“Fair enough.”
I pull onto the highway and glance over at her. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Did you never do something that was partly immoral?”
She looks nervous as I ask her. Like talking about her past is not something she wants to do.
“I was an investigative journalist. Immoral was practically written on our business cards. Anything to get a story.”
“And what made you quit?”
She is silent for a few moments and I watch her as she swallows, avoiding eye contact.
“I… well… I just ugh needed a break.”
I glance back over at her and can see the lie written all over her face. “Bullshit.”
She sighs. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Why not?”
“I just don’t. And we are only fifteen minutes out of Asheville I don’t want to fight about it and be in complete silence for the rest of the drive to Wilmington.”
I see her breathing heavier and I know whatever the hell happened before she came here wasn’t simple. It wasn’t one sided.
I let her calm down before I talk. Mostly I just don’t want the silence besides the background noise of the radio. So I do what I probably shouldn’t. I open up to her.
“When Tiffany left, I blamed myself for the longest time. Hell, if I’m being honest, I still do.” I take a deep breath and grip the steering wheel. “We were together for nearly four years. My family warned me about her. Your brother even warned me about her. Everyone thought she was a gold digger but I saw someone else. Yes, she liked material things but I felt the love she had for me. So I fought against the words of my family but I didn’t fight my brain.
“I put off asking her to marry me for years. Even though she constantly hinted at it. But I just couldn’t convince myself to pull the trigger. I needed to be sure she truly loved me. And I really thought she did. Even after the time we were engaged, as she was planning the wedding, she seemed honest and true. She had nuances, we all do, and I thought I knew them all. I thought I could read her like a book. Hell, I asked her to move in after just four months together.
“But I was fooled. It was all a lie. Her words when she left me are still as clear now as they were then. Her fake argument that I worked too much that I didn’t give her enough attention. I know it was all fake. She didn’t care about my work or when I was gone. She had a credit card in my account, she had the freedom to live the life she wanted.”
I pause, the memories hitting me hard as I drive.
“How did you know it wasn’t real?”
I sigh, my grip tightening on the wheel. “Because she said she hated how much I worked. How much I was gone. But then she moved on so quickly. With someone who works as much as I do. But he comes from a wealthy family. He has a trust fund. He has everything she could possibly want and he has a societal moniker to go with it. All she ever wanted was to live a life of luxury. And I should have known when she accused me of being gone all the time it was to cover up her lie. The fact she was cheating on me.”
I sense Grace turning in her seat to look at me. “You think she was with him before she called the wedding off?”
I nod. “She never complained about me being gone before. Hell, at the end, half the time I came home from work, she wouldn’t even be there. I gave her so much. So fucking much but it was never enough. The house wasn’t big enough, the dishes not designer, the furniture not luxe enough. As I look back at everything, it wasn’t so much that I blamed myself for her leaving. I blamed myself for being blind to her in the first place.”
“You loved her though. Love makes you blind.”
“And I should be smart enough to see the difference. Smart enough to listen to what my family said and believe them.”
Grace twists back in her seat and looks out the window. “We always think we should be smart enough but it’s not the case.”
This is the first time I’ve heard her open up about anything. Her walls always closed off. “You’ve been there before?”
She laughs cynically. “More than once. I’m the type that falls head over heels and then gets burned in the end. Or I should say I was the type. I learned to just not let anyone in.”
“It’s easier to shut them out.”
“Yeah,” she scoffs. “And to shut yourself out in the process. Not give in to feelings and self-doubt. Just be a stone wall. Hell, as a journalist I had to be.”
I reach over and grab her thigh. “We all do what we need to survive.”
She squeezes my hand that’s on her thigh. “And that is exactly what you did when it came to Tiffany. You did what you had to do to survive. You took the blame. Made yourself out to be the bad guy. Because being the victim is worse. So much worse.”
I glance over at her and see a lostness on her face. Like she has been the victim before. But I don’t think she is talking about relationships. If she was, she would have said it. I think it has to do with her job. A subject she keeps closed off. Even Owen doesn’t know exactly what happened.
But I think she just gave a piece of herself away with those words.