I nod.
“She’s the reason why. I found out she spent some time in foster care before she was eventually adopted by a local pastor and his wife. She’d become a spokesperson for the program, and her parents asked that all memorials be made out to CASA, so I send a check every year.”
“Oh my God.” My mind spins faster than it ever has. “I just can’t imagine him—”
“You can’t imagine that Cole and your perfect husband being the same person?”
I nod, sadly. The Cole I fell in love with could have fit in a picture frame on store shelves. The one in the story River just told—the one I’ve talked to the last few days—is a complete monster. It’s impossible to reconcile the two in my mind.
“He hasn’t changed that much, Marley. He only showed you one side of himself.”
“Eleven years. He said he loved me for almost eleven years.” The tears finally escape. Cole was my partner. How can we be talking about the same person?
“I’ve hated him for fifteen,” River says from beside me as we both stare at the water.
SOME THINGS ARE CLEAR. Some are blurry. Someone turned my life story upside down and backward.
“So what happened in the bar?” I ask after taking a few minutes to let everything sink in. That’s the part I still don’t get.
He winces. “I was sitting at the bar—some shithole near the airport—killing time before flying back up north. There weren’t many people there so a conversation in the corner caught my attention. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear most of what they were saying. A few minutes later, Cole stood up, and I almost fell off my barstool. I never wanted to see him again, and if I did, I never thought it would be there.”
“Did he recognize you?”
“Immediately. The asshole actually smiled at me like he’d been happy to see me. He sat next to me and ordered another beer.”
I wonder what Cole might have been doing there, but that’s the least of my worries after what I’ve already learned.
“He asked what I’d been up to,” River continues. “I told him I worked in a nightclub but left out the fact that I own several. I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt that day so it wasn’t hard to hide behind most people’s misconceptions about me. He asked if I lived in the area, and I admitted that I did part-time. After we talked for a few minutes, he asked if I was interested in making some extra money.”
“But you didn’t need the money, did you?” I interrupt.
He looks at me sideways. “I don’t need anyone else’s fucking money. I was curious, though. Wondered what Cole was up to now.”
“And that was trying to catch me having an affair.” I fill in the blank, but I still don’t understand why River agreed to it. If he hated Cole so much and he didn’t need the money.
“Yeah.”
I close my eyes, bracing myself for how he might answer my next question. “Why did you agree to do it?”
He pulls his hand from beneath mine, standing to walk toward the water. I follow as he kicks off his shoes and walks a couple feet into the warm ocean water until he’s covered up to his knees. I almost feel sorry for him, but then I remember every way he deceived me, and I don’t.
“You’re never going to talk to me after this,” he says, swishing his feet around beneath the water.
“We really don’t have any reason to.”
“It’s kind of sad, you know.”
“Why’s that?” I ask. I think about River all the time, but there are a lot of negative feelings where the good ones once resided. There’s no doubt in my mind that never seeing him again is for the best. There was nothing genuine in what we shared, at least on his end.
He shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter. Nothing fucking matters.”
“Why did you agree to do it, River?”
“To get back at him. To get even for what he did to her.”
I step back out of the water, letting sand coat my wet feet. “So you just used me to get back at him?”
“It’s not like it sounds. I promise you, Marley, it wasn’t like that at all.” He throws his hands up in the air. “Jesus, why does this have to be so hard? Why does everything have to be so damn hard?”
After picking up my sandals, I walk back toward where his car is parked and climb back inside, keeping my eyes forward. I don’t want to look at him. I don’t want to hear the sound of his voice. I don’t want to smell his expensive cologne.
Cole was trying to break me.
River was just trying to get even.
Somehow, I became a pawn in two different games, and I wasn’t a willing player in either.
Time passes. Anger and tears mix, creating the cocktail of insanity. Never in a million years would I have believed that this is my life—it’s not reality. I can’t imagine anyone else believing it.
I sit as still as a statue when I hear his door open. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, before shifting the car back in drive.
It’s the longest short drive of my life as I wait for my building to come into view. He surprises me by pulling alongside a park a couple miles from my place. Just as I think about jumping out and walking the rest of the way to clear my head, he reaches across my body and opens the glove compartment. I watch as he pulls a manila envelope out and hands it to me, my name scribbled across the front in his familiar penmanship.
“Don’t open it until you get home.” It’s all he says before the car starts down the road once again.
The silence between us is like a sad song. The longer it plays on, the deeper I feel it in my heart. It’s crushing—paralyzing. It’s not about a break-up or a sudden death; it’s about something that never existed at all. A bad dream.
Another thought enters my mind as we turn onto my street. “Can I ask you one more thing?”
“Anything,” he says quietly, shifting the car.
“That Sunday, after I’d left your condo, how did you know Cole was in the shower when we were texting?” I bite down on my lower lip, waiting for him to answer.
He stops at a red light, running his fingers over his forehead. “He called me shortly before I texted you.”
“Why?”
I watch him wince as he puts the car back in drive. “To ask how the weekend went.”
“And what did you tell him?” I ask.
“Just open the envelope when you get home. Your answers are in there.”
The last minute or so is quiet, and as soon as he stops in front of my apartment building, I step out of his car with the envelope clutched in my hand. I don’t bother with a goodbye. I don’t know that I ever met the real River. And now I never will.
My legs burn as I take the stairs—a side effect of the run I subjected myself to earlier. I withstand it long enough to make it to my floor and unlock my door. Once inside, I collapse against it. Even the strongest of people can only take so much until they just can’t. There’s no line between my reality and my imagination.
I uncork a bottle of red wine and drink it from the bottle as I soak up my newfound solitude.
Everything blurs.
Nothing hurts.
SUNDAY MORNING HITS—LITERALLY. It could have been a hammer, a brick, or one of those heavy metal bats, but my head aches to the highest possible degree. Light pierces my eyes when I try to open them. My veins literally pulse against my skull as I try to stand long enough to make it to the bathroom.
My stomach rolls, releasing all the hurt I tried to drown in two bottles of red last night. Just another thing to add to the list of items that seemed like a good idea at the time, but ended up being far from good.
After taking a few slow sips of water, I fall back into my bed and try to sleep the hurt away, knowing the worst part of it will still be there when I wake up.
The physical wounds hurt far less as I open my eyes for the second time a little after noon. The hammering is a dull ache. The nausea still cripples me, but it’s nothing like it was before.
I walk into the kitchen, forcing d
own a few pills to kill what remains, only to see the envelope River handed me sitting unopened on the kitchen counter. It’s a time bomb waiting to explode in my hands. It’s scary not knowing its contents or how they’ll affect me.
I stare at it as I brew myself a pot of coffee. I keep my eye on it while I lean against the counter, slowly sipping my first cup. I wonder if he didn’t want me to open it until I got home because he was scared of the way I’d react, or if he couldn’t watch my heart break any more than it already had.
Just as I put my cup down to open it, my phone vibrates on the counter. I pick it up, and my eyes instantly widen.
Cole: What the hell are you talking about?
I scan my messages in an attempt to figure out what he’s saying, and the smallest of smiles tugs at my lips. Drunk Marley decided to text her soon-to-be ex-husband last night.
Marley: I wish I’d never met you. I could have done better with Jarrett McKenzie.
Jarrett was at the bottom of our graduating class in college. His family had all the money in the world, but his looks and money didn’t take him anywhere. It was a good thing his daddy was an alumni.
Marley: How are you going to get out of this one without your dad to protect you, asshole? Maybe you should pay me off too.
Marley: Since when do you hang out in the bars down by the airport? I know you weren’t saving money to take me to dinner.
The messages go on and on with no reply from him … until now. Even if none of what I know gains me any ground in the courtroom, knowing that I’ve made him anxious gives me a small victory.
I type one last message before throwing my phone back on the counter.
Marley: I’ll see you in court.
Hopefully that will keep him on the edge of his fancy leather chair until we have our first date in court. Our last first date.
My focus goes back to the envelope, but this time I unclasp it before I have too much time to think about what’s inside. As I slide out a stack of pictures, a smaller white envelope falls to the floor. I let it stay there as my eyes catch sight of top picture. Just when I thought my life couldn’t get any worse, I find out it can.
The world’s tallest man couldn’t see over the pile of lies. In the first picture, Cole has his arms wrapped around a tall, rail-thin blonde in a short black dress. His face is nuzzled in the crook of her neck the way he used to nuzzle mine. In the bottom left-hand corner is a small post-it note that says, “Her name is Bridget Flannery.”
The next is of the two of them kissing. Then there’s another of them entering the Ritz-Carlton Chicago hand in hand. Each photo is date and time stamped starting about two months ago with the last one taken just last week. I can’t take anymore after I catch a glimpse of the two of them leaving a restaurant on the night of my birthday. That one is the final stab. Didn’t think I could take anymore, but apparently I can. Cole was cheating on me?
Why did he come crawling back that Sunday when he’d just been with her? Why did he run right back to Chicago—to her—after asking for another chance?
More pieces fall out of place.
How long had he been cheating? Was this the first woman? The thought of him being with her then coming home to me all those weeks makes me sick. He preached the importance of work—of growing our business—when all he was really doing was getting his dick wet.
Maybe he wanted me to get caught first. Maybe he needed me to step out of our marriage so he felt less guilty about doing it himself. In the end, the reason really doesn’t matter. He was wrong.
I toss the pictures on the counter, watching as some of the ones I hadn’t thumbed through fan out.
My whole body shakes as I crouch down to pick up the smaller envelope that fell as I pulled out the pictures. My name is scribbled in River’s handwriting once again. I open it, wondering how much more I can possibly uncover that I haven’t already. I slip a folded piece of notebook paper out and unfold it to find the $10,000 check Cole had written River—never cashed—as well as a few white rose petals. My heart jolts back to life as I roll the delicate petals between my fingertips while staring at a page of handwritten words. Not reading, just staring.
River Holtz had something more to say.
A single tear falls on the page, soaking through the ink.
Another tear slips from my cheek onto the bottom of the page. I can’t decide if opening the envelope made me feel better or worse. There’s hope that someone might care, but there’s also another huge slap in the face.
River isn’t the monster I thought him to be.
Cole is even more of a prick than I already knew he was. I wonder if anything he said from that Sunday on held any truth, or if he was simply buying time. I may never know.
LIFE TURNS IN A CIRCLE. You journey around, maybe hitting a few bumps or snags along the way. Then you’re right back to where you started, but yet never in the same place. You go from an unknown to a part of history. That’s all that really changes from beginning to end.
I’m not happy with the way my life is right now; most people in my shoes wouldn’t be.
I had big plans for my life’s journey. I wanted to leave a lasting impression. I wanted to leave behind children who looked like me, who had all of my best characteristics. I wanted them to be able to tell their children’s children about me. I wanted to be someone who would be missed after they were gone.
Now, I’ve encountered an impassable mountain—one I’ve just started to climb. A big part of my life may have been a lie, and now I have to move past that and learn to trust again. I love Cole. I was genuinely in love with Cole, but did he ever really love me? I want to think he did. I hope he did. I hate the thought of being used. Even more than that, I hate the thought that my choices in men may have already cost me my dream.
And River. I’m not sure what to make of everything I’ve learned over the last twenty-four hours. His story is crazy, but I believe every word of it. At least, I want to believe it. I feel something for him. I’m sure that I have for a while, but I don’t think it’s love.
Hell, I don’t even know what love is anymore.
Love has become distorted. I can’t remember what it feels like to fall into it, and I definitely can’t tell the difference between an honest and an insincere love. It’s going to take me a long time to untangle the mess my failed marriage has left behind, but for now I’m holding onto hope I will one-day piece back together the true meaning.
I’ve been sitting around my apartment contemplating Wine Fest 2.0 since I opened that envelope earlier. There was a lot of information within it, but my mind is too fogged to decide what I want to do with it. This shouldn’t be so difficult for a lawyer who has been through discovery hundreds of times over, but this is my life.
After making a few quick phone calls, I send Cole a text.
Marley: Can you meet me at Staley’s law office tomorrow at noon?
A couple minutes tick by as I wait for a response.
Cole: For what?
Marley: Mediation
Cole: There’s nothing to mediate. You violated a pre-nup.
Marley: Then it should be quick and easy. Can you meet me tomorrow or not?
Another minute or two goes by.
Cole: Fine. Don’t forget to bring the keys to my car. I’m going to need them.
Asshole.
I spend the next few hours putting together my case. It’s all there; I just have to put a nice little bow around it so I can explain it—tell our ridiculous story in a believable way.
Our marriage wasn’t going well. I cheated. We tried to make it work, and I cheated again. Divorce papers served as dessert. Hired lovers. Cole’s affair. It’s an absolutely crazy tale.
The look on Cole’s face is going to be priceless, and I’ll get the satisfaction of knowing I was the one who put it there.
“You didn’t bring an attorney?” Mr. Staley asks when he sees me sitting alone in the conference room.
I smile, patting the folder in front of m
e. “I’m not going to need one.”
Staley shakes his head. “We can delay this if you need more time. This is an awfully quick turnaround.”
“No need.”
“It’s your call.”
Just as I’m about to open my mouth again, Cole walks in wearing a tailored black suit and gray tie. His hair is spiked in the way I always liked. I have to look down to keep my emotions in check. This is hard no matter what’s happened between us. There’s always going to be feelings there. He was my first true love … the first man I trusted enough to promise my life to. That doesn’t all disappear, even after everything I know now. I guess it’s possible to love a monster.
“Mr. Mason is ready to get this thing rolling,” Cole’s attorney announces as soon as they sit down. It’s Davis, Miami’s hard-hitting divorce lawyer.
Inhaling a deep breath, I gain the strength to look up at the man who ruined my life. There’s no doubt he knew what he was doing when he left me alone for weeks on end. He had to have known pairing River with his lonely wife would lead to something. Not that it matters here because he did it first. He betrayed me, then sat back and waited for me to betray him so he could have everything. The only thing I still wonder is when it all changed … when did he stop loving me enough to remain faithful? Did he ever love me enough?
“I’m ready,” I say, keeping my head up.
“Who would like to start first?” Staley asks, tapping his pen against the wooden table. I stare between it and Cole, waiting for my chance to tear his ego in two.
“We’d like to start, if that’s okay with Mrs. Mason,” Cole’s attorney states, leaning forward.
“Marley,” I say before Staley can approve their request.
“Is it okay if we go first, Marley?” He drags my name out like it’s foreign to him. It’s not going to be when he walks out of here today.
“I have no objection to that,” I answer.
Davis turns his attention to Staley. “I assume you’ve reviewed the pre-nup?”