That’s right, Catherine. I’m not your loving, bend-over-backward, devoted husband anymore.
“I regret everything, Dex. I regret the way I treated you, the way I hurt you, the way I ran away from us…the way I blamed you.” Her eyes started to water when those words came out, and her bottom lip trembled slightly before she quickly composed herself once more.
She’d get no sympathy from me.
“It was wrong to blame you, and I’m so sorry for that.”
I felt like I hadn’t blinked once since she’d taken a seat, my eyes numb from the intensity of my stare.
“It wasn’t your fault. Not in the least.”
I did get some satisfaction out of that, did feel the weight of my guilt lift off my shoulders and disappear. I’d carried that fear every single day since she’d left me, carried the weight of Allen’s soul like I was the one who’d delivered it to heaven personally. It still gnawed at me, still disrupted my sleep sometimes, still gave me a momentary jolt of anxiety when I stepped into the OR and saw the patient on the table.
She looked down at her hands and squeezed them together tightly. “Fuck, I’m sorry…”
I could actually feel the pain in her voice that time.
“I lost my father, my best friend, and I just needed someone to blame for it. We were so close… I just couldn’t accept the loss. I assumed my brilliant superhero husband would give me what I wanted, and when that expectation wasn’t met, I put all the blame on you. I knew his heart was bad, I knew the risks, but at the end of the day…it was easier to blame you. That was wrong, so wrong.”
Yeah, it fucking was.
“I’ve spent the last year trying to run from it. I’ve spent the last year blaming you for something that wasn’t your fault, because it’s easier to be angry at someone than to feel that raw sense of loss. But I’ve had to stay busy, to never sit still for a moment, because the regret would creep in. I always knew I was wrong…in the back of my mind…deep in my heart.” She inhaled a deep breath, doing her best to keep her eyes dry. “Grief does crazy things to the body, makes you lose your mind…turns you into someone you don’t even recognize.”
“I know that better than you do.”
She looked at me again.
“Because I lost a man whom I loved like a father…and then I lost you.” I abandoned my patients, abandoned my practice, abandoned my entire life because of what she did to me. I lost myself—completely and utterly. “I know you lost your father, but I’m the one who lost everything, Catherine. I retired from surgery and worked for my mother instead. I moved in to a shitty apartment in Brooklyn because you took all my money. I spent the last year fucking any woman who gave me a glance because I’m incapable of feeling anything more than that—because of you.” I almost took the high road and kept my suffering to myself, but I couldn’t move on because I hadn’t gotten the chance to speak my mind, to unload my pain onto the person who’d inflicted it, so I just let it out. “Don’t sit here and tell me how much you’ve suffered, because your suffering is nothing compared to mine. I loved you, Catherine.” I kept my eyes dry, but my chest started to constrict tightly, the wetness in my throat. “I fucking loved you more than anything on this goddamn planet. I would have slit my own throat if it would have made you smile. You have no idea how many times a gorgeous woman made a pass at me when we were married, and I had every opportunity to fuck her brains out without anyone ever knowing about it, but I never did. It wasn’t out of marital obligation. It was because you were the only woman I ever wanted.”
The wet sheen in her eyes reflected the lighting behind me, the tears growing bigger and bigger.
“I have spent so much time thinking about this, where it went wrong, what I could have done differently. And you know what’s sad? I genuinely think we would have spent the rest of our lives together, with our two kids, having a beautiful marriage like my parents, if this hadn’t happened. That makes me feel worse. If I hadn’t operated on your father, I would have a little boy or girl right now. I would still be happy. What does that say about us? That it was just a travesty that broke us apart? Or were we never that happy to begin with?”
When she blinked, two drops rolled down her cheeks. “The first one…”
Even after all this time, after all this anger, I didn’t like to watch her cry. My eyes shifted out the window so I wouldn’t have to look at her.
“Dex.”
I resisted for a moment before I turned back to her.
“Six months after our divorce, the anger started to wear off. It couldn’t mask my real pain anymore. I started to realize how badly I’d fucked this up, what I had lost, and I thought about calling so many times in the hope that I could apologize and get back the love of my life—”
“Why didn’t you?” A few months ago, I was working in the Trinity Building, making a joke of everything, pretending I was perfectly okay when I was profoundly depressed, and if she’d walked in and asked me to take her back…the answer would have been yes.
She shook her head before she dragged her palms down her cheeks and wiped the tears away. “Because after what I did…I didn’t think you’d ever want to speak to me again. Because I knew I didn’t deserve you. Because I knew I fucked this up so badly that I shouldn’t be granted a second chance.”
She was right about that—she didn’t deserve a second chance.
“Then I met this guy…”
I shifted my gaze away because I didn’t want to hear this.
“And I think the reason I started to see him was because…he reminded me of you. We were together for a while, and then he asked me to marry him. I said yes.”
“Congratulations.” The sarcasm in my voice was almost violent.
She winced at my coldness. “I said yes, but immediately afterward…I realized the only person I’d ever want to be married to is you.”
My eyes shifted back to hers.
“That was when it really hit me, what I’d lost. Everything came to me in flashbacks, every Christmas morning, having dinner together when you came home from work, that first time we took a pregnancy test and it was negative…and we were both devastated. Playing in the snow at your family’s cabin, our wedding day. And in that moment, nothing was the same. That was when I really woke up, when I really felt everything, and I ended things with my fiancé…because I never loved him. How could I possibly love anyone when I’ve been in love with you this entire time?” She sniffled as she looked at me, her eyes watery, turning red, her makeup having rivers cut through it.
All I could do was stare as she stared at me, replay that confession over and over in my head. I pictured the same flashbacks she mentioned, watching her walk down the aisle in her beautiful gown on that summer afternoon in the Hamptons, her father walking her to me to hand her over, holding her when she sobbed about the negative results of her pregnancy test when we’d been trying nonstop for a month, of the snow angels we would make together outside the cabin, the way she and my sister were so close, like they were sisters themselves. The best years of my life had happened when I was married to her.