Page 106 of Now That It's You
Kendall smiled and shook her head. “Hear him out. You owe it to yourself to get closure. You never had that with Matt, and it ate at you for two years.”
“Yeah,” Meg muttered, glancing at the door where Kyle stood waiting, not knocking, not ringing the bell, just standing there waiting for her. “Point taken.”
“Goodnight, sweetie,” Kendall said, wrapping her arms around Meg’s shoulders and squeezing her with enough force to let Meg know she was loved beyond measure. “You got this.”
“Thanks, Kendall.”
“Call me later?”
Meg nodded and opened the door. Even though she knew he’d be standing there, her stomach still did a flip when she saw Kyle on her front step, the porch light making a halo around his head. He nodded at her, then at Kendall. “Meg,” he said, his voice low and soft. “Kendall.”
“I was just leaving,” Kendall said, moving around him with a glare that made it apparent she’d do grave harm to him if he did further damage. “I’m only a phone call away, though, Meg.”
Meg nodded, watching her friend walk down the path to her car. She couldn’t bring herself to make eye contact with Kyle. Not yet.
When she finally did, the remorse in his eyes was enough to make her legs shaky again. She cleared her throat and willed herself not to blink. “Why are you here?”
“There’s something else I need to say.”
His eyes glittered under the porch light, and Meg stared at him, wondering if she’d ever really known him at all. She gripped the door tighter, willing herself to keep breathing. “I think you’ve said enough for one day, don’t you?”
“No. I don’t. And I think you need to hear me out.”
Rage flared in her, and Meg leveled him with a glare. “I don’t think I need to do anything you say, Kyle. You betrayed me. You took something I told you in confidence and you threw it in my face and?—”
“Confession number one,” he said, his voice loud enough to send Floyd skittering off the paisley chair behind her.
Meg shook her head and folded her arms over her chest. “I’m not playing your stupid game anymore! This is my life we’re talking about here. Besides that, I didn’t touch my damn ear.”
“Confession one,” he repeated like he hadn’t even heard her. “I was there when Matt cheated on you.”
That got her attention. Meg closed her mouth as her tongue went dry and her throat closed up. “What?”
“Not in the room,” he said. “It wasn’t like some sort of voyeuristic orgy. But I was with him when he made up his mind to do it. When he decided he wanted to cheat.”
“Decided,” she said dumbly, rolling the word like a pebble on her tongue.
“It was a conscious decision, not a heat-of-the-moment kind of thing. That might be different from what he told you, or maybe from what he told himself.”
Meg swallowed hard, not sure whether that made it better or worse. Did she want to hear the rest of this?
Closure, her subconscious whispered as Kyle studied her face.
“Do you want me to continue?”
She nodded, even though she hadn’t made up her mind yet. Then she stepped aside, granting him entrance to her home. She thought they might just stand there in the foyer, but he moved right through it. He paused at the entrance to the living room, and his eyes were dark when he turned back to her. “Is it okay if we talk in here?”
“That’s fine.”
He nodded, then moved around her sofa, pausing again. He took a few steps to the left, then folded himself into the stiff, paisley-print armchair Floyd had just vacated.
Clasping his hands in his lap, Kyle waited for Meg to sit. She dropped slowly onto the edge of the sofa, not so much a decision to be seated as a certainty her legs wouldn’t hold her up much longer. She took a few deep breaths, steeling herself to hear what he had to say.
“We went golfing,” he said. “It was maybe two weeks before the wedding, sort of a brotherly getaway. He probably told you that part?”
She nodded, not sure what golf had to do with Matt having an affair, but knowing the details seemed important to Kyle. She remembered Chloe’s words the other day. Something about dragging all the skeletons out of the closet and sorting through the bones to see what scary things lurked there. Is that what Kyle was doing?
Meg ordered herself to listen, to let the words sift through her ears and into her consciousness so she could absorb and process them, whatever they may be.
