Page 84 of The Broken Heart Playlist
I imagine an alternate reality where I met Gideon first and fell madly in love with him. Where I was still the Katherine who wore pretty floral dresses and smiled easily. Who didn’t flinch when a man raised his arm.
But thinking about what my life could have been is the path to bitter madness. And if I had met Gideon first, would I have Lisset? I wouldn’t change anything if it meant she wasn’t in my world.
“Kate?”
He’s still waiting for my answer. I twist my hands together in my lap and try to focus. “I’m doing okay.”
It’s clear he doesn’t believe me. To be fair, I don’t believe me either. It’s funny, even though he’s seated, hands clasped loosely between his legs, there’s a contained, restless energy about him.
“Tell me about your ex-husband.”
“Gideon,” is all I can say, my breath catching, my heart racing.
His eyes are darker than I’ve ever seen them, locked on my face. “Did he hurt you?” The question seems to come from a place deep inside him. A place full of fury and anguish.
I draw in a ragged breath. “Yes.”
“Kate.” He buries his face in his hands, overcome.
Then he lifts his head and shifts forward in his chair, as though he intends to comfort me, but I lift a hand to stop him. “Don’t,” I plead. “If you touch me, I’ll start crying and I don’t want to cry right now.”
After a lengthy pause, like he’s wrestling with himself, Gideon nods. “Tell me about him,” he says again.
I release a shaky sigh. “Why?”
“Because I think it will be good for you,” he answers. “Why don’t you want to tell me?”
“Because...” Pain squeezes my chest. “Because I’m scared you’ll look at me differently.”
His jaw tightens. “Do you think what that scumbag did to you in your marriage will make a difference as to how I view you? How I feel about you?”
“Yes.” A whisper. A confession.
There’s a flicker of something in his face. “How can you possibly think that?”
“I don’t like the person I was in my marriage.” My fingers twist. “I don’t even know if I like myself much now.”
“Fortunately, I like you enough for the both of us.” Gideon says it so firmly, so unwaveringly, a lump forms in my throat. “I like you enough to ask you to please tell me what happened with him, because I’m guessing you haven’t told anyone?”
I shake my head wordlessly. No, I haven’t told anyone. My family knows—or guesses—some of what it was like in my marriage, Grandma the most out of everyone, but I’ve tried to keep the full picture from them.
“You can’t keep bottling it all up,” he tells me softly. “Lisset was brave enough to unburden herself and you saw how much that helped her. You can do the same.”
It’s the one argument I can’t fight. Lisset reached a point where she could no longer carry the weight of her secret. Howcan I move forward with Gideon when I’m still shouldering the burden of my failed marriage? Maybe it’s time to shrug off just a little bit of that weight.
“Oliver wasn’t a great husband,” I admit, after giving myself a moment to shape my story. “We were both unhappy. Actually, he was more unhappy than I was and sometimes he took it out on me. In the end, it didn’t work out between us.”
Gideon stares at me. And in the fiercest tone I’ve heard him use, he says, “Don’t give me the sanitized version.”
I swallow. “It’s too ugly to tell you everything.”
His expression is bleak. “Kate, if you weren’t spared in your marriage, why should you spare me? Yes, it’s going to feel like a gut punch having to hear what you went through and knowing I wasn’t there to help, but please, for the love of all things still good in this world, don’t spare me.”
And so, with memories shuddering through me, I tell him.
I tell him how Oliver distanced himself from me after Lisset was born and what an awful thing it was to experience, your husband falling out of love with you while you’re still in love with him. To hear the impatience in his voice and view the contempt in his eyes. It shames me now how thirsty I was for his approval, how starved I was for his attention.
In a desperate attempt to recapture his love, I tried to mold myself into more of what I thought he wanted, making myself smaller and smaller and Oliver bigger and bigger, as if inflating him would somehow change his heart.
