Page 150 of Homewrecker

Nash exhaled. “Well, long story short, I didn’t see it coming. She’d already checked out of the marriage, but I just didn’t know how far gone she was.”

He stared toward the television. “She started seeing someone else.”

“How did you find out?”

“She told me.”

I blinked. “She told you?”

“Eventually.”

He rubbed his chin. “She wasn’t really remorseful about it either. That was probably the part that fucked me up more than the cheating.”

I stayed quiet.

“She basically told me it happened, she wasn’t going to spend the rest of her life apologizing for it, and I needed to decide if I could move past it.”

“Damn.”

“Exactly.”

He gave a dry laugh. “I wanted to.”

That surprised me. “You did?”

“We had a kid.” He looked at me. “A life, a house, and years of building. I wasn’t trying to throw all that shit away without at least asking myself if I could get past it.”

I listened.

“But I couldn’t.” He shook his head. “And it wasn’t because she fucked someone else.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“That hurt, obviously. But people fuck up. People make selfish decisions. People get confused and do shit they regret. But she didn’t regret it. She regretted that it might have hurt me in the end. But the actual decision?”

He shook his head. “Not at all … And that’s what I couldn’t get past.”

He reached for my hand and played with my fingers. “She had enough time to think about herself, what she wanted, how she felt, what she was missing, and what made her happy.”

His thumb moved over my knuckles.

“But in all that thinking about herself, she never stopped long enough to think about what it would do to me.”

My throat tightened thinking about Ravenna. Her name appeared in my head so quickly that it scared me.

Nash continued. “That’s the part of cheating I don’t understand.”

I couldn’t move.

“How do you love someone and never stop to consider them?”

My chest hurt.

“How do you come home to someone knowing you’re doing something that could completely change the way they see themselves?”

Ravenna.

“How do you look them in the face?”