Page 103 of Every Now and Then
With my heart jackhammering inside my chest, I pick the letter back up and begin reading where I left off.
I started and stopped my affair with Grayson several times, and he understood why. Like me, he fought his sexuality for years before comingout of the closet. Unlike me, he was brave enough to do it while he was alive.
I can’t. I’m not strong enough to withstand the vitriol that would surely come my way. My parents are too conservative and religious to accept me. They’d disown me in a heartbeat. You would divorce me, and the girls would grow to hate me for tearing our family apart.
After Grayson broke up with me for refusing to leave you, I tried to work on our marriage—to be the husband you deserve and the father that the girls need, but I can’t keep going. The guilt is eating away at me from the inside out. I’m depressed; I can’t sleep; I can’t eat. I can’t look atmyself in the mirror.
I can’t keep living this lie.
I’m sorry that I don’t have the strength to tell you this in person, but I can barely write the words on paper. There’s no way I could say them aloud. There’s no way you would ever forgive me. How could you, when I can’t even forgive myself?
I don’t think I can return home and see the pain in your eyes knowing I caused it. I’m too weak to keep going. I’m not the man I want to be. You’re better off without me.
When you read this letter, I want you to know that I loved you and the girls as best I could. For their sakes as much as mine, please keep my secrets, Anna.
I’m so sorry.
Kyle
I reread the letter as I scramble to make sense of it. My heart is beating out of my chest, and my breath is stuck inside me. This cannot be true. Surely, I’m misconstruing Kyle’s words. But after I read it again, slower the second time around, I reach the same two startling conclusions.
And I’m not sure which one is more shocking.
That my husband was gay.
Or that I think my husband committed suicide.
I thought that I’d already gone through the most painful thing I ever could—discovering that my husband was cheating on me and having him die on the same day, leaving me as a widow with two small children.
But I was mistaken. Our entire relationship was built on a foundation of lies, and that blatant betrayal cuts deep.
Did I ever really know the man I was married to for years?
Our field of dreams engulfed in fire / Your arson's match, your somber eyes / And I’ll still see it until I die / You’re the loss of my life
The final notes of the song fade, slowly evaporating into nothingness, taking with them everything I thought I understood about my world.
35
Annabelle
Now
The stunned, shattered look on Hayes’ face as he reads Kyle’s letter tells me he’s feeling a condensed version of what I felt the first time I read it over a year ago.
The unassailable pain Kyle was living with was unimaginable. After reading his words, possibly the only truthful ones he ever gave me, my heart irrevocably broke. For Kyle. For the girls. And for me.
I was shaken to my core, teetering on the brink of collapse. Hurt and confused, I questioned everything because the truth as I knew it had disintegrated. It felt like the rug had been ripped out from under me and I was falling in slow motion, no longer certain which way was up or down.
I thought Kyle was in love with me. He wasn’t, nor had he ever been.
I thought he was attracted to me. He wasn’t.
I thought our marriage was a mostly happy one. It wasn't.
There were times when I sensed something was desperately wrong within our marriage, but Kyle gaslit me into doubting myself over and over, making me feel like I was imagining problems where none existed.He was just busy, too tired, swamped at work, stressed out, lost track of time.He always had a litany of excuses to explain away my worries.
All the while, I was just a pawn, a piece he moved around and manipulated as he played his game of life.
