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She looked so small and broken. I hated myself for what I’d done to her, to us, and my emotions got the better of me.
Struggling to see clearly through the tears that had formed in my own eyes, I lifted my hand and placed it on the middle of her back. “I’m so sorry, baby.”
As soon as I got the words out, Kiera turned her head, pressing her forehead against the spot where her cheek had just been resting, and she began to quietly sob.
All I could do was stroke my hand up and down her back.
The waves continued to crash along the shore, delivering one bout of uncertainty after another. And when the water receded each time, it never took any of the sadness, fear, or hopelessness with it.
SEVENTEEN
Kiera
“It was too easy.”
Johnny and I hadn’t moved from this spot, where I’d parked myself just over an hour after I’d left him sleeping in my bedroom in the villa this morning.
Last night had been an absolute disaster, and waking up wrapped in his arms for the first time in months threatened to send me spiraling right back to that place. So, no matter how much I wanted to stay there, to give myself the chance to really experience it one last time, I didn’t.
I snuck out, came here, and waited for answers that never came.
When he showed up, I wasn’t quite sure if I wanted to lean into the surprise I felt, or if I wanted to accept that him being there was precisely what I would have expected from him. Maybe the Johnny of more recent months wouldn’t have come looking for me, but the Johnny I fell in love with eight years ago would never not check on me.
That realization only added to all the confusion I felt over our situation.
At the sudden break in the silence that was surrounding us, I tore my gaze away from the ocean and looked at Johnny. Like me, he had been looking out at the waves, but the moment I turned my attention to him, he broke his connection with the horizon.
“What was easy?” I asked.
“Us,” he replied. “Things were always so easy between us from the start. You know how it was. Even our friends struggled to understand how it was possible that we never fought.”
The corners of my mouth tipped up ever so slightly as I recalled the early days of our relationship.
He was right.
It had been easy.
Falling in love with Johnny had been incredibly easy.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
“I don’t know how else to say it, but I think I got lazy,” he explained.
That struck me as an odd thing to say, because it was completely untrue. “You work all the time,” I argued.
Johnny let out a soft laugh. “I didn’t mean I’m lazy when it comes to making a living. I meant that I grew complacent in our marriage. Maybe, somewhere in the back of my mind, I had this thought that since we were already committed, you wouldn’t be going anywhere, so I didn’t need to try as hard. That’s where I screwed up.”
“I think we both made some mistakes,” I told him.
Shaking his head, Johnny insisted, “You didn’t make the mistakes that I did, Kiera. I wanted a life with you. I wanted the family we talked about having, and I became focused on doing what I had to do to ensure I’d be able to provide for that family. It’s not an excuse, but that’s where I was. And the worst part is that in doing all that I was, I never took to the time to actually build that family with you.”
My heart squeezed at the mention of the family that Johnny and I didn’t have with one another. We’d both wanted children, and it never happened, because we were too caught up in the honeymoon phase of our marriage at the beginning and our careers in the middle of it that by the time we got to the end, it seemed we weren’t seeing eye-to-eye on anything.
I hated that Johnny and I never made it far enough to be able to experience having children with one another at the same time I was relieved we hadn’t brought a baby into the world, considering we were at this place now where it seemed things weren’t going to work out between us.
I’d spent so long thinking about the family that would never be that Johnny decided he still had more to say. So, he continued, “I’m not mad at you anymore, Kiera. I was in the beginning, but now I understand it. I get why you asked for the divorce. I stopped dating you. I became your roommate instead of continuing to be your husband. I didn’t give you what you needed in our marriage, and I hate that it took things getting so bad and you needing to ask for a divorce for me to realize exactly what I had with you.”
If there had been one question I’d continuously asked myself over the last six months, it was about that. While I understood the how of us getting to this place, I never understood the why.
