I betrayed Grady. I betrayed him.
I sucked in a gasping breath and whatever barrier had been left completely dissolved. My cries were loud now, ugly and desperate. I held my hands over my face and wept while my soul shattered apart.
Emma came running into the room completely frightened by my breakdown. “Oh, Liz,” she gasped when she found me on the floor.
I felt her arms wrap around me so tightly it hurt as she slid down next to me. She held me against her chest like a small child, rocking me back and forth. Her tears mingled with mine and she mourned with me even though she couldn’t begin to know what a horrible person I was.
When I had finally settled down some, she asked, “Was it horrible?”
I shook my head as more tears started to fall. “It was wonderful,” I confessed.
“Then why are you crying?”
“Because it was wonderful. And because he kissed me!”
“You didn’t want him to?”
“No,” I shook my head and my face scrunched as hot tears poured from my eyes. “I didn’t want him to stop.”
She finally understood my inner conflict. She pulled me into her arms and I stayed there as both of us cried for the husband I’d love and the husband I’d buried.
Emma couldn’t possibly understand all of the emotional turmoil that beat on me, that stirred up my insides and ravaged my heart. But she knew that this hurt me. That it both killed me and somehow sewed me back together.
I didn’t know what to do about Ben or if there was even anything to do. The only thing I knew that night was that it had been one of the best of my life.
And one of the worst.
Stage Four: Depression
There has been this faint hope inside of me that while I work through these stages of grief, they would become easier along the way.
I pictured myself healing as I waged war with each stage, gradually building armor that would protect me from the hurt, heartache and despair.
That hope is a lie.
Grief doesn’t get easier with each stage. Grief becomes harder, more difficult to face, more consuming with each breath that I take.
I am adrift in a sea of confusion. I am lost in a desert of heartache.
I am broken.
And now I must face depression.
This is the last of the great miseries. I am supposed to find acceptance after this stage, but I don’t think it will happen.
I can’t help but believe I will be lost in depression for the rest of my life.
The only light I can find, beyond my children, is in Ben and he brings his own private agony that rips at my chest with claws as sharp as knives.
He is both comfort and pain. Both freedom and shame.
The relief I feel when I am with him is at odds with my private guilt. Guilt that I try to ignore.
Grady has been the only life I know.
But can there still be life in death?
If I chain myself to my dead husband, will I ever truly live again?
And yet how can I let go of a love and a man that still mean everything to me?
There is too much on my heart, too much weighing on my shoulders. Depression comes in fast and fiercely, without apology and without reprieve.
Depression leaves me feeling heartsick and hopeless. Ben is the only fresh air in my stale, stagnant thoughts. Yet I will eventually have to let him go too.
And then my depression will become twofold. Once for the man that I will always love, but can never be with again. And once for the man that I will have to choose to never be with in the first place.
It is agony to live like this.
I love one man and I am falling in love with another.
I am grieving and I am celebrating.
I find moments where I am truly happy.
But at the end of the day, when I am alone and left to my thoughts and my grief, I find that I am so very depressed. And that is the very beginning of me and the very end.
I am nothing but depressed.
Chapter Twenty
Five days passed before I saw Ben again. True to his word he had called me the day after our date. And when I hadn’t answered, he had texted asking me to call him back.
I hadn’t done that either.
I managed to avoid running into him over the weekend and into the school week. My kids kept me busy. Soccer season was in full swing for both of the older kids, and Lucy and Jace had started swim lessons. I had signed them up weeks ago, hoping we would be able to use Ben’s pool during summer.
Now the lessons felt like little digs at my heart, painful reminders of what I’d ruined between us.
I couldn’t face him again. I couldn’t look into his eyes and remember that kiss and not fall to pieces.
Worst of all, I didn’t want to give that up. Him up.
I wanted there to be more.
When I lay in bed at night now, I reached over to Grady’s side and felt the crushing weight of his absence. But then I would close my eyes and remember the feel of Ben’s lips against mine, the hard press of his body, the firm grip of his hands as he held me tightly to him, as desperate for me as I was for him.
My mind would spin and my thoughts would crash into each other. My heart couldn’t figure out where to settle, whether to feel guilt or elation, shame or joy. It was too much for me. I walked around those days with tears I could not stop and a sick feeling in my stomach.
I tried to convince myself that if I felt this ill about Ben, then I shouldn’t be with him. A relationship couldn’t be built on emotions as volatile as these.
But in the depth of me, in my very center, I knew that it wasn’t Ben causing this trauma. It was my refusal to acknowledge my feelings for Ben that had me tied up in knots. It was the suppression of my real feelings that made me ill and heartbroken.
I knew he would get tired of my avoidance. Ben wasn’t the kind of man that ran from problems. He faced them head on and like with everything else, he challenged me to do the same.
But I desperately hoped he would give up on me. I needed him to walk away and find someone that could actually give back to him what he wanted… what he needed.