This Is Not How It Ends(72)

“Charlotte.” It was terse and emotionless.

“Hi, Ben.”

He reached inside the front pocket of his jeans and returned with my ring. Our fingers brushed when he dropped it in my outstretched palm, and I waited until we reached the living room before sliding it back on my finger. Its glint had changed over time. Once, the brilliance symbolized our falling in love and the joy our promises meant, but that was before cancer. Before Ben. Before I’d broken those promises in two.

Philip hid under a blanket on the couch. He looked tired and small, and Ben took the seat beside him. I could tell Ben was shocked by Philip’s appearance, but he was good at pretending. He was sitting there pretending a lot of things.

I left the two of them alone to talk. It was tough to watch while our indiscretion—let’s call it what it was, our betrayal—wove through the fringes of their conversation. Ben’s remorse was plastered across his face. I had lured him in. And then I made a promise I couldn’t keep. The guilt was overwhelming at times, a bruise, tender and raw. If you believed in karmic boomerangs, I was stabbed square in the back by mine.

October was upon us, and the weather turned mild. The cancer left Philip with an aversion to air-conditioning, and we opened all the windows for the temperate breezes to fill the house. I tried to block out their conversation, but their sounds carried through the walls, hitched to the wind. Even if I couldn’t make out their exact phrases, I knew what the murmurs meant. The interminable silence. At one point, I watched them hold hands. Two men on the precipice, with no pretense, only love. Their vulnerabilities stung, and I had to turn away.

I remembered how I’d felt after reading Ann Packer’s novel The Dive from Clausen’s Pier. The main character, on the verge of breaking off her engagement, was suddenly faced with her fiancé’s paralysis. In a gut-wrenching dilemma, a show of strength or weakness, Carrie Bell must decide to stay or go. Truthfully, I didn’t finish the book. I’d stopped reading right there, the quandary so awful to me I couldn’t go on.

Maybe my own decision was partly born of similar guilt and the need for redemption, but once I made it, I couldn’t go back. In fact, I didn’t want to go back. That’s the thing about betrayal. It’s convoluted and malleable, changing to fit an individual story. It doesn’t always mean you love one person more than another. For some, it means your heart is cracked in two. Falling for Ben didn’t mean I stopped loving Philip. It just meant I was selfish and confused. I loved Philip, I did. A special love that snuck into the corners of my soul and burrowed. The cancer didn’t make me love him any less, but it handed me an opportunity to repent for my sin, to make it up to him. To be there at the very end like I wasn’t for my mother. And even that wasn’t a reason to stay with someone, but I did. Because our love was real.

That afternoon, I walked Ben to the door, with Sunny scratching at my legs. “I’m taking Sunny out,” I hollered to Philip.

It was our first time alone, and even with the cooler temperature, the air felt thick between us. If I thought Ben was going to hop in his truck and drive off, I was wrong. He stayed by my side and followed me to the street.

“He looks awful.”

“Yeah,” I said, “that’s what cancer does to you.”

A pair of butterflies flitted around Sunny’s head, and he chased after them. And when a FedEx truck drove by, he lost interest, tugged on the leash, and barked incessantly. “What are you going to do when you catch the truck, huh, big shot?”

Ben hovered nearby, and his silence was worse than anything. We used to take this walk daily, never running out of things to say.

“How much time?” he finally asked.

“Not enough.”

“I’m here for you, whatever you need.”

But he was wrong, and I froze, everything I was feeling clamoring to come out—the guilt, the shame, the grief. I was venomous and hot. “That night meant nothing to me, Ben. You need to know that. Nothing. You mean nothing to me. Do you understand?”

He let me break down, waiting patiently for the outburst to pass. Good old Ben. The essence of calm and composed. Always reasonable in a crisis. But now his sensibility agitated me. I decided in that precise moment to punish Ben as I was being punished. It would absolve the guilt, and Philip could die in peace.

“No matter what happens with Philip, we’re done. I’ll never be with you. Ever. People like us are cursed. We would’ve never been happy. It was foolish to think otherwise.”

His face turned pale from my battering. It was cruel and mean, but I didn’t care. I thought he’d finally break down. It was not what he said, it was what he didn’t. Hurt passed through his eyes, the unrecognizable film which meant there was no going back. I couldn’t erase my words, the pain was plastered to his cheeks.

When he spoke, I barely recognized his voice. “He’s my friend, too. You forget that, Charlotte. You think you’re the only one hurting. I’m hurting, too. But you’re right. This . . . whatever this is . . . was . . . it’s over.”

He turned around and headed for his truck.

It didn’t even hurt. Ben was no longer inside me.





CHAPTER 34

October 2018

Philip was waiting at the top of the stairs when we returned.

“Ben tore out of here like a bat out of hell.”