“Damn it, Elin,” he groans, pacing a circle in the middle of the bedroom floor.
“Damn it, Elin?” I repeat. His words stoke some life back into me, diffuse some of the numbness I’d begun to feel.
“I never said I wanted a divorce from you!” he booms.
“Sometimes actions speak louder than words.”
“Yeah, you’re right—they fucking do! What was last night? Was that my way of asking you to see about a divorce? You think I came over here and held you in my arms so you’d get the picture I didn’t want to be with you anymore? Don’t lie to yourself, Elin, and don’t lie to me either.”
“Ugh,” I huff, walking around him and into the hall. Ignoring his shouts for me to come back, I enter the living room. I need to put some distance between us. Scurrying to the far end of the sofa, I clench the armrest as he walks in.
“I couldn’t divorce you,” he says, positioning himself against the other side of the sofa.
“As soon as I can save the money, I’ll file. You don’t have to do it,” I whisper. Even as the words come out of my mouth, I want to fall to the floor and sob. I know, in the bottom of my gut, that I don’t want it to be over. I want to love this man for the rest of my life. But I don’t want the relationship he and I have now. It’s not . . . us.
We’ve agreed to stop the fights dozens of times, promised each other we’d do better. Yet, we’re still here.
His jaw ticks, his knuckles turning white as he re-grips the couch. “The hell you will.” Running his hands through his hair, his eyes never leave mine. “I’ll tear up every set of papers they send me. I’ll put up a fight at every turn, Elin. I’m not letting you do this to us.”
“I don’t have another answer!”
“The answer is right fucking here!” he shouts back, holding his arms out to his sides.
Tears burn my skin as they flow down my face. He notices them, watches them cascade to the floor, before he looks me in the eye again. When he does, I see the pain he’s in, and as much as I hate to admit it, it breaks my heart.
I just want this over.
“Please,” I gasp, “just let me go.”
“Let you go?” he asks, his voice starting to break. “Like it’s something I can just laugh about and keep going?” He leans towards me, his eyes burning into mine. “You’re everything to me, Elin. You’re my lover, my best friend, my partner in everything, the mother of my children someday.”
My chest heaves with my sobs. I can’t even see him in front of me anymore. It’s all a blur, a watery vision of colors and fuzzy shapes.
“If you take you away from me, you take everything. Don’t you understand?” he says, just loud enough for me to hear over myself. “You’re everything to me, Elin Whitt. You’re my entire world.”
“You don’t get to say that after you just vanish! That’s not how this works!”
“Is that what this is?” he asks, starting to come around the couch. I back away in the opposite direction and he stops. “Are you punishing me for leaving? Fine, make me feel the pain you felt when I left—”
My hand trembles as I put it in the air to silence him. My body shakes with fury as I think back on the night I lost our baby. “You could never feel the pain I felt. I could never, ever do that to you, even if I wanted to. You have no idea,” I seethe.
“I didn’t know what else to do. I—”
“You didn’t know what to do? About what, Ty? What in your fucking life was so bad?” My hand shakes as I point a finger at him. “You don’t get to just come and go as you please. You don’t get to get sick of being married and—”
“That’s not what happened!”
“I don’t even care!” I scream, my temples throbbing as blood rushes through my body. “I don’t even care,” I say again, wiping my nose with the back of my hand.
“Yes, you do.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I laugh sadly. “How can I ever trust you not to just walk away when things get hard or boring?”
“Is that what you think I did?” he asks, astonished. “You think I just got sick of this life and walked out?”
“Yup.”
“How could you think that?”
“What am I supposed to think? You leaving was a new low, Ty, a new bottom. You’ve never even thought about leaving me before and all it took was one little—”
“You asked me to.”
My hands throw in the air. “Yeah, I did. You’re right. So you just decide a few weeks of not talking to me at all was the right answer?”
“My phone broke. I—”
“What if I needed you?”
The heft of my question cuts him off, his mouth still open. Slowly, his head cocks to the side. “Did you?”
I only look at him. No smile, no smirk, no staring daggers his way. Just a somber look that has him thrown off balance.
“Elin . . .”
“Do I even want to know what you were doing?”
He still hasn’t recovered from my insinuation. Gathering all the courage I can gather, I go for it. I ask the one question that, depending on the answer, will answer every other one.
“Was it another woman, Tyler?”