Dirty Red (Love Me With Lies)(71)

My head spins. I’ve never felt anything so painful. My heart heaves and contracts. It feels heavy and then it feels like it’s not there at all — like he stuck his hand through my ribcage and squeezed until it burst. It feels like I have a thousand ton elephant sitting on my chest. I weakly try to hold on to my reserve, but I feel it being torn away from me. Something inside of me uncoils. With an awkward jerk of my head, I glare up at him with all the hatred I am feeling.

He stands with his back to me until I am done crying, and when I stand up, he faces me.

“I know that to merely say sorry would be an insult. I am more than sorry for what I’ve done. I married you when all along I belonged to someone else. I have been lying to everyone. I don’t even recognize myself anymore.”

I am emotionally inebriated. I don’t know whether to make him watch me slit my wrists or slit his and put an end to my misery. My face has become a swamp of tears and mascara and nose leakage. I want to hurt him.

“You think you can leave us and be happy? She’s gone, Caleb,” I sneer. “Wedded … bedded — “ I see him flinch, and my rage climbs higher.

I lick my lips and taste wine. I’ve had too much of it, and my tongue is ready to curl around every ugly secret I own and spit them at him, one by one, until he’s asphyxiated from the incredible weight of them. I want to take away his breath, crush his windpipe, and with what I know, I surely can.

Where to start? I contemplate telling him that I’ve met Noah and that he’s f*cking sexy Ghandi — that I understand why Olivia was able to move on.

I shake my head, tears burn like lemon juice in my eyes. I need to know it all. What he did during those weeks that I thought she was taking advantage of him.

“Did you sleep with her — during your pretend f*cking amnesia?”

There is an uncomfortably long pause, which I consider answer enough.

“Yes.” His voice is suddenly raspy.

“Have you ever been in love with me?”

He dips his head as he thinks.

“I love you,” he says, “but, not in the right way.”

My heart plummets as realization sets in. He loves me — he’s never been in-love with me.

“You don’t love me the same way you love Olivia.”

He flinches like I’ve hit him. For a moment, his guard is down, and I see so much hurt on his face that I am taken aback. He covers it quickly.

He looks sorry, he really does — or maybe it’s just my vision that is blurred because of my tears. I collapse in a heap again and pull my knees up to my chest.

I hear him slide down next to me. For a long time, neither of us says anything. I am mentally replaying the year he spent pretending to have amnesia, revisiting the conversations and doctor’s visits. I cannot find a single crack in his story. I fight through the memories, trying to find at least a moment in that year where I sensed he was being untruthful, but there is nothing. I feel like such a fool. So used. How could I be so in love with a man that was so willing to deceive me? I feel like a piece of trash, disposable and unwanted. I know that I am a mess; my tears have caught strands of my hair and plastered them to my face — a face that always gets blotchy and red when I cry. I have never let him see me like this, not even when my father died.

There are so many questions, so many things that I need to know, but my tongue stubbornly stays glued to the roof of my mouth. Caleb tried to get Olivia back. Not once, but twice — first when he faked the amnesia, and the second time when he hired her to be my attorney. If he wanted her so badly, why hadn’t he left me when he had the chance? It wasn’t in his nature to drag his feet.

I shake at his honesty. The stinging truth of how I had pressured him into proposing to me after I chased Olivia out of town echoes in my head. No. This is not my fault. He didn’t have to marry me. I may have played fiercely to keep him, but I thought that he loved me, that he wanted to spend his life with me. He never showed me otherwise. Then I realize something else: Caleb is not as good as I have always thought him to be. His integrity, his honesty, the pure and selfless way he takes care of the people he loves … it all evaporates in light of this new, deceitful Caleb. My God — he did everything in his power to get to her, and I did everything in my power to keep her away.

Have I always known in the back of my mind that I am second choice? Lots of people have first loves that they never really get over, but how could I have grasped the degree of his obsession with Olivia? What kind of woman am I if I knowingly married a man that didn’t love me? He is a thief. He stole my life; he stole hers. Goddamn, why am I even thinking about her life?

My first clear thought is that I want to make him pay. I flash to an irrational thought, where I picture myself hogtying Olivia and dumping her in the Everglades for the gators to deal with. Of course I would never do that — I would hire someone to do it for me. I file through all of the other emotional bombs I can drop on him. I have told so many lies that I have an entire buffet of shadiness to choose from. I pluck out the worst one and rub my chin on my shoulder. This one will hurt him, probably deeper than anything that I could do or say about Olivia. Ready … set …

“Estella isn’t yours.”





Epilogue



Hate is such a prodigious feeling. It’s hot and oppressive like fire. It starts by burning through your God-given reason until there is nothing left of it but a mound of ash. It moves on to your humanity next, hot tongues flicking across the few remaining threads of innocence until they melt into each other and morph into something ugly. Then, in the rubble of what you were, hate plants a seed of bitterness. The seed grows to a vine and the vine chokes what it touches. That’s where I am; the vine wrapped so tightly around my neck I can barely breathe. One hand is on that vine, the other is pressed against my chest to keep everything from falling out.