“Closure,” I breathed. “That’s the word I’ve been looking for all these days. Maybe you’re right; if I can talk to her and put this all behind me, maybe she won’t be dominating my thoughts every minute of every day.”
“Hmm…it’s a possibility,” he said. “But I wouldn’t count on it.”
“Why not?”
“You love this girl, am I right?”
“Yes.”
“Then closure is not going to do you much good,” he said honestly. “You’re still going to be sad about the relationship ending, whether or not you get closure.”
“Well then…fuck me.”
He gave me a sympathetic smile. “I know you’re hurt and angry,” Mel said bracingly. “But there are relationships that have been through worse.”
“Oh, yeah?” I said challengingly. “Like what?”
“Like cheating,” he said softly.
It was his expression that got to me. “Wait,” I said, in shock. “You cheated?”
“I wasn’t the one who cheated,” he replied.
I raised my eyebrows, realizing what he was telling me. “No way… Dana?”
“We had been married about three years,” he explained. “I had just become a full-fledged firefighter and was working all the time. I was so consumed with work that I forgot to carve out time for her. Even when she begged me to spend some quality time with her, I was either too busy or too tired. After a while, she just stopped asking, and I figured she understood. Then a few months later, she came to me and confessed.”
“She told you herself?” I asked.
“Yep.” Mel nodded. “She came clean. She told me she’d been seeing this guy for a few months and the guilt had finally led her to break up with him and tell me the truth.”
“How did you react?”
“Not well,” he sighed. “We separated for a while, and I thought about filing for divorce several times.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Because I realized that Dana was still the love of my life and that kind of love didn’t come easy. She had made a horrible mistake,
but she admitted to it. She apologized and wanted to make our marriage work. Slowly, I realized that my life just wasn’t the same without her. So I went to her parents’ house where she was staying and told her I wanted to start fresh. We decided to go for couples counseling, and a couple of months later, we were living together again.”
“Fuck,” I breathed. “How did I not know this?”
“Because it was before you joined up and it’s not something I go around telling people.”
“Right…”
“But we have two amazing children now,” he said. “And a marriage that’s as solid as ever.”
“And the fact that she cheated never comes back to haunt you?”
“It used to,” Mel admitted. “But not anymore… I know my wife now, and I know I can trust her. I accept my part in her mistake, and we’ve moved on. We both learned something extremely important from that experience, and that was that relationships are hard, and if they mean something to you, you need to fight to stay together.”
I sighed. “It sounds very romantic when you say it like that.”
“All I can say is if Megan is your Dana, then forgiving her might be in your best interests, too,” Mel said. “But only you can say whether that is true or not.”
I wasn’t a big believer in fate, but just after that conversation with Mel, I got a message on my phone. When I glanced down, I saw Megan’s name; I froze as I read her text. She wanted to talk and had asked to meet me at the park where we had ended up after our first failed attempt at a date. I stared at her message for a while, wondering if this was my big choice… But I knew it couldn’t be.