chapter 114
Six Months Later
“Let’s talk about your happiness.” My therapist’s favorite topic. I often wondered, hitting this stage of the appointment, if Tracy recycled the question with everyone in her life, every damn member of her family forced to prove, on an everyday basis, that their smiles and laughter were real.
“I’m happy.” I looked away from a wrinkle in her cleavage and to her eyes, sharp holes of black behind bright red glasses.
“Everything is great.” It was. It was better than great.
It was a painful happiness, the kind so precious that it scares, each moment filled with an edge of panic that it will all be lost. A person should not be this happy, our love should not be this strong—it just didn’t seem fair, seem possible, to be so blessed.
“How is the public handling your engagement?”
I shrugged. “I’m not sure. I haven’t paid attention.
” Probably not well. Yankee Nation hadn’t been pleased when their first lady had abandoned her post. They’d ignored the carefully worded press release that Tobey and I had given.
The one that emphasized our continuing friendship, and the joint decision we had made to end our four-year marriage.
The paparazzi had caught my climb onto the private jet, Chase behind me.
They’d seen our kisses on the beach in Bali.
Overnight, I’d been branded a cheater. I hadn’t cared, not when it had been the truth.
I had cheated. There wasn’t really any getting around that.
Besides, Tobey had been in the trenches right next to me, Dan’s mouth as loud in prison as it’d been outside of it.
Everyone knew about his affairs, the media all but having a field day between the two of us.
It was comical, though I seemed to be the only one seeing the humor in all of it.
“When is the wedding?”
I glanced down at my hand, at the simple band there.
We’d skipped a diamond, Chase wanting something that could be worn under a glove.
I preferred it, every giant rock reminding me of my first one, the stone that had seemed more like a shackle than a symbol of love.
“In six months.” I wasn’t in a rush, though Chase seemed to be counting down the seconds, frantic to change my name and haul me off to his cave where he could properly claim me as his own.
“Anything else happen since our last session?”
“I visited Dan again.”
Her brows raised. “Why?”
I didn’t know. But she didn’t like answers like that.
She liked to dissect, the process exhausting yet helpful.
Every session, I told myself I wouldn’t come back.
And every session, when I checked out and the perky receptionist asked if I wanted to book another appointment, I did.
It was a cycle I wasn’t yet ready to stop. Like peeling chapped lips.
I slid my palms under my thighs, knuckles against jeans, and tried to work through her question. “I like seeing him. It makes me feel in control.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Love.”
“You know what I don’t understand?” I folded over the gum wrapper, my nail sliding across the edge, each bend in the foil drawing Dan’s eyes to it.
“What?” There was glass between us. Dirty glass, fogged at the top, a few greasy handprints scattered over its surface. He peered at me and waited.
“You wanted Tobey and I to be together—that’s why you did all of it, right?” He said nothing, and I pressed forward. “But then you were going to kill me. Which would have meant that we wouldn’t be together. It would have defeated the entire purpose.”
I don’t know how I never saw his crazy before.
Maybe I just hadn’t known where to look.
Didn’t know that the slow tilt of his head meant that he was turning over a lie in his head before he spoke it.
Or that he smiled when I said something that angered him, and he frowned when he was thinking.
Now, he smiled, but it was a sad one. An almost genuine one.
“I read an article about you and Stern. A nice piece actually. Vanity Fair, I believe.”
I nodded. The only interview I had done, one published just last week.
An interview where I had bared my soul, my first time speaking aloud the thoughts, the dreams, the feelings that I’d hidden for so long.
The piece had been my confession, and the only time I would speak publicly on any of it.
After that, should the fans hate me, so be it.
But at least they would know the how. The when. The why.
“The last line of it. Powerful stuff.” He saw my confusion and leaned forward, so close that his breath fogged the glass.
“Our love … I knew I would never find another like it. I had to protect it. I had to respect it. Even if it hurt Tobey. Even if it hurt the fans. Even if it meant leaving everything that I knew. I had to choose him. And I’d make the same decision now, even if he didn’t love me back.
Because next to it, anything else was a lie.
And anything else wasn’t fair to either of us. ”
“I meant it. I love Chase. And I never felt—”
“I know you didn’t.” He cut me off, his head shaking but staying in place, close to the glass, his fingers biting into the table. I glanced at those fingers, the same ones that had held the knife to my skin, the same ones that had wrapped around my throat and squeezed.
“Then …” I flicked my eyes back, suddenly understanding.
“I thought he was happy with you.” He said softly, and there was madness in those eyes. Love does that to a person. I understood that, on a much milder scale. “I’d wanted him to be happy. And I thought you were worthy of him.”
“Until I wasn’t.”
He smiled, a slow one that showed a piece of food stuffed near an incisor. I couldn’t believe that this was the man, the one who terrorized our lives, our team, our city. This man who settled back into his plastic chair, scratching at a place on his neck.
“I don’t understand.” Tracy tilted her head, her pen tapping at the edge of her notepad, toes curling into the brown cork of her sandals.
“Despite the ten-year age difference, despite Dan’s ex-wife, we never saw it. We had simply appreciated his undying loyalty to the Yankees. But it wasn’t about them.” I paused, weighing the words in my mind before using them. “He loved Tobey. That’s why he did it all.”
So simple. And so heartbreakingly stupid.
I glanced at the clock, then at her face, three minutes left in this examination of my sanity. “I don’t think I’ll see him again. I think I’m done.”
It’s odd that I chose that day to make that decision. Even as I said it, I wasn’t sure it was final. I had some perverse need to stare at him, locked in that prison, on the other side of that glass. But, I never had another opportunity to. That night, Dan Velacruz hung himself in his cell.