Page 14 of Chasing the Other Woman

And still, he doesn’t move.

I shake my head, turning and walking out before I can take in any other sight that will stay with me forever.

The clinic is too bright. Breathing feels more difficult than I remember it being. I’m swallowing sobs that feel like rocks sliding down my throat.

“Sam.”

Hershel catches up with me near the curb. His long gray hair is wet and plastered to his forehead. He’s wearing a Zeppelin shirt that’s drenched.

“Don’t,” I say.

“I wasn’t.”

“Yes, you were. You were going to tell me to go back in there.”

“Yeah, maybe I was. But whatever you saw⁠—“

“You mean my husband holding another woman and not even attempting to remove her from his person while I stood there and hurt?”

“That bad, huh?”

I laugh, an ugly, humorless thing. “I’m going home. He doesn’t need me.”

“You know that ain’t true, Sam.”

I turn to face him. His face has weathered since I first met him, back when Brooks and I were so stupidly in love we believed we could conquer anything. Hershel has seen it all. Our wedding. Our fights. He banged on motel room walls when we were too loud and swore the next morning he’d seen calmer rabbits in heat. He was there when we came home without our baby. He was there when Brooks stopped letting me back into the truck with him, one careful excuse at a time.

“He needs someone next to him,” I say. If you didn’t know better, you’d think I was calm. You’d completely believe that my heart wasn’t split in half. “He needs someone who can be beside him when the road goes bad. Someone who he can look at after it’s all over and tell her he couldn’t have made it through it without her.”

I look back at the door.

“That person just isn’t me anymore.”

I turn, starting toward the SUV. Hershel reaches for me.

“Go back and make him talk to you, Sam.”

The door to the clinic remains closed. Behind it, my husband, the love of my life, is in another woman’s arms, telling her that she was the one he needed to get through the night.

“I can’t do it anymore, Hershel.”

I step off the curb and into whatever comes next.

As I reach the door, I hear the clinic doors open. I don’t look back.

Four

BROOKS

The sound of Hershel’s truck pulling away leaves with it a quiet that’s ominous.

I stand in the mudroom, hand braced against the wall, waiting for something to happen. My forearm is throbbing from the gash I took when the truck went sideways. The right side of my body is protesting in a way it hasn’t in years.

And around me, there’s nothing but silence.

I wait for a raised voice from the kitchen. Maybe a cabinet door slammed a little too hard.

As I kick my boots off, grimacing with the ache racing up my body, I wait for Sam to step in behind me and tell me what an absolute idiot I was for ignoring her call. Because she’d be right.