“That’s seriously the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“They’re both great people who deserve to be happy.”
“We’re both great people who deserve to be happy, too,” Brianna said.
Noah was slightly terrified of where she might be going with that. “Is that right?”
“It is. We deserve it after what we went through with them.”
“My definition of happy changed after that. Happy to me is a drama-free life.”
“I understand that. The kind of drama that happened to us is the worst, but neither of us went looking for it. We didn’t cause it, and we can’t let it completely ruin our faith in other people.”
“How can you have faith in anyone after what he did?”
“It’s not easy, but I choose not to let the actions of one person color my outlook on everyone.”
“You’re a bigger person than I am if you can still trust people. I don’t think I’ll ever trust anyone the way I did her and Miguel.” Noah finished the last of his ribs and took a drink of his beer. “That mistake with the fireplace never would’ve happened on his watch. His attention to detail was meticulous. Carlo is great, but he misses shit all the time and makes mistakes that Miguel never would’ve made.”
“It’s tough to replace someone like that.”
“He’s irreplaceable at work, which makes me hate what he did even more. I gave him the keys to my kingdom, and he ran off with my queen.”
“Are they still together?”
“I don’t know, and I tell myself I don’t care.”
“You could find out easily enough.”
“What difference would that make to me?”
“Maybe if it was a love match, you’d feel better about it.”
“No, I wouldn’t. They had to betray me to get their ‘love match.’ So why would I want to know that?”
“If I were you, I’d prefer to know that what they did was about more than scratching an itch at your expense.”
“Eh, I don’t care either way. It happened. It sucked. It’s over. I’ve moved on.”
“Have you, though?”
Brianna couldn’t believe she was talking to him this way, about the worst time in both their lives. But it was comforting to meet someone who understood what that kind of betrayal did to a person. It ripped apart the fabric of your entire life and left you shredded. She was still putting the pieces back together more than a year after uncovering the full extent of her ex-husband’s deceit.
If there was one good thing about being in Vermont, it was being far away from all the misguided sympathy from friends and family at home who’d wanted to do something to help—at first. But what could they do? What could anyone do? She’d given her heart to a monster, and he’d trampled all over it. After a while, her friends and family had grown weary of hearing the latest episode in her ongoing drama, leaving her more alone with her heartbreak than she’d been at first. Her cousin, Dom, was the one exception. She’d been there through it all and had never wavered in her devotion. For that, Brianna would be eternally grateful.
“I think I have,” Noah said in response to her question. “Moved on, that is. It’s been three years.”
“Do you date?”
“Not really. I have a friends-with-benefits thing with a woman I’ve known since high school. Neither of us is interested in anything more than that, so it works out well.”
“So that’s it? A friend with benefits for the rest of your life?”
“I don’t know about that, but it works for me right now.”
“I get it. What’s the point of risking anything if there’re people out there like your ex and mine, right?”
“Right. I did that once. Risked everything, and it didn’t work out, so why bother with the hassle of that again?”
“Can I ask you something—and you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
“Sure. I mean, I’ve already told you more than anyone else knows.”
“Thank you for trusting me with that. I promise it won’t go any further.”
“What did you want to ask me?”
“If you were happy with your wife before it went bad.”
“I was, which made it so much worse when I caught her with Miguel. I’d had no idea that anything was that wrong. I mean we had our issues, but who doesn’t? It reminded me of what my mom said after my dad left, that she’d had no clue he was unhappy enough to do something like that. Sure, things had been ‘off’ between them for a while, but she didn’t see that coming.” He took a drink of his beer. “What about you? Were you happy before you found out who he was?”
“Blissfully. No one in the history of love had ever been more in love with anyone than I was with him. I’m sure I was completely annoying to everyone who knew us with the way I’d go on and on about how wonderful he was. Only to find out it was all a con. Everything that happened between us was part of his master plan to ruin my life.”
“Why would anyone spend the limited amount of time they have in their lives ruining someone else?”
“I’ve done a lot of reading about the mindset of the sociopath, and I’ve come to understand that it’s not intentional on his part. It’s just how his mind operates. His goal is to maneuver a situation to his optimal benefit at the expense of anyone and everyone who gets in the way. I wasn’t a person to him. My feelings had no bearing on him, so it was nothing for him to hurt me the way he did. It took me a long time to understand the psychology of it. My therapist is the one who first used the word sociopath to describe him.”
“Do you ever wonder…” He fiddled with a paper-wrapped straw that the waitress had left on the table.
“What?”
“How it’s possible you lived through something like that and continue to function somewhat normally?”
“All the time. When I look back on those first few months, all I see is the darkness. My life imploded in one twenty-four-hour period. Everything went from fine to not fine in the literal blink of an eye. For a long time, weeks, I didn’t think I would survive it.”
“How did you?”
“When the full extent of what he’d done became clear to me, I started to get angry. Strangely enough, that helped.”
“I know about that kind of anger. I never thought I could kill someone, but when I saw them together…”
“Which one would you have killed first?” she asked with a grin.
“Him.”
“Why not her? She was the one you were married to.”
“Because he was screwing me twice over by screwing her.”
“I can’t believe you had to see them together that way.” She shuddered. “That had to be the worst.”
“Took a long time to scrub those images from my mind.”
The waitress returned to take their plates, handed a key for a room upstairs to Brianna and asked if they were interested in more drinks or dessert.
“Since I don’t have to drive, I’ll have another,” Noah said. “Anything for you, Brianna?”