Every Wrong Reason

“Stop avoiding the question.”

“Stop acting like a three-year-old.”

That was it. The last straw. My chair scratched over the wood flooring as I pushed back and jumped up from my seat. I fled for the door, ignoring the protests and frustrated calls of my name. I had to get out of here.

I couldn’t do this.

I couldn’t be us again.

I grabbed my purse off the couch and let the screen door slam shut behind me. It snapped against the frame for a second time when Nick followed me outside.

“Kate, are you serious?”

I whirled around and tried to breathe through my anger. “Nick, are you?”

“What is your problem! I thought we were cool. Friday night we-”

My eyes flooded with tears and I wasn’t sure why. “Don’t,” I whispered.

He took a step back. His hand had been reaching out to me and he dropped it. “You’re serious,” he said.

“I can’t do this. I can’t have you here with my parents, acting as if nothing’s wrong. As if we’re fine and normal and not in the middle of a divorce.”

“We’re not in the middle of a divorce,” he bit out. “We’re separated, Kate. Neither of us has filed. Neither of us has to file.”

“What?” The breath whooshed out of me and for a second I didn’t think I’d be able to stay standing.

“You heard me.” He lifted his jaw defiantly and narrowed his gaze again.

For a hysterical second I thought he was going to dare me not to divorce him. As if all I needed was the challenge of making us work and I would forget about wanting to leave him.

As if I would take his dare.

As if it were that easy.

“Did you even need your amps?” I took a step toward him, not sure what I was going to do or say. Part of me wanted to shake him. The other part wanted to collapse in his arms and tell him he was right. So. Right. “Was this just an excuse to see me again?”

He returned my question with one of his own. “Why are you so hell bent on leaving me? Is this about having a baby? Kate, I-”

My heart jumped in my chest and then crashed back into place, only this time it was shattered into a million pieces. “Don’t,” I begged him with a broken, desperate voice. “Don’t.” A tearless, silent sob shook my entire body and I had to hold my hand to my face to keep from completely falling apart. “Nick, this,” I flicked my finger between us, “is what this is about. Not kids, not my parents not any other reason than we ca

“We weren’t the other night,” he quickly reminded me. “We weren’t miserable.”

“That was one night! One! What about all of the other nights? What about all of the other days and fights and years of not getting along? I’m not trying to hurt you. Or, at least, not intentionally. I’m trying to give you a chance to find happiness somewhere else.”

“Because you want to find happiness somewhere else.”

I could have argued with him. I could have sworn that it wasn’t entirely about me, that I wanted us both to be better off, that I was thinking of him as much as I was myself. But I didn’t.

Instead, I let him believe it. I let him think the worst of me.

I let him decide that I wasn’t worth fighting for.

“I have to go,” I whispered.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t argue and he didn’t come after me again.

I got in my car and drove away. I didn’t last one block before I started crying again, before the tears and pain became so much I had to pull over and cave into the pressure in my chest and the sobs that racked my entire body.

Eventually, I stopped crying. Eventually, I stopped shaking. But when I got home, I didn’t feel any better. And when I crawled into my empty bed that night, it started all over again.

I didn’t go to family di

Chapter Eleven

18. He can’t let go.

I slumped against the doorframe to Kara’s office and dropped my bag to my feet. She looked up at me from where she stood over her desk examining some papers and frowned at me.

Unlike the rest of the school, Kara’s office was warmly lit and smelled like heaven. She burned candles all year round, despite the fact that they were against school policy. Mr. Kellar let her get away with it because she argued that her students needed to feel safe and comfortable. He apparently agreed, because he never said anything to her except when there was an inspection.

“You look like shit.”

I glared at her. “Thank you.”

“What happened?” Her voice softened to gentle concern.

“Don’t ever get married. It’s not worth it.”

Her lips pursed and her shoulders straightened. “I wasn’t pla

I couldn’t tell if I offended her or not. She wasn’t married, she wasn’t even dating, but that wasn’t because there was something wrong with her. She was hot, successful in her own right and the best person I knew. She wasn’t with someone because she chose not to be.

I had always thought of her as the quintessential empowered woman. But there was something in her expression just now… something I couldn’t read.

I walked in and collapsed in one of her comfy chairs that sat in front of the desk. She hadn’t invited me, but I was too miserable to care.

“You don’t have a meeting or anything, do you?”

Her expression shifted to careful consideration and I wondered if she was going to bill me for my time. “Not for a few minutes. What’s going on?” This time I heard real concern in her voice. She had gone home to visit her family over the weekend, so we hadn’t spoken since after school on Friday. She didn’t know about all of my Nick drama and I was finding myself reluctant to share it with her.

I didn’t want to burden her with more of my depression, plus I was fairly certain she was as sick of hearing about my woes as I was. But I also couldn’t get myself to speak the truth out loud. I didn’t want to tell her about my Friday night with Nick because I wanted to keep that for me… I wanted to keep it special and untainted by snarky analysis.

I didn’t want her to point out the possible obvious- that Nick didn’t want to go through with the divorce. And I didn’t want her asking questions to find out if maybe I didn’t either.

There was too much past… too much history for us to ever be really happy moving forward. We just needed to cut this cord and move on.

“I saw the divorce lawyer this morning,” I confessed.

I watched her shoulders sag and her mouth turn down in a frown. “Is that where you were?”

“I took the morning. I couldn’t wait any longer.” I picked at the frayed threads on the arm of the chair. “My parents invited Nick over to Sunday di

Her eyebrows shot up and her palms slapped the desk. “They did what?”

“Apparently they miss him.”

“They hate him!”

“Apparently they only hate me.”

She waved a dismissive hand. “Trust me, they don’t. My parents hate me. Yours love you. Maybe too much, but they definitely love you.”

I blinked at her, unsure if she was serious or not. Kara kept much of her home life to herself. She shared everything else, though, so I had never wanted to pry. I hadn’t even met her parents before. It wasn’t like college where most of my friends’ parents either came to visit or hosted a group of us for a long weekend. Since I hadn’t met Kara until our professional lives, there had been no reason to meet her family. I had never thought anything of it. She had only met mine a couple times over the years.

I tilted my chin mulishly, “If they loved me, they would not have invited my ex-husband to di

“He’s not your ex-husband yet,” she said with an obvious amount of patience in her tone. “Maybe they were trying to get you back together? Maybe they don’t hate him as much as you thought they did.”