Infuriatingly, she held a calm but worried tone as she said, “Don't yell; you'll wake the baby."
Trent grit his teeth. "How long?" he enunciated carefully. "Don't you dare think about lying to me. How long, Lily?"
"A couple of weeks," she said.
"A couple of weeks and you already went to see him?" he snapped.
Lily looked down at her feet, and he could see her eyes were already filling with tears. "I'm sorry, Trent."
"You're sorry?" he repeated, trying to keep his tone even and quiet. "Did you sleep together?"
Lily didn't answer him, but when she looked up and met his eyes, the answer was clear.
"Huh," he said, nodding and squinting his eyes in disbelief.
"Trent, I'm sorry."
Without thinking, Trent tossed her phone to the ground with all the force he could muster. He'd hoped it would shatter into a million little pieces, but the armored case prevented it from a single scratch.
"Why?" he demanded. "Why would you do this? We have a family, Lily! Now is not the time to go out and have a quarter-life crisis!"
"I don't know why!"
"Why would you do it? How could you do it? I could never do that to you, Lil."
"I know you wouldn't," she said before erupting into heaping sobs. "But we've been together so long," she said through desperate breaths.
"That's supposed to be a good thing!" he insisted. Trent loved that they'd only ever been with each other. That they had been through everything together—parental struggles, getting their licenses, buying a house, marriage, all of their important firsts. How could she possibly view any of that as a bad thing?
"We've been together for so long that I feel like I don't know who I am anymore," she cried, taking a seat on the floor in front of him, desperate for understanding. "We've always just been Trent and Lily and I...I feel really lost."
"You're scared," he said. There was no question that he could forgive her—that he would. She betrayed him, and it hurt more than anything he had ever experienced in his life, but this was their marriage, and sometimes marriage was hard—wasn't that what people had always told them?
Trent didn't run away from hard things, and he wouldn't run from this.
"We've just taken this huge step, and things are changing," he said, kneeling on the ground in front of her and rubbing his hands up the sides of her arms. "You're scared, but we'll settle in. We'll find a new normal and you—”
"No, Trent," she said through her tears. "Whatever you're going to say, the answer is that I won't. I won't settle down. I won't learn to love it. I won't forget the way I feel now. I won't stop feeling this way until I go and find out for myself if I made the right decision."
"Right decision..." he repeated to himself. "What do you mean?"
"The right decision marrying you," she said.
"You did," he insisted firmly, but Lily wouldn't stop shaking her head.
"I need to find out. If I was meant to be with you forever, then why would I be falling for someone else?"
"Because you're scared!" he yelled. "Because you're bored!"
"Trent..."
He couldn't believe what he was hearing. Lily had always been right there beside him, believing in their relationship. She'd always been his rock, and he had never felt like they weren't on the same page until that very moment.
"What if you did make the right decision? What if you realize we are supposed to be together?" he asked, trying to talk some sense into her. "Why do you have to rip my heart out just to end up right back where we are right now? Why can't we cut out the middle-man here?"
"I can't let it go," she said.
"What are you saying? You want to leave me, Lil? Are you leaving me?"
Her answer, a simple “I think so,” ruined him. Trent begged her to stay, to change her mind. He demanded to know who the guy was, and she told him. It wasn't anyone he'd known. Just some guy Lily had started talking to online.
And then she left.
There was nothing Trent could do to make her stay. He demanded that she did not take Bex with her, and she reluctantly agreed, though not without pushback.
The divorce was hard, especially because he had loved her so fiercely.
He told the story to Grace one night after they had spent the day riding. Day turned lunch in the afternoon and then a movie night with Bex at Trent's house.
He thought it would be weird to have Grace over, but strangely, it wasn't. She fit right in on his couch, holding Bex and cheering for the same parts of the movie his son did. After Bex fell asleep, Trent told her that he appreciated how sweet she was with him, then told her that he felt guilty sometimes, about Lily.
"When she left, I told her she couldn't take Bex with her."
"Would she have wanted to?" she asked, and he didn't quite know how to answer.
"I think so. I don't know," he said absent-mindedly. "I really couldn't tell you. At the time, I thought that I wanted to be with my kid. I couldn't stand the thought of her taking him away from me, but there was another part of me that wanted to punish her or try to guilt her into staying. But she was determined to go live her life with this other guy—see what else was out there, even if it meant leaving our son behind."
"Would you have forgiven her if she stayed?" she asked.
"For cheating? Oh yeah," he said with ease.
"That's the difference between men and women, I guess," she laughed softly.
"What do you mean?"
"If Aaron cheated on me, even if I tried to forgive him, it would have been the thorn in the side of that relationship for the rest of time. I'd always wonder if he was cheating again. If his phone went off, I'd wonder who was texting him. If he went out or was late at work, I'd be...my heart would be a wreck," she said. "We're not even together anymore, and the thought of him with someone else makes me feel physically ill."
"It's not like it rolls off my back or anything. It's a hard pill to swallow. I've only ever...I mean, she was my..." Trent trailed off, feeling suddenly embarrassed. "We were young when we first started dating, you know?"
Grace nodded and offered him a smile.
"Knowing that she's been with someone else makes me really angry. It hurts. It sucks. But if it comes down to ruining my family by holding a grudge or forgiving her—knowing what a great marriage we had before she cheated and assuming we could get back to that spot?—Yeah, my choice would be to forgive her."
"Even now?" she asked.
"I don't know. It's been two years."
"You may be entirely different people now," she offered.
"Or we could be exactly the same," he said.
Grace nodded, but she didn't seem bothered by his lack of answers. "The real question is, would she be over here riding horses with you and have an awesome movie night?"
"Definitely not," he laughed.
"Then you should count yourself lucky that she hit the road and you were able to find yourself such a fantastically talented partner here."