“Go ahead. But you’re a danger to yourself. They’re still going to admit you.” Was that the right word for it? Admit? Or commit? I hated the sound of the second choice. It seemed final.
“God damn it, Sophie!” he shouted, and I took a step back. “If you do this, we are over, do you understand? I’ll file for divorce in the morning!”
Those words should have shattered my heart, but we’d been through so much this year that there was nothing left to break. It was already ground to dust. “Fine. I’d rather you leave me and be alive than stay with me and kill yourself.”
He froze. Tears rose in his eyes as he realized how ineffective his gambit had been.
“I love you, Neil. More than anything in this world. But I haven’t been good to you. I’ve let this go on for way too long, when I should have intervened. This is the only way I can help you. Be angry with me. Divorce me. But I’m not going to let you kill yourself.”
I leaned down. I couldn’t leave this room without touching him one last time, especially if he did plan on going through with his divorce threat. I didn’t think he was going to, and I didn’t know if he could make binding legal decisions while he was in a mental health facility against his will. But I had to kiss his forehead, to see if I could somehow feel his love lingering on his skin.
His hand came up to sink into my hair, and he pressed his forehead against mine. A rasping sob shook his body. “I’m sorry. Oh god, Sophie, I’m so sorry.”
“I know,” I murmured, cradling him to me.
“Let me come home,” he pleaded. “Please, Sophie. I’m begging you.”
“I can’t.” I sniffed, hoping to hold back more tears. “I love you too much. You can call me, okay? Any time that you can. And I’ll visit you.”
“No, no,” he said as I straightened, and he caught my hand. “Please don’t leave me here.”
“I have to.” I squeezed his fingers, then pulled free. He let me go and covered his face with his hands.
“Don’t go,” he begged again as I shut the door.
I only got a few steps before my exhaustion and my emotions got the better of me. My knees gave out, but Mom was there to catch me.
“Come on, honey,” she soothed, steering me away from the room. “Tony’s waiting with the car.”
How many times had I left a hospital crying over Neil? How many more times could I take?
CHAPTER TEN
The next afternoon, I woke up to an entirely different life.
I was sick of doing that.
Rolling onto Neil’s side of the bed, I closed my eyes and inhaled the scent of his cologne on his pillow. Even though the sheets were cold and the room was silent, I pretended he was just in the shower. I imagined him coming out of the bathroom, toweling off on his way to the closet to get dressed. He would make some crack about me still being asleep, and I would roll my eyes. Maybe I would get him to get back under the covers, or join me for a second shower.
I reached between my legs and felt where he’d so recently been inside me, after so long. He’d meant for it to be the last time. If I hadn’t found that note, maybe it would have been. The doctor had said that overdosing on Valium wasn’t often fatal. But Neil had intended for it to be.
He’d intended to die in our bed, lying beside me. He hadn’t cared that I would wake up beside his body.
Fuck Neil.
I sat up, my skin crawling at the touch of the sheets that now felt like a corpse’s shroud. I wasn’t angry. I was enraged. I buried my face in my pillow and screamed as hard and loud as I could, then came up for air and did it again.
This wasn’t fair. I was losing everyone I cared about. Emma. Michael. Now, Neil? My family, the one I’d only just gotten, was slowly being taken from me, and I wasn’t getting a say in it at all. Worse, I couldn’t opt out of the pain the way Neil had. I didn’t want to, but even if I did, it would have been impossible. Olivia needed me, and there was no way I could jump out of her life like that.
For a long time, I’d gone along with people who said that suicide wasn’t about being selfish, but it was damned hard to see it that way when your husband was willing to strand you forever in a life you’d never wanted in the first place.
That thought made me ill. Talk about selfish, my conscience scolded me. But it was the truth, wasn’t it? If I’d wanted to be a single mom, I’d certainly had my chance three years ago. I hadn’t chosen motherhood, and now, it had chosen me. No matter how much I loved Olivia, nothing could change the past.
Maybe that was why he tried to kill himself. I sat up, wiping my sweaty hair from my face. Oh god, had that been it? He felt guilty over so many things that he couldn’t change, no matter how often I told him not to. Had he thought he’d doomed me to a life I didn’t want? That was ridiculous, and I’d told him so. But Neil wasn’t just a control freak. He was the special kind of control freak who can’t trust anybody to tell him the truth about their feelings. He always doubted me, even when I reassured him.
The longer I thought about it, the more every second of my life with Neil began to feel like a lie. I blamed myself for not seeing the truth of how sick he was. I blamed him for hiding it from me. The guilt was unending, and so consuming that for a few minutes I forgot where I was.
Maybe I was losing my mind, too.