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“I didn’t know that,” he said. “It’s a nice name.”
“It is. But do you think you could take this opportunity to break the ice with Peony, maybe ask her why she didn’t want to talk to you after Stevie and Luca left?” I noticed him flinch then, and he took a deep breath.
“Why would I?”
“Don’t you want to know?”
He looked confused, bordering on angry, which isn’t hard for Dawson. It’s an expression he wears almost constantly these days and is so different from how he used to be when he was married and thought he was happy. “It’s not putting me off my food, no.”
“You never wonder if maybe she blames you?”
“Blame me?” he said. “Why? I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“No, but neither did she.”
“So? I’m not the one ignoring people.”
“But maybe she’s only doing that because she’s embarrassed… or because you’re so damn morose all the time.”
“You don’t think I have a right?”
“It’s been two years, Dawson.”
“So?”
“You don’t think it’s time you lightened up a little, instead of letting it get to you so much?”
He topped up my wine again, shaking his head. “Can you honestly say it doesn’t get to you that Sabrina cheated?”
“Of course it does, but our situations are very different. They always were.”
“Are you trying to say it was worse for you because Sabrina cheated more than once? Because cheating is cheating, in case you didn’t know.”
“I’m aware of that, and that wasn’t what I was trying to say. My point was that Stevie left in the blink of an eye, with a lot of unanswered questions in her wake. Sabrina and I tried to make it work, and failed… and then fought for years. We’re still fighting now, based on what happened this evening.”
“You mean I got a clean break, and you didn’t?”
“Cleaner, maybe. Not clean. Like I said, Stevie left you with a lot of unanswered questions. That can’t be easy.”
“It’s not.”
“Exactly. I’m not saying it was a walk in the park for you, Dawson. Far from it.”
He took another deep breath, like he was thinking things through.
“We both married our high school sweethearts,” he said after a moment or two. “And they turned into home breakers.”
“In Sabrina’s case, she was more like a hurricane sweeping through our marriage.”
He nodded his head, pushing his fingers back through his dark hair.
“You know, the thing I can’t get over is that neither of us saw it coming.”
“We trusted them,” I said. “More fool us.”
“It’s not something I’ll ever be able to do again. But my point is, they’d both been cheating for a long time. How did we miss it?”
“Maybe we were complacent,” I said, finishing yet another glass of wine. “Maybe we took them for granted.”
