Instead, it’s three o’clock in the morning and I have a migraine the size of the moon. Goddamn it.
“This isn’t about the water all over the bathroom floor, Nick. God, honestly! It’s about the principal of the water all over the bathroom floor!”
“Are you kidding me? What the hell does that even mean?” His handsome face contorted with frustration. He wouldn’t even look at me.
I thought back and tried to remember the last time he looked at me, really looked at me, and couldn’t remember. When was the last time he saw me? When was the last time we hadn’t been fighting long enough for his clear blue eyes to look into mine and make a real connection?
It had been years.
Maybe he had never seen me.
“It means there’s water all over the floor! Again! How many times have I asked you to clean up after your shower? I’m not asking for much! I just want the water cleaned up off the floor so that when I go in there I don’t soak my socks every single time!”
“You’re going to take your socks off anyway! Why does it matter?” His long arms flew to his side as he paced the length of our bedroom.
I flopped back on the bed and the pillows depressed with the weight of my head. I felt like crying, but I wouldn’t let something this stupid bring me to tears. I wouldn’t.
Not again.
This whole argument wasn’t really about the water. He was right; I had been planning to take my socks off. But I was so sick of asking him to do something so simple. Why couldn’t he just listen to me? For once?
“Fine,” I relented. “I don’t care. Let’s just go to bed.”
“Typical,” I heard him mutter.
I peeled my fingers away from my face and propped myself up on my elbows. His back was to me as he stared unseeingly at our closed blinds. I could see the tension taut through his broad shoulders. His thin t-shirt pulled on the sculpted muscle he was so proud of.
It was so late and both of us had to work in the morning, which only proved to fuel my frustration. His run had lasted forever tonight. He left shortly after dinner and hadn’t come home until close to ten. I had started to think something had happened to him.
When I asked him where he was, he told me his running group had gone out for beers afterward. He’d gone out for beers and hadn’t bothered to text or call or let me know he was alive and not dead in the ditch somewhere.
I’d had a terrible day and my husband got to go out for beers at the end of an excessively long run while I did the dishes, cleaned up the kitchen, started his laundry and graded papers.
And then at the end of all of it, I’d walked into an inch of standing water on our bathroom floor because he couldn’t be bothered to clean up after himself.
And he wants to throw around the word “typical.”
“What was that?” My voice pitched low and measured, in complete opposition to the pounding of my heart and rushing of blood in my ears.
This was not the first time we’d had such a lengthy blow up. In fact, we fought more than we got along. If I were truly honest with myself, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d enjoyed being around him.
“It’s typical, Kate. Just when I finally get to the bottom of why you’re so pissed off, you decide to shut down and turn yourself off. You’re ready for bed and I just finally figured out what crawled up your ass. So what am I supposed to do with that now? Just forget it? Move on and pretend you didn’t keep me up all hours of the night yelling about it? God knows, you will.”
“I’m tired, Nick. It’s three o’clock in the morning. We both have to work tomorrow! What do you want me to do? I guess we could sit here and talk in circles until the sun comes up, but like you said, you finally get it!”
“God, you can be a bitch.”
His words hit me like a slap across the face. “And you can be a selfish asshole.”
I watched his face fall. It was that perfect kind of hit that took all of the wind right out of his sails. His entire body deflated and I knew I hurt him as badly as he hurt me. Except instead of making me feel better about myself, I realized I had never felt worse.
He slumped down at the edge of our bed and buried his face in his hands. His tousled, light brown hair fell over the tips of his fingers and reminded me of the times I used to brush it back, out of his eyes.
Even now, after seven years of marriage, he was still one of the most gorgeous men I had ever seen. His tall frame was packed with lean muscle and long limbs. His face was blessed with sharp angles and deep, soulful blue eyes, a square jaw hidden behind a closely cropped beard, like he’d forgotten to shave for a few days. His wild hair was a little longer on top than on the sides, but despite his unruly hair he had always been casually clean cut. No piercings. No tattoos. And his lips had always been dry, for as long as I could remember. But he had this way of dragging his tongue across them that used to make my mouth water.
I fell in love with him on our second date. We shared mutual friends that introduced us. My roommate Fiona was dating his track teammate, Austin, and one Saturday in October during our junior year of college, she finally hauled me along to one of their local meets.
We hit it off after he took first place in the thirty-two hundred and he was in a celebratory enough mood to not stop smiling. I couldn’t stop staring at his lonely dimple or his bright blue eyes. He had the keen insight to know he’d charmed me.
Or maybe he just read the very obvious signs. I was not good at hiding my feelings.
Our first date was an absolute disaster though. I was awkward and he was nervous. We didn’t find much to talk about and when he dropped me back at my dorm, I swore to Fiona that he would never call me again.
I never understood why he asked me out for our second date, but it was that next time, when he took me to my favorite Italian restaurant and then out for a drive that ended with trespassing and a moonlit walk through random fields in the middle of the country, that made me realize I would never find another man like him.
He had something I decided I couldn’t live without. His intentional questions and quick sense of humor held my attention and his big smile made my insides melty. I had never met anyone that made me feel that way… that made it seem as if I were the only person alive that had anything interesting to say.
If every night could be like that second date I would never doubt what was between us, not even for a second. But after struggling to put up with each other for all of these years and knowing that whatever chemistry we had with each other fizzled a long time ago, I was exhausted.
I was starting to realize, I was also broken. Or if not broken, then breaking.
I couldn’t keep doing this.
And while I was deciding these things I had started to collect reasons for why we weren’t right for each other… why he wasn’t right for me. I was organized by nature. I was a list-maker. I couldn’t help but compile all of the reasons we were wrong for each other.
Even if they broke me.
Even if they destroyed us.
“What are we doing?” he mumbled into his hands.
Hot tears slipped from the corners of my eyes, but I wiped them away before he could see them. “I don’t know,” I whispered. My hands fell to rest against my flat stomach. “We hate each other.”
He whipped his head around and glared at me over his shoulder. “Is that what you think? You think I hate you?”
“I think we’ve grown so far apart, we don’t even know each other anymore.”
It was his turn to look like I slapped him. “What do you want, Kate? Tell me what you want to do. Tell me how to fix this?”
I recognized the pleading in his voice. This was how it always happened. We would start fighting about something mundane that neither of us would give in to, inevitably it would reveal our bigger issues, the ones we usually tried to ignore, then finally we would round out the night by Nick promising to do whatever it took to make this work between us. Only, the next morning we would wake up and nothing w
ould be changed or fixed or forgotten and we would start the delusional cycle all over again.
I was sick of it. I was sick of feeling like this and walking on eggshells every time we weren’t fighting. I was sick of feeling bad for how I felt and the things that I said. And I was really sick of that look on his face right now, knowing I was the one that put it there.
I wanted to get off this crazy train. I wanted to wake up in the morning feeling good about myself and I wanted to go to bed at night knowing I wasn’t a huge disappointment.
My hands clenched into tight fists on my belly and I squeezed my eyes shut before they tried to leak out more painful memories. I glanced to my left, taking in my appearance in the mirror on the door that led to our bathroom. My long hair looked black in the dim lighting and my skin was so pale it could have been see through. I stared at my eyes, as equally dark and empty as a black hole, and wondered if they were reflecting my broken spirit.
“I don’t think we can.” My words were a shattered whisper, but they felt like clarity… like truth. They were hurtful, but they were freedom. “I think we’re too broken, Nick. I think it’s too late for us.”
“What are you saying, Katie?”
I ignored the agonized rasp to his voice. If I started to feel bad for him now, I would never get this out. “This is over, Nick… We’re over. I think it’s time we were both honest with ourselves and admitted that.”
His response was immediate, “You’re for real? You really don’t want to try at this anymore?”
My temper shot up again and my face reddened from the hot anger pumping through me. “I have been trying! What do you think I’ve been doing for the past seven years? I’ve been trying every single day! And it’s not enough! It’s never enough! I cannot keep doing this day in and day out. I can’t keep pretending that things are okay and then falling apart every time we start arguing. Nick, I’m exhausted in my bones. You’re a good person, but it’s like… it’s like I bring out the absolute worst in you. And the same is true about me! I’m fun. I’m a really fun person. People like me! All of the people except you. And I don’t blame you! When we’re together I’m a nag and I’m ungrateful and I’m just… ugly. And I hate that person. I hate the person that I am with you. And I hate the person that you are…”
His head snapped up. I hadn’t meant to go that far or finish that thought, but Nick was too perceptive to miss it. “You hate the person that I am with you. Is that what you were going to say?”
I shrugged one shoulder, ashamed that I’d let those words slip out. I shouldn’t have said it, even if it was true. If nothing else, it drove my point home. I was a terrible person with Nick. To Nick. We’d made each other into horrible people.
Our relationship was toxic. He was slowly poisoning me.
I was slowly poisoning him.
“So what are you saying?” he demanded on a rasp. “You want a divorce? Is that what you want? You think we should get a divorce?”
I nodded, unable to get those precise words beyond my lips. “We aren’t good together. We hate each other.”
“Yeah, you’ve made that abundantly clear tonight.”
“Can you think of any reason that we should stay together? Give me one good reason that we should keep doing this to ourselves and I will try. I swear to you, if you can come up with one reason to stay together, I’ll keep doing this. But, Nick, god, this is ruining me. I don’t know how much more I can take before I just fall apart.”
This time when the tears started falling, I didn’t wipe them away or try to stop them. My chin trembled from the force of my emotion and a devastating sob racked my chest. It was true. All of it. I hated myself and I hated him because he was the one that had turned me into this awful person.
I could not do this anymore.
If he came up with a valid reason, I didn’t know what I would do. I knew I told him I would stick it out, but at this point, I couldn’t do it. I would never really try again at this broken relationship. I had nothing left inside of me to give.
He watched me for a long time. I could see him processing everything behind his veiled eyes. I knew he thought he was hiding his emotions from me, but after seven years of marriage and ten years of being together, I could read him like an open book.
This was his analytical phase. He had to weigh each piece of information, emotion against truth, accusation against reality, before he could come to a logical conclusion.
My husband, the cold-hearted thinker. Logic and reason outweighed everything else. If it wasn’t a fact, then it didn’t exist to him.
Or at least it didn’t matter.
“If this is what you want, then fine. A divorce, legal separation… whatever will make you happy.”
Whatever will make me happy. Is this it? Is this what I want? But I had already told him it was. Immediately I regretted everything about tonight, everything I had said and everything I’d accused him of. But I couldn’t keep feeling this way. I couldn’t go through this again, only to have it happen tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. It was time to stand up for myself and fight for my happiness. Nobody else was going to do it for me.
Not even Nick.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
There was a long weighted silence, as if he were waiting for me to take everything back, to make my final words disappear. Eventually, in a hoarse, tortured voice, he said, “I’ll, uh, sleep on the couch tonight. I can move my things out tomorrow morning.”
I sucked in a sharp breath. Was he serious? Were we really doing this? “Where will you go?”
“I’ll stay with my brother until I can get a place of my own.”
“Jared won’t care? I mean… what will he think?”
“You can’t have it both ways, Kate. You can’t ask for a divorce and then hope to keep it a secret. Besides, it’s better than staying at a hotel.”
“No, you’re right,” I whispered. I rubbed my stomach and tried to ignore the sinking feeling in my gut. I asked for this. I practically demanded the divorce. So why did I feel such a horrific feeling of disappointment.
My body felt like it was being pulled apart in every direction. My heart felt trampled beneath a stampede of bulls. This was supposed to make me feel better. This was supposed to feel like freedom. I was finally digging myself out of the wreckage of our marriage and yet, I felt more wrecked in this moment than any moment leading up to this one.
“We’re really doing this?” My words couldn’t seem to come out stronger than a weak whisper.
“You tell me. You’re the one that started throwing around divorce. It’s not the first time you’ve asked for one, Kate. I’m frankly sick of trying to talk you out of it.”
“I just… I don’t know where else there is for us to go. Nick, we’ve tried. We gave it our best and now I think it’s better if we move on… away from each other.”
“Yeah,” he breathed. “Tried and failed, I guess.”
I wanted to argue with him. I wanted to tell him that he was wrong and that we hadn’t failed, that there were as many good times between us as there were bad, but I couldn’t bring myself to put up the effort. He was right. We failed.
We were failures at our marriage.
When I didn’t say anything else, he grabbed his pillow and stomped downstairs to the living room. I rolled over in bed, pulled the duvet over my shoulders and cried until I passed out.
When I woke up in the morning, he was already gone.
Chapter One
8. My life will be better without him.
The bell rang and my stomach growled. I looked at my classroom, at the kids shoving papers and notebooks into their backpacks and the energetic chatter that warred with the high-pitched ringing of the fourth period bell, and wondered if I had some Pavlovian response to that sound.
I had been conditioned to know hunger, but I hadn’t felt it in months.
I smiled at my students as they filtered from the room and reminded some of them about homework
they owed me, but I barely heard the words that fell from my lips or acknowledged the concise instructions I was notorious for.
Behind my smiling mouth and teacher responsibilities, I was made of brittle glass and emptiness. I was nothing but paper thin defenses and sifting sand.
I had never known this kind of depression before. I could hardly tolerate my soon to be ex-husband and yet his absence left me unexpectedly battered.
Once my English class filled with a mixture of juniors and seniors had left me behind, I let out a long sigh and turned back to my desk. I dropped into my rolling chair and dug out my lunch from the locked bottom drawer.
I set it on the cold metal and stared at the sad ham sandwich and bruised apple I’d thrown together last minute this morning. I couldn’t find the energy to take a bite, let alone finish the whole thing. I’d lost seven pounds over the last three months, one for each year of my disastrous marriage. And while I appreciated the smaller size I could fit into, I knew this was the wrong way to go about it.
My friend, Kara, called this the Divorce Diet. But I knew the truth. This wasn’t a diet. I’d lost myself somewhere in the ruins of my marriage and now that my relationship was over, my body had started to systematically shut down. First my heart broke. Then my spirit fragmented. Now my appetite was in jeopardy and I didn’t know what to do about it. I didn’t know if I would ever feel hungry again.
I didn’t know if I would ever feel again.
I used to eat lunch in the teacher’s lounge, but lately I couldn’t bring myself in there to face other people, especially my nosey colleagues.
Everyone had heard about my failed marriage. They stopped me in the halls to offer their condolences or hitman services with empathetic expressions or playful smiles. They watched me with pitying eyes and sympathetic frowns. They whispered behind my back or asked invasive questions.
But none of them cared. Not really.