Page 75 of Falling For Us Again

My mother was having an affair with another man?

It all starts to make sense —the arguments, the anger, the tension, my father’s resentment, the way he always seemed to look at me with that hard, unforgiving gaze. It was never about me. It was about the secrets my mother kept about the other man she never stopped loving that he couldn’t forgive.

I turn the pages, desperate to understand, to make sense of the choices she made. Each entry is a window into her torment, a record of a love that consumed her, even as it destroyed everything she held dear.

I told him this was the last time I’m going to meet with him, but as soon as I sent the letter, I knew it was a lie.

I will never stop loving him. I love him more than life itself.

I miss him every second we’re apart. Our stolen moments are the only things I look forward to lately.

His touch and his kisses, his loving whispers… They hold me until we meet again. Yet, I can’t have him. It’s too dangerous.

Richard is a jealous man. I can see it in the way he looks at me when other men are around. I’m terrified of what he might do if he finds out.

The room around me fades as I become lost in her words, in the raw emotion that spills across the pages.

I can feel her fear, her desperation, her longing. My heart clenches as I read on, each word lifting a veil on this woman who was my mother.

Richard knows everything!

When I came home, he was drunk. He found the old pile of letters from My Dearest that I thought was hidden well, and he burned them in front of me.

Then he beat me.

He doesn't know who My Dearest is, and he thinks he can beat the truth out of me, but I’ll never tell him. He says he’ll kill him if he finds out, and I believe him.

I am so scared, yet a part of me can’t blame him. Maybe I deserve it. The betrayal in his eyes hurts my heart but I can’t stop myself.

No matter how hard I try, I can’t stop wanting My Dearest. My heart has never stopped belonging to him, not since the day we first met in high school back in Tennessee.

I always knew he was too good for me. He comes from a wealthy family, and I’m just a poor farmer’s daughter. Something that his parents never let me forget.

Somehow, he fell in love with me, and I felt like the luckiest girl on earth. Just like before though, every time we try to take a step back, we end up falling back into each other’s arms.

This time however, it’s not his parents standing in our way.

Oh, fate, how can you so cruel!

In the journal is a letter folded between the pages and two pictures. They are both of my mother with a man I don’t recognize. In one, they’re standing close together outside of a school, and in the other, they look like college students.

It’s him.

He was her first love, she once mentioned to me. She had spoken about him once when I asked her a question about boys.

Something about how you never get over your first love.

I remember there was a wistfulness in her eyes as she talked, and then she stayed in her room for the rest of the day. I hadn’t thought much of it at the time.

The journal contains entries of my father’s relentless abuse and how scared she was of his jealousy, even when she stopped seeing him. She was scared that he might start abusing me as well with how angry he was.

I open the letter, and the handwriting is unfamiliar.

“Sweet Iris,

I’ve tried to convince myself that I can live without you and that I can survive on the memories of the moments we’ve shared, but each day without you feels like a lifetime of longing, a wound that refuses to heal.

How can I stop loving you? How can I erase you from my heart when you’re all I’ve ever wanted?

---