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“Yeah. With Celia.”
His mouth turned down. “I was blissfully ignorant. Smitten with my wife, two kids, and the baby on the way. We weren’t wealthy, but we weren’t struggling either. I considered myself the luckiest guy on the planet.”
“You’ve always been like that.”
“Because I had the three of you.” He cleared his throat. “Five days after you were born, I came home from work. She was waiting for me in the kitchen. Said she couldn’t be a mother. Didn’t want to be my wife. She was tired of pretending.”
He scrubbed his hand behind his neck. “Back then, we knew about pregnancy hormones, but not the effects they can have on women. I thought it was the stress of a newborn, even though you were the best baby out of the three. Slept through the night. Hardly cried.”
“You think she had postpartum depression?”
“If I’d known what it was at the time, I’d have probably thought so. Now? No. I don’t think that’s it at all.”
“So that was it? She left?”
It seemed impossible she could just walk out on all of us.
“Yeah. And I was so stunned, I let her go.”
I remembered that feeling so well. “It’s like a sucker punch with a delayed reaction.”
“Yes. That’s exactly what it’s like.” He got a faraway look as if he remembered the feeling as well as he did the day it happened. “I found the divorce papers on my pillow. But I kept thinking she’d come back.”
“What?” The more I found out about the woman I’d been so desperate to know, the less I liked her.
“I was on auto-pilot. I worked. I took care of you kids. I didn’t even contest the divorce. Everything happened so damn fast.”
“Why haven’t you ever told us any of this?”
“Because what happened between us didn’t have anything to do with you. If the time ever came for you to choose between us, I couldn’t have lived with myself if I’d have poisoned your mind with my bitterness.”
“Dad—”
He held up his hand. “You’re old enough to make your own decisions now.”
“How did you find out about the other man?”
He toyed with his glass. “Right after the divorce was final and she’d gotten her half of everything, she told me if I hadn’t changed, she wouldn’t have been forced into another man’s arms.”
“She came by?”
“No. I mean literally. We were outside the mediation room, the ink not even dry. The lawyers were still inside socializing.”
How could she do that to Dad?He was such a great man and deserved so much better.
“I don’t understand how you ever fell in love with someone like that to begin with.”
“I haven’t ever figured out if she was always this way or she changed. Or maybe she was telling the truth, that I made her leave.”
“No. You see what she did. If she gave a shit about me or Andrew or even Marlow, she wouldn’t have shown up here.”
“That wasn’t her final parting shot.”
“What else could there be?” Guilt crept up his face. “She told you about me.”
“Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “Told me you weren’t mine, but if I didn’t want you, she’d give you away.”
My chest seized. She didn’t want me. That wasn’t news.Why does is still hurt so much?
