Page 81 of About that Fling
“I let her wait in my car while I changed the tire. After I finished, I got back in and told her she was good to go. That’s when she broke down crying. She kept saying how sorry she was, how she felt scared and confused and that she missed me.”
Jenna gripped the armrest, hating the image of Mia in tears almost as much as she hated the thought of Adam sitting solid and strong beside his ex-wife with his arm around the back of her seat, trying to comfort her.
“Was it the first time she’d apologized for—for what happened?”
“God, no. She’d apologized so many times at that point that I’d stopped hearing the words. But this was the first time I’d seen any sign she genuinely regretted it. That if she had a do-over, she’d have done things differently.”
“She wanted you back?”
He nodded tightly, just once. “She said she did. Right then, I think she believed it. I told her no. I gave her a Kleenex and sent her on her way. Called later to make sure she got home safely.”
“Did she bring it up again? Or did you—did you talk about it with her when things cooled down?”
“Yeah. A week later, I got an email from her. It was all businesslike, mostly talking about divorce papers and court dates. Toward the end, she apologized for her ‘moment of weakness.’ That’s what she called it. Said she hadn’t meant anything by it and could we please forget the whole thing happened.”
“You never discussed it again?”
Adam shook his head. “I’d mostly pushed it out of my mind until now.” He cleared his throat. “The thing is, I believed her. She really didn’t mean it. She didn’t want me back. But the fact that I screwed up her narrative—well, that threw her for a loop.”
“Her narrative?”
Adam seemed to hesitate a moment, his eyes on the horizon. Or maybe he was just watching traffic. It was surprisingly thick for a Friday evening with stars pricking the black sky and a soft spatter of rain on the windshield.
“When you make a decision to leave someone, you tell yourself a story,” he said. “You convince yourself you have no choice, or the relationship is doomed, or the person or the situation is so awful that this is the only thing you can possibly do. You have to save yourself. You believe the story with all your heart. You need to believe it if you want the courage to leave.”
Jenna nodded. How many times had Mia said that? I had to leave, I was dying inside.
How many times had she said it herself?
I couldn’t marry Shawn. Not after everything, I couldn’t spend the rest of my life with him.
“So you messed up her narrative by coming to her rescue,” Jenna said. “By leaving work to be there for her when she needed you.”
He nodded. “Something I hadn’t always done. I can admit that.”
“Sometimes, kindness is the worst thing,” she said. “Especially if it unravels your entire justification for something you’ve done. Something you might not be very proud of in the first place.”
He looked at her. “Very true.” He glanced back at the road, quiet again. “How about we talk about something else? Something more uplifting.”
Jenna untucked her feet, lowering them to the floor. She let her left hand drift so it was touching his now, fingers twining with fingers.
“More uplifting than your dying grandmother and your painful divorce?”
He smiled, his eyes flicking to hers. “Sure. Like the Holocaust.”
“How about dead puppies?”
“The black plague?”
“Euthanasia?”
He lifted his hand, folding his palm over hers. He slid them both to her knee, the heel of his hand rubbing her knuckles like the space behind a cat’s ears.
“That’s what I love about you, Jenna. You always know how to make me smile.”
She smiled in response, almost a required reaction to the word smile. Or maybe the word love. It was getting difficult to tell.
Early the next morning, Adam drove from their Seattle hotel to his sister’s house in Ballard. Beth had tried to convince them to stay over the night before, but he’d insisted he didn’t want to bother her by arriving late.
