Chapter Fourteen #3
“It wasn’t obvious to me. I thought we were happy. Were things perfect? Were we perfect? No. Of course not. But I didn’t want to be with anyone else; I didn’t want anything else. I just wanted you.”
Margo took a deep breath, her heart racing as she placed the heel of her palm to her chest, trying to somehow soothe the deep ache inside her, the wound that had ripped open. Maybe this was why they hadn’t talked until now. Every word between them felt like a thousand knives slicing her to ribbons.
She tried to remember how she had felt back then, how overwhelmed she had been.
“I didn’t know that,” she answered carefully, fighting to keep the emotion from her voice, the benefit of time, distance, and therapy making it easier to sort through her own feelings.
“I didn’t know that I was enough. I felt like you always wanted more from me than I was able to give, and I always came up short. ”
Back then, her emotions had been all-consuming, but now, she could see the little mistakes and misunderstandings that had cropped up between them, the ones that she would have immediately addressed had she known they would soon snowball into the catalyst that ended their marriage.
That was the problem with hindsight—knowing what she did now, she would have given anything to go back and live those moments differently.
They had been young, and she had been inexperienced. She’d dated plenty of guys, had a few boyfriends, but Luke had been the first truly serious relationship in her life, “love” in all capital letters, bolded, and underlined.
“I didn’t know how to be a wife,” Margo confessed.
“When we married, I felt like it was supposed to be easy.
After all, loving each other in the beginning was so easy.
You walked into the pub that afternoon and smiled at me, and I thought, ‘I want him to smile at me like that every day for the rest of my life.’ It was wild.
Who falls in love so quickly, so easily?
And when everyone kept telling me that it was too fast, that we should slow down, I just thought that the fact that it was so easy between us meant that it was right , that somehow there was something about us that was impervious to all the fights and indignities that felled other couples.
“It sounds like a fairy tale. I know. But I think it had to be for me to give it a chance. If we were different, if our love was different, then I didn’t have to be afraid that I was going to make the same mistakes my parents did.
That one day I was going to wake up bitter and divorced with a kid in tow who would get shuffled from house to house, the last relic of a marriage no one wanted to celebrate or even acknowledge. ”
“Margo.”
“I never wanted to get married. Ever. I never told you that. We never even discussed marriage before you proposed. I never wanted that kind of obligation. Not after seeing what my parents went through. I never wanted to give someone the power to hurt me like that, never wanted to be the kind of person who could hurt someone like that. And then you were there with your smiles and your kisses, and you were the most solid, constant thing I had ever experienced in my life, and I thought that if I was going to break my rules for someone, take a chance on someone, I couldn’t imagine doing it with anyone other than you.
“I was terrified on our wedding day. I threw up twice. I never told you because I was so embarrassed. One of my bridesmaids had to hold my veil back.”
“You should have told me. I would have been there for you. We could have talked about it.”
The ferocity in his voice left no doubt of the veracity of his words.
“I know. I know you would have tried. But I didn’t want you to see that side of me.
I didn’t want reality to intrude. You saw the business side of me, the part of me that could take risks when there was logic involved, when my heart wasn’t.
You admired that version of me, and I didn’t want you to realize that for as much as I might have my shit together when it comes to business, when I have to be emotionally vulnerable, when my heart’s on the line—I’m a mess.
It’s easier when I’m in control. When I have a plan, when I can make sense of things.
I didn’t see you coming, and then you were there, and I just felt like I was swept up in this idea of us, but I never got my feet on the ground.
“And all throughout our marriage, I guess I just started to panic. I didn’t know how to be a wife.
The only example of a marriage I had growing up wasn’t exactly a happy one, and I didn’t want to repeat the example I had, but the more I worried about not being like my parents, the more I fell into those traps. ”
He cursed. “Do you know how many nights I spent wondering what I had done wrong? Why you suddenly looked at me differently, acted differently? I was worried that I was so greedy for you, so in love with you, that I had pushed you into a marriage you didn’t want.
When you told me you wanted a divorce, I was so angry with myself that all I could think was that of course I needed to give you what you wanted, that I needed to be fair to you. ”
A tear trickled down her face and she batted it away. “You didn’t push me into anything. I leapt. I just wasn’t used to leaping and I freaked out.”
“I didn’t know.”
“I know. And I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.
Honestly, it wasn’t even that I didn’t trust you as much as it was that I didn’t trust myself.
Or maybe I didn’t trust in us. In what we were together.
It seemed too good to be true, and I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for something to happen that would confirm what I had feared all along.
It took a lot of therapy for me to understand that maybe my fear was causing more problems than I realized. ”
“It’s not your fault,” he whispered. “I could have asked. I could have talked to you more. I could have told you what I was afraid of. I’d never loved anyone as much as I loved you and it terrified me.”
His words terrified her, even now. Therapy was great, and she felt stronger than she had back then, more self-aware, more in control, better equipped to navigate the things that would have sent her into a frenzy.
And still—it was a process. Knowing the things that triggered her didn’t make facing them easy. Her old ghosts still crept up even now.
As much as part of her found comfort in his words, in knowing that back then she hadn’t been alone in her feelings, that she had been loved as greatly as she had loved, she still couldn’t escape the heartbreaking knowledge that the emotion was in the past, not the present, leaving her with an inescapable sensation of loss.
“I wish I could go back and do things differently,” Margo confessed. “I wish we’d met later in life, that I was in a better place. I was still figuring out who I was, who I was going to be. I wasn’t ready.”
He nodded. “I think I knew back then that we weren’t on the same page, that we weren’t ready for all I was trying to turn us into. Or suspected, at least. I just hoped that things would work out. Maybe I was too arrogant.”
“You weren’t. You were just trying your best. We both were.” Margo took a deep breath. “I’m sorry for the way I pushed you about your job. For making you think that it was the problem, that the danger and unpredictability of your schedule was something you needed to change for me.”
“Maybe it wasn’t the problem, but it didn’t make it easier.”
“No, it didn’t. But I know better than anyone how important it is to enjoy what you do, and you loved solving cases, working with Interpol. I wish I had understood back then that you wouldn’t be the man I fell in love with if I tried to change that about you.”
“I wouldn’t have gone into business with you if I didn’t think it was the right move.
I was burned out with work—some of the complaints you had, I felt, too.
Working with you—as much as I loved you and as proud as I was of you, it just wasn’t the right fit for me.
You were building this company, and you were doing what you were meant to do, and I was stuck.
And I didn’t know how to tell you, because at the end of the day, I chose this.
I was the one who was pushing so hard to fix things, and I was too embarrassed to admit that it still wasn’t working. Maybe I was afraid to face it myself.”
“We both made mistakes. I don’t think either of us is solely to blame.” Margo reached out and placed her hand on his resting on the table. “I’m sorry.”
He squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry, too.”
Tears filled her eyes, and she brushed them away with her free hand.
“I don’t want to make you cry,” Luke said.
“I’m not sad. In a way, I’m glad we had this conversation. We never said goodbye to our marriage, to each other, the way we needed to. This seems like the goodbye we needed to have.”
“It does.”
Neither one of them spoke. There was nothing else left to say. They stayed like that, hands clasped together, as the train carried them forward.