It was a good question and one that I already knew the answer to. I sighed. “I don’t have to think about that answer,” I said. “I still love him… I think I will always love him. I just don’t know how to stop.”
Meryl smiled in a way that betrayed her own personal connection to my problem. She looked at me with a maternal kindness and patted my hand. “I’m sixty-six, darling,” she said. “And I’ve been married for forty-five of those years. Forty-five years, and I can sit here today and tell you truthfully and confidently that I love my husband.”
“Wow,” I breathed, thinking about the kind of commitment it takes to stay married that long. I thought about my parents, and it seemed to me that every couple that had stayed married longer than twenty years deserved some kind of special honor.
“Tate was twenty-four, and I was twenty-one when we got married. Together we built a business, a house, and we raised three children. When I tell people that they look at me like I’ve led some kind of charmed life. They see my adult children, they see my beautiful grandkids, they see my fine house and my business, and they assume it all came easy.
“Let me tell you something, darling: none of it came easy. Tate and I, we struggled to build every single thing we had. But nothing was as much a struggle as our marriage. Not even my children realized that. Angela’s my oldest. Two years ago she came to me and told me that she and her husband had decided to separate. They were unhappy, it seemed, and they wanted to go their separate ways. When I tried to advise her, do you know what she said to me?
“She told me that I couldn’t afford to advise her because I had a perfect marriage,” Meryl said. She let out a snort of laughter and shook her head. “A perfect marriage… Ha!”
“What did you say to her?”
“I told her that soon after we were married, I left her father,” Meryl told me. “I wanted to file for divorce seven months after our wedding day. I also happened to be four months pregnant with her.”
“Why did you want to divorce him?” I asked.
Meryl laughed. “We we
re young. I was only twenty-one. I didn’t understand what marriage really meant. I went from my father’s home to my husband’s, and I felt as though I lost my identity twice over. We’d been raised differently, we did things differently, and I thought I’d made the biggest mistake of my life. So I went and stayed with my parents for a few weeks. And eventually, Tate came to take me back to our home.”
“And you went with him?”
“I went with him,” Meryl smiled. “Of course, youth can be impulsive, impetuous and reckless. But as you get older, the problems become harder, more serious.
“The second time I started thinking about divorce was different. I was in my forties, I had been married twenty years, and I had three teenage children. Tate and I had spent our twenties and thirties trying to build something that we could leave to our children. We had been so consumed with raising them, that somewhere along the way, we’d lost track of each other.
“Tate came home one day and made a confession. He had cheated on me with another woman…some girl in the company that was a good deal younger than me.”
“Oh God,” I said, clinging to Meryl’s story, completely absorbed in her life.
“I screamed and kicked and threw things,” she admitted. “I told him to get out. He said he wouldn’t, so I told him that I would leave. He told me I couldn’t because of the kids.”
“What did you do?” I pressed when Meryl fell silent.
“I stayed,” she replied. “For one year after that, we lived like strangers. We slept on opposite corners of the same bed, we exchanged conversation during dinner in front of the kids, and we went along with the routine of our lives… For one year it was hell. But then at the end of that year, we both realized something.”
“What?”
“We had healed a little,” Meryl told me. “We came together, we talked things out, and we decided that despite everything, we still loved one another. And we started fresh, we endured, and because we endured, we fell in love with one another all over again. We became best friends as well as lovers.”
I took a deep breath. “It takes a lot to forgive a man who cheated.”
“It does,” she nodded. “That really depends on the woman. My point though is this: love and marriage...it’s not something that just falls into your lap. If you’re lucky enough to find someone you love, you need to fight like hell to keep that love alive. Because it’s not always going to be perfect, it’s not always going to be easy—it’s work and change and sacrifice.”
I reached for my glass, but then I changed my mind and dropped my hand. “You have a point,” I said. “But that also depends on one very important factor.”
“Which is?”
“Both people need to want to work at the relationship,” I said softly. “If one person just wants to walk away…”
“Then they were never meant for you in the first place,” Meryl said pointedly.
I sighed inwardly. “They were never meant for you in the first
Chapter Thirty-Three
Tristan