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CHAPTER15
BECKY
I’m seeing Todd in a completely new light now.
I sense the heartbreak in his voice. Whatever he had with that woman, despite the fact that it’s been long over, has left deep marks in his soul. It’s probably why he’s been so adamantly single and independent, so quiet and wary of letting anyone in. It was never just about protecting the lie regarding his fake family. It was also about protecting his heart. I see it.
“What happened?” I ask.
By now, we’re deep into the second course, working through a platter of spiced and grilled meats with noodles and sautéed vegetables, all in the company of some truly exquisite sauces. It’s my understanding that we’re being treated to the very best that Li’s take on Chinese cuisine has to offer, so I make sure to enjoy every morsel to the fullest—it’s hard not to—while Todd tells me the whole story of how he fell so deeply in love, he thought he would never recover when it was over.
“We agreed on everything, we hated the same things—it felt like true compatibility,” he says, chopsticks moving a piece of meat across his plate. “I thought we were it, you know?”
“I think I do…” I’d had something similar with Elliot’s dad, after all. A beautiful lie that I told myself until I believed it to be true.
“Her name was Elise, and she turned out to be married,” he says. The words hit hard, my stomach churning as I realize how badly it hurt him. “I only found out shortly before an investor dinner and right after I proposed,” he adds. “I’d even showed Rick, my previous business partner, the ring I had picked out for her. I remember him telling me it was too soon. Six months in, and I was trying to marry the girl. Yeah, in retrospect, that was crazy. But I did as my heart told me, and my heart wanted me to spend the rest of my life with this woman.”
“How did you find out she was married?”
“She told me. As soon as I whipped out the ring and got to one knee, she showed me her wedding band. She’d been keeping it in her purse whenever we got together. I cannot explain how awful it felt… It broke me.” He laughs mirthlessly. “I felt like such an idiot. A sucker.”
“You weren’t a sucker,” I tell him. “You were genuinely in love, and maybe she loved you, too…”
“Not enough to be with me,” he says. “It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s done and dusted. But the problem at the time was that there had already been rumors about me getting married, so when I told the lie, I was only able to tell it because I had convinced myself that it was coming from a place of truth. Of something that could’ve been.”
“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” I tell him, then reach across the table and cover his hand with mine. His gaze jumps and locks on mine. For a moment, it’s just me and him left in the world again, just like when we kissed. My lips still tingle. My heart still flutters. I would give anything to be able to kiss him even now, to feel him, to feel his breath tickling my face.
“She didn’t deserve you,” I add. “No matter how badly it hurt and no matter how much you feel that you loved her. She never deserved you, and she was never going to make you happy. As far as I’m concerned, you dodged a nuclear disaster when she turned you down…”
“That’s the worst part,” he laughs bitterly, his voice losing color. “She only turned down my marriage proposal. She wanted us to still be together.”
“Just not on paper, but as her side piece? Oh, the audacity!”
My blood boils as I imagine what that must’ve felt like for Todd. The hurt, the humiliation, the nagging sensation that he simply wasn’t enough for her, that he wasn’t good enough for her to put that husband out of his misery.
Good grief, love can be so messy and complicated—I should know—but then again, as the years have passed, I’m not sure it was love that pulled me to Luke. It was something much more physical and ephemeral, but it ended with Elliot’s birth, and so perhaps I gave the whole thing way more meaning than it deserved.
It's starting to sound like precisely what Todd did with Elise.
“It doesn’t matter anymore. She’s gone. I’m over it. We’re here, now,” Todd says. His hand slips out from under mine and takes it, squeezing tightly and definitively. “I’m with you, here, now. I just wanted you to know the whole truth, to understand me better. At the end of the day, I’m ashamed of this whole performance we’re doing, I am. But I excuse the means for the reward that will soon follow. I have worked too hard to let it all flop, and no one deserves to suffer because of my stubbornness and desperation.”
“We’ll get through it,” I tell him. “Together.”
His gaze softens. “I can’t believe I didn’t see you sooner, Becky. For two years you’ve been right under my nose, and it’s only now that I truly…seeyou.”
“You’re a busy man.”
“And you’re a busy woman,” he says, then slowly bites into his lower lip. “What would you like to do after dinner?”
I blink several times, trying to understand the meaning behind his question. We’ve both been so busy trying to preserve the lives we’ve built so far that neither of us has stopped to wonder what it might be like if we colored outside the pattern for once. If we did whatever the heck we wanted with one another and worried about the consequences later. He’s out of my league, and he’s got other plans with his life, but the physical magnetism between us is undeniable. Maybe I could just go with the flow for once and let what happens happen.
It will end poorly for me either way, but I might as well have something sweet to look back to when I inadvertently tell myself to look on the bright side. Someday, I will need to look on the bright side of this.
“I’d like to spend the rest of the night with you,” I tell Todd.
CHAPTER16
BECKY
