignore it. He told himself it was nostalgia, that it would pass, but it hasn’t passed, and he owes it to both of us to be honest. A man owes himself honesty, at least.

“I think some part of me has been waiting for her,” he says. “This whole time. Even when I didn’t know I was. I think that’s partly why I didn’t want to have kids…”

I hear it. I hear every word. I think about the times I thought about how lovely it’d be to have a baby with him only to be told that the time wasn’t right, but soon…

I think about all of our years together.

The years I thought we were happy and building a solid future together.

Ten years of anniversaries. The trip to the coast. The night he held my face in both hands and told me he’d never been surer of anything.

For ten years I thought each of those moments was him choosing me again, and every single one was him checking a door he’d never closed.

Making sure his place was still held. I wasn’t the love of his life.

I was what he did with the time while he waited for it to show up.

“You’ve been waiting for her,” I say. My voice comes out level and far away, like it belongs to someone standing behind me. “For all these years while you pretended to love me?”

“Not consciously. I swear I didn’t know…”

“But you did.” I pick up the towel now. I dry my hands.

Slow, careful, one finger at a time, because it’s the only thing I can control in this kitchen right now.

“You just said it, Drew. You said some part of you was waiting. If some part of you was waiting for her than I didn’t have your whole heart. ”

He opens his mouth. Closes it.

“Were you waiting on our anniversary last year?” I ask. “When you gave me the earrings and told me the next ten would be even better?”

“Rachel.”

“Were you waiting the night you said you’d never been surer of anything?”

“That was real. All of it was real.”

“And also, the whole time, you were waiting.” I fold the towel in half and set it on the counter. “Both of those can’t be true.”

He drops his head. He’s quiet for a long time.

When he looks up, his eyes are wet, and the thing I can’t forgive is that the tears aren’t grief.

They’re relief. He looks like a man who’s set down something heavy he’s been carrying uphill a long way, and the lightness in him is so obvious that I have to put a hand on the counter to keep my balance.

“I think I need to go,” he says. “Not forever. Just... I need to figure out what’s real.”

“No,” I say.

He blinks. “No?”

“Not ‘not forever’. If you walk out of this house to go figure out whether your college girlfriend is your soulmate or if you should continue to settle for me, you don’t get to come back to see if I’m still here.

That’s not how this works.” My voice is still level.

I’m holding it there with everything I’ve got, and underneath it my whole chest is burning. “If you go, you go. That’s it.”

“I’m not asking you to wait for me.”

“Good. Because I’m telling you I won’t.” I’m shaking now, fine and steady, like a glass of water on a table someone bumped. I press my hands flat on the counter to hide it. “Pack a bag and go.”

“Can we at least talk about this?”

“We just did.”

He stares at me. He expected the version of me who handles things.

Who calls his mother back and books the repair and holds onto the mortgage letter so he won’t have to worry.

He expected me to manage this, too, to sit down and make a plan and organize his leaving so it doesn’t bruise him on the way out.

I don’t give it to him.

He goes upstairs. I listen to the sounds.

The closet door. The drawers. The zip of the weekender bag I bought him for the coast trip, the one I spent twenty minutes picking out because I wanted it to be right.

He’s leaving me with a bag I chose for him.

There’s something in that I’ll probably find funny later, when later is a thing I can think about.

He comes back down and stops in the doorway. Bag on his shoulder, keys in his hand, every bit of him already aimed at the door.

“I did love you,” he says. “I need you to believe that.”

Did. Past tense. He hears it the same second I do, and I watch him decide not to fix it. It’s the most honest thing he’s managed all night.

“Goodbye, Drew.”

Not goodnight. He catches it. He nods once, and he goes. The door clicks shut behind him, soft and final. His headlights sweep across the wall above the sink. Then they’re gone, and the house goes quiet.

I don’t cry. I keep bracing for it, and it keeps not coming. I stand at the counter a long time with the towel I folded and the plate I dried and the pan of chicken nobody really ate. My hands have stopped shaking. That scares me worse than the shaking did.

Tomorrow, there will be things to do. A lawyer to call. A letter from the mortgage company to open. A life to pull apart and rebuild from what’s mine, which turns out to be less than I thought and more than he deserves to know about.

Tonight, I turn off the kitchen light. I climb the stairs to a bed that is, as of an hour ago, entirely mine. For the first time in a month, I don’t lie here trying to figure out what’s wrong with my husband.

I know now. What was wrong was me. I was the wrong woman in the right chair, and he sat across from me for ten years and waited for the right one to come back.

She’s back. He’s gone.

And now I’m done being someone’s waiting room.