Page 126 of Bloom

“Because you didn’t know if you wanted to leave her.”

A glimmer of frustration harshens his features. “You’re hearing things I’m not saying, honey. You’re mad—”

“Mad.” A bitter laugh leaves me as I reach my limit, and I snap. “I’mfurious, Hunter. Ihatethis. I hate her, and I hate myself for it. I hate you for putting me in this position. For making it worse because I’m trying to be the better person, I’m trying to do the right thing, and you’re making it so hard. And for what? Why? Because youlike me? She’s yourwife,Hunter. Youmarriedher. You won’t even date me, so what’s thefuckingpoint?”

“The point,” Hunter bites out, breathing as hard as I am, our pants echoing around the store, “is I wasn’thaving dinner. I was signing divorce papers. I wasbeggingCheryl to sign them too. She won’t for the same reason she tried to scare you off; she thinks I’m making a choice, just like you do. But it’s not achoice. I’m not picking between you or her. I’m getting divorced, Caroline, whether you want me or not.”

My mouth opens, but nothing comes out. What the hell am I supposed to say to that?Cool? Great? Thanks so much, all is forgiven?

All can’t be forgiven. I can’t just fold. He lied to me, he hid a wife,a life, and I can’t be the girl who forgives and forgets because of some dramatic declaration, even if it is a really good one. Even if he’s saying all the right things. Even if I want to, so badly, so things will beeasyagain.

I have so many questions. So many things I want to know, so many things I’m scared he won’t tell me. So much I don’t understand, that Ineedto understand before I lose my damn mind.

“I need to know what happened,” I find myself blurting out. “With Cheryl. I need to know.”

Hunter mimics me momentarily, doing that open-mouthed, silent thing. Clearing his throat, he rolls his lips together. His throat dips with a swallow. And he says, “Okay.”

38

HUNTER

He looks so pained, so tense, and she feels so guilty to be the cause.

But just as she opens her mouth to tell him to stop, that it doesn’t matter, he starts to talk.

“So you’re just gonna leave?”

He resists the urge to laugh at the utter disbelief lacing his wife’s voice, at the look of complete confusion on her face. She looks at him like she can’t possibly fathom why he’s shoving all his belongings into a duffel bag.

Like she's not standing there wearing rumpled lingerie he sure as shit has never seen before.

Like he didn't just watch a half-naked man jump out their bedroom window.

Like he didn’t just walk in on her in bed, intheirbed, with someone else.

“Baby, please,” Cheryl cries, clawing at his arm in a fruitless attempt to stop his hurried packing. “Please, don’t leave.”

If he was thinking clearer, he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t leave, but not because of any desperate plea. If anger wasn’t clouding his thoughts, if he wasn’t hell-bent on getting the fuck away from her, he’d stay because this is his goddamn house. His hard-earned money bought it, he pays for the upkeep, his name and his name only is on the fucking lease because that way, none of the financial burden would fall on her—just the way she wanted it.

But right now, he doesn’t care that uprooting his life when she’s the one who fucked up isn’t fair. He just needs to go.

When he zips up the bag full of his clothes and slings it over his shoulder, and picks up the other two by his feet, her hysterics kick up a notch. She starts to wail, an ear-splitting noise that bounces off the walls, and to anyone else, they might sound sincere. Anyone else might believe that she's truly upset, that she regrets it, that she was lonely, that his alleged emotional and physical absence pushed her to the edge. If he didn’t know her so well, if he hadn’t spent close to a decade of his life getting to know her, he wouldn’t know how to spot her crocodile tears from a mile away.

But he did, and he does. He recognizes them well when he glances at her one last time before storming out the door.

She follows him downstairs, begging and pleading and crying until his refusal to engage with her performance causes her emotions to flip quick enough to give a guy whiplash. The tears abruptly dry up, irritation fuelling her words now. “Stop ignoring me, Hunt.”

He’s not; he just has nothing to say. Screaming and yelling and giving her tantrum some competition is exactly what she wants, and God knows he’s given her enough of that over the years. Blank indifference is all he has left.

He reaches for his keys on the hallway table, but the moment his fingers graze the cold metal, they’re ripped from his grasp.Forcing himself to remain calm, he turns to face hiswife. She clutches his keys to her chest, holding them hostage with white-knuckled fingers. “You’re not leaving.”

He stares at her, and he wonders when this happened. When he stopped recognizing the woman he married. Was she always so manipulative, so selfish, somean? He wouldn’t have fallen in love with her if she was, surely.

He thinks about the woman he met his senior year of undergrad. He thinks about dropping out of vet school a couple of years later because she wanted to spend more time together, to start a family, only to promptly decide she wasn’t ready. About moving to Atlanta because the town they lived in was too small for her even though the city made him itch, as did being so far away from his momma and Kelsey. About working an office job he hated so she could cut her hours—and eventually quit—but still buy nice things.

He thinks about finding her in bed with another man. He thinks about six months ago, when she didn’t come home one night and made up a flimsy excuse he never quite believed. He thinks about a few months before that, before she left her job, when she went on awork tripwith the same man he just caught her with.

The last straw, he slowly realizes. That’s what this was. His long overdue breaking point.

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