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Hot tears build behind my eyes, but I widen them in hopes of holding the tears in. I refuse to cry in public, and more importantly, I will never cry in front of Maisie.
I turn around and start running back toward my office, where my car is parked. I need to get out of here. I have to get in my car and go home and decompress from the onslaught of truth that just assaulted me.
“Melissa! Wait. Where are you going?” Maisie shouts out, and I ignore her.
By the time I get to my car, I’m crying with tears streaming down my cheeks. I start to drive, my hands shaking, aimlessly heading around Greenwood Village, and then hit the highway. Two years’ worth of hot remorse comes out of my body in a loud sob.
I know the pain that was just pelted at me by Allison Lalayne because I’d felt it too.
Hell, I still feel it on a daily basis.
I loved Tyler Landish, and he left me for the love of another woman. I don’t care how mentally strong you are; you never get over that shit.
“I chose you.”
Will’s words from yesterday pierce my ears.
“When you kissed me in the parking lot, I knew in that moment that you were the woman I wanted to be with.”
If I hadn’t launched myself at Will, would he really have left Allison, like he claimed he was going to? He says it was inevitable, but I know better than that. I destroyed their happily ever after.
Will is no better a man than Tyler.
I’m just as evil as Maisie.
I once told Tyler it was his fault for putting himself in a position to love another. Will did the same. He saw me at the bar, and he flirted with me. I know I’m not crazy when I say he gave me bedroom eyes and danced with me the way no taken man should ever dance with another woman. Just the thought of Will now dancing with someone else like that has my palms twitching. I’d be livid. I’d be heartbroken. I’d die.
Allison should be upset. She should be absolutely devastated. She has every right to attack me on a sidewalk, armed with an iced coffee and vicious rhetoric.
I’d do the same.
In fact, I did.
A long time ago.
I marched myself into Maisie’s salon with my fist in the air and my words curling through the packed salon. She looked like she wanted to cry as I called her a slut. I also told her she was a shit stylist. I threw a hairbrush at her, like a total psychopath, and stormed out.
“Fuck!” I yell in my car when I reach a stoplight and bang my hands on the steering wheel so hard that my palms feel tingly and numb.
How life has come full circle is beyond me. It’s so messed up, and there’s no way for me to clean this mess.
The worst part is, I’m pretty sure, somewhere along the way, I fell in love with William Bronson.
When Tyler left, I never thought I’d love again. I’d invested my whole world in him, and when he left, he took a chunk of my confidence with him. I felt like second-best. A downgrade. A discard. In fact, I felt like that long before he left.
I drive down to Castleton and past the bare trees that look over the mountaintops. I think about how happy I was when I was just a teen, driving these roads for the first time. Tara and Tyler were in tow, and we’d sing at the tops of our lungs while weaving down the valley.
When I reach Newbury, I’m on the familiar roads Tyler and I would take on long evenings when Izzy wouldn’t sleep. She loved the car, so we’d pile in, listening to the radio, and lull our little girl to sleep. Hunter always liked the stroller. I drive past the woods where we went for hikes with Izzy’s hand in Tyler’s and Hunter in an infant carrier on my chest.
As the kids got bigger, the park was our usual haunt. Tyler wasn’t around as much during those days, so it would be me and the kids walking around the neighborhood for hours. I went from a crazy teen to a stressed-out mom in a heartbeat. Those first few years of each of their lives, I was so invested and exhausted. I had little of myself to give to my husband.
Then, Mom got sick. I spent most of my days with her at doctor’s appointments and pushing her wheelchair around town so she could get fresh air. I didn’t see Tyler for almost a year because I was with my mom so much. We knew her days were finite, and I wanted to spend as many as I could with her.
When he told our marriage counselor that I let the marriage go, he was right. I chose our children’s early days and then my mother’s final ones over ours.
When she died, I was a shell of who I used to be. Overweight, depressed, and drowning in the humdrum of being a stay-at-home mother of two. My job as a wedding designer was falling by the wayside until Jillian offered me a job, and I slowly started to get back into living again. Tara had me at the gym, and I was feeling like myself once more.
When Tyler asked for a separation, I asked him to try to make it work. We stayed at the house and went through the motions of being a family without really being a couple.
