Page 42 of Perfect Pairing
“So things were good for a while?” Brie asked softly.
I nodded. “We got married a few weeks later in a small, private ceremony, and life went on as usual. Until Hansen was born.”
I hated having to explain the next part, hated having torelive how fucking blinded I’d been. By exhaustion from being a brand-new parent with a baby who rarely slept through the night. By my desire to keep my little family together.
“She started cheating on me not long after she had him,” I told Brie, averting my gaze from the camera so she couldn’t see exactly how embarrassed I was to admit that.
At first, I genuinely hadn’t noticed. She’d pulled away from me—emotionally and physically—and I thought it was her way of dealing with her postpartum body and navigating life as a new mother. I never once thought she’d just been seeking intimacy elsewhere while I’d been drowning, trying to keep myself and our son alive.
When I did find out—thanks to overhearing a phone call between her and her lover when I’d unexpectedly come home early from work one day—I wasn’t even surprised. In the year that followed, while I was certain she knew I knew, neither of us discussed it. There was never talk of splitting up and bringing the fate I’d never wanted for him down on Hansen’s head.
We became roommates who shared a child, nothing more.
“I don’t know how long I would’ve let it go on before I finally mustered the courage to file for divorce if it hadn’t been for the accident.”
“Accident? Are you okay?” Brie asked hurriedly then smacked her hand over her face at the absurdity of the question.
“Hansen and I are fine,” I said with a chuckle, surprised I could even muster a laugh. “The same cannot be said for Shannon’s boyfriend.”
Brie gasped again as the pieces clicked into place. “He didn’t make it.”
I shook my head.
I hadn’t known about the prior arrests and substance abuse issues Shannon had until that day, when her addiction to alcohol resulted in the death of someone else. I’d never gotten the whole story—Shannon refused to see me in the aftermath; in fact, she forbade me from attending any of the court proceedings. From what I managed to gather through secondhand accounts—mainly her parents who, once I divorced their daughter while she sat in jail during the trial, cut me and their grandson out of their life with such brutal efficiency, it made my head spin—Shannon and her boyfriend had been running away. She’d told her parents she was leaving me and she was heading to their house in the Hamptons for some time away. During their last phone call, she’d told them the attorneys could handle everything, and she’d come back into the city only if absolutely necessary.
A celebratory dinner had gotten a little too rowdy and, despite two previous DUIs, Shannon had gotten behind the wheel anyway.
They never made it out of the city before she lost control and slammed the car into a concrete divider. Her boyfriend died on impact while she sustained cuts, scrapes, and a fractured right arm.
“The judge threw the book at her,” I said. “Her prior arrests and subsequent offenses combined with her history of alcohol abuse and the fact that her addiction resulted in a death…well, he wasn’t taking any chances. She’s serving a life sentence with the possibility of parole in 2050.”
Twenty-seven years from now.
By then, Hansen would be thirty and likely have a family of his own.
But where would I be?
Surely not with this woman on the phone, who had silent tears tracking down her cheeks at the conclusion of my story, but damn, I couldn’t stop my mind from conjuring the image anyway. Of me and Brie, having made a family together, a few siblings for Hansen to lord over as the oldest running around. A big old farmhouse with a barn and garden and plenty of room for our babies to run.
I’d lost so much, including the life I’d never have with Brie because I was too destroyed emotionally to give it to her.
But I’d do it all over again as long as I got Hansen out of the deal. My boy was my world.
“I am so sorry,” Brie said with a sniffle.
“It’s not your fault.”
“None of it is yours either,” she said emphatically, swiping angrily at the moisture on her face. “Don’t for one second think it is. Shannon made her choices, Ez. She chose to cheat on you. She chose the bottle over her son, over her family. There wasn’t anything you could’ve done.”
I shook my head. “I wasn’t enough. Maybe if I’d—”
“No,” she cut me off, and I met her eyes in the tiny screen. The fierceness of her gaze had me rearing back, those emerald eyes blazing.
“You are more than enough for m—” She cut herself off and started again. “For anyone lucky enough to have you.”
The words she cut herself off from speaking hung there between us anyway.
You are more than enough for me.
