The Shepherd (The Game 6)

Take all the time you need. Ivy told me everything.

God. Of course she had. “Everything.” I’d given her a handful of words. There wasn’t much to tell. But Ivy was going to speculate, and she was gonna include others to a degree.

I sighed and set my phone on the table.

“Tell me how you could justify cheating on Angelo,” I said.

Archie sat a little straighter and took a breath. “Before I go there, may I tell you a bit about our relationship?”

Fine. I inclined my head.

Nothing he said would matter. If a relationship was bad, you ended it; you didn’t jump into bed with someone else. Or make out with them at a carnival.

“I understand that he was your friend,” he started by saying. “And I presume you haven’t reconciled.”

I chuckled humorlessly. “No, he was very clear about never wanting to see me again.”

Which still stung, even after he took things too far and blamed me for the whole fucking thing.

“I’m sorry.” If Archie gave me a quarter for every apology… “Either way, I understand you’re on his side. You were friends for a long time, and you cared about him. I did too, but as his partner, I got to see other sides of Angelo. And he wasn’t…you know, abusive by any means, but he wasn’t nice when he felt insecure. He didn’t trust me.”

“I wonder where he got that from.”

A pinch of annoyance seeped into Archie’s eyes. “I’ve never cheated on anyone before, Greer. I saw what an affair did to my sister once—and my aunt when I was younger. I didn’t give Angelo any reasons not to trust me. The opposite. When he wanted me to send him a picture that showed I was at home, I complied. I gave him the benefit of the doubt because trust is hard in long-distance relationships. At the same time, we’d already been together for two years when the long-distance began. The trust should’ve been established.”

This was difficult to listen to. Other couples’ drama wasn’t meant for outsiders, because everyone had their own version of the truth, and adding a spectator to that didn’t help. But I did remember Angelo had a tendency to be a little controlling. More than that, he wanted you all to himself, including friends. Meeting him in Chesapeake Bay had given me a break from my brothers, but that hadn’t meant I was on bad terms with my family.

Angelo had never shown interest in hanging out with my brothers, though. If I brought it up, if I suggested we all go to the beach together, he’d say something like, “I can only keep up with one Finlay, Finlay. Let’s do something else.”

“The reason he didn’t trust me,” Archie continued, “was because we had discussed polyamory and open relationships once. Not as an option for us, just as something that existed. He’d read an article about it, and I didn’t reject the notion like he did. So he started making snide jokes every now and then—and it escalated when I was nearing the end of my studying in London.” He paused and opened the Coke bottle, though he didn’t drink from it right away. “I told him I was going back to Pittsburgh, and he didn’t like that at all. It became an obsession of his to say we weren’t gonna work out because I was just going to find my second and third boyfriend since I was ‘into that poly shit.’”

I made a face.

“I’m not making him out as the villain here,” he told me. “I became good at punishing him, sometimes out of spite. It fucking hurt when he accused me of those things, especially when we were thousands of miles away and in different time zones that messed with when we could talk.” He swallowed hard and then took a quick sip of the soda. “Combined with his whiplash-inducing mood swings—first cursing me out and claiming I was seeing other men, then calling me up, apologizing, asking me to prove that I was home… It pissed me off. Sometimes, I’d ignore his messages for days. I just couldn’t deal with him, and I knew being ignored hurt him back as much as he hurt me.”

Sounded like a healthy relationship.

He cleared his throat. “I was supposed to be thrilled when he told me he was moving back to the US. He’d landed a position where he only had to travel between New York and Philadelphia. Instead, I felt like I was going to suffocate. But I owed it to us to give it a try—maybe I was wrong. Maybe we’d finally stop fighting.”

I was guessing they hadn’t.

“I’m only telling you this to give a glimpse of how done we were, Greer,” he said tiredly. “Before I met you, I would’ve had the exact same black-and-white view on the sacredness of a relationship as you do. And I say that with my four-year-long train wreck with Angelo in mind. Regardless of how much we’d hurt each other, the right thing to do was end the relationship. Which I was going to do. I was worn-down, bloody exhausted, and doubting I even had any feelings left for him.”