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After the way I’d spoken to her when she was obviously already upset about something, I knew I wouldn’t get very far.
I decided to wait.
Surely, she’d come back downstairs, and maybe then I could apologize, so I could talk to her and explain what had happened.
But the truth was that what happened with me at work didn’t matter anymore.
All I wanted to know was what was wrong with her, what was upsetting her. For the last eight years, it had been my job to dry her tears if she cried. And now, she had been crying, and I had no idea why.
Hours passed.
She never came out of the spare bedroom, and by the time I finally climbed the stairs and went to the other spare bedroom—I hadn’t been able to sleep in our bed without her—I didn’t do it feeling angry.
For the first time in three months, I climbed into bed and spent the entire night feeling nothing but devastated.
NINE
Kiera
Three months later
Things hadn’t gotten easier.
Six months hadn’t been enough time.
I’d managed to convince myself that things would have been okay between Johnny and me by now. Somehow, I’d fooled myself into thinking that Johnny and I would be one of those couples that got divorced but remained great friends.
And that hadn’t seemed like a far stretch at the time I approached him about the divorce. The two of us had wound up on very different pages, so I truly believed the divorce would be for the better.
I waited for the moment that it would happen, but it never did.
Of course, I realized that there was going to be an adjustment period—time needed to get over the initial shock of it all—but instead of us coming to a mutual understanding of this being the best decision for us, things only got worse between us.
In the beginning, Johnny was unreadable. He was mostly quiet, and I had assumed he was trying to come to grips with it and where we were headed. I realized that it wasn’t an easy thing to swallow. It was one thing to have found that our relationship had stumbled off the tracks, but it was something else for us to decide to get off the train completely.
So, while I realized that he might have accepted what I told him I wanted and realized it was the best for the both of us, he still needed to be able to cope with it. That was precisely the reason why I gave him the space that I did initially.
But now I wondered if I’d given him too much time and space at the start, because it wasn’t long before things between us took a turn I hadn’t been expecting.
It happened roughly three weeks after I’d gone to Johnny and shared that I wanted a divorce. I’d gone to him to ask him about something related to a household bill, and while he ultimately answered the question, the bitterness dripping from his words was unmistakable. As time went on, I wound up seeing more and more bitterness from him.
He was angry.
So angry.
And it came as such a shock to me, because it seemed Johnny had become a man I didn’t know anymore.
Fortunately, I hadn’t needed to say anything to him again after that. Technically, that wasn’t true. I had plenty I felt I needed to say, but that was all personal stuff. It wasn’t anything related to important bills or tasks that needed to be handled around the house.
Since he’d made it abundantly clear that he was furious with me, I decided it was best to give him the space he needed. Of course, I knew we were going to need to speak to one another about the specifics of dissolving our marriage, but in an effort not to add more fuel to an already blazing fire before our best friends got married, I figured it was best to wait.
Then it changed.
Or, more specifically, he changed.
It was about three months ago when it happened. I’d had a particularly difficult day at work, and when I coupled that with all the hurt and sadness I’d been feeling over my impending divorce, it didn’t make for a very pleasant outcome.
For some strange reason, Johnny had unexpectedly come home from work earlier than normal that day. I’d been sitting on the couch crying my eyes out, thinking I had hours until he’d be home.
