Page 77 of Dear Ripley

“That’s my point,” Harlow insisted. “A decade ago, you forgot how to communicate with each other. You both started bottling things up because life was busy and heavy and getting in the way, and, once that starts, it’s easier to go along with it. Once you bottle one thing up, everything else gets bottled up too. But now, you have the opportunity to try again. You’re older now, more mature. You know the mistakes you made, and how to fix them. And I know you still love each other.”

“We definitely do not,” I retorted, even as I wondered whether she was correct. Was it that we’d both simply started bottling things up? If it was, why? How had we found ourselves there? It didn’t feel wrong, it felt like an account of what had happened between us, but how? Andwhy?

She was right, however, about the fact that I’d been in therapy for years. Alicia had been too, as I’d recently discovered. We’d grown, we’d worked on talking about our feelings and what we were experiencing, and, I didn’t know about her, but I’d spent a lot of time thinking about the way communication broke down and all the ways I wished I could go back and change it. And Harlow was right—I did know how to handle communication better.

But I seemed to struggle to translate that into my dynamic with Alicia. Except in writing…

Harlow shook her head. “You’re every bit as frustrating as she is. Look, she spent the last eight years being a shadow of her former self—”

“Well, divorce can do that to you, as I’m sure you’re aware.”

She smiled very slightly. “I’ve watched her go through it, I get it.”

“You’ve also been through it,” I reminded her as gently as I could. She might be invading my privacy and relationship, but I wasn’t looking to be insensitive about hers.

She tilted her head. “Kind of. But it’s different. It hurt a lot finding out my wife was cheating on me—especially in those circumstances—and I did have a lot of grieving and reassessing to do, but I wasn’t that sad once the papers were signed and the thing was done. It felt more like… relief, freedom. And I asked Alicia if she’d felt the same way. She said she never had.”

I stared from the kitchen into the living room, at the back of Alicia’s head. There had been something freeing in the fact that we’d had the conversation, that we’d done what we needed to do, and it wasn’t hanging between us as a threat anymore, but it never really had felt like relief or freedom for me either. I’d assumed there was something wrong with me, that it was a product of me not moving away, of me staying in the home we’d built together. Hearing that Alicia apparently felt the same way, well, I wasn’t sure it was just that.

“She never really moved on,” Harlow whispered, close beside me. “Morgan suggested you hadn’t either.”

I hesitated. I didn’t want to give her any more ammo than she already had, but, at the same time, she wasn’t wrong, and it sounded as though Morgan had already sold me out. Some best friend she was. “Yeah, I… don’t know whether it’s just me, but I just… never had that connection with anyone else, never felt the spark. At first, I thought I just needed time to get over her, but, the longer it went on, the more I wondered whether it was something else, or whether everyone was right, that you got one person, and she was mine, and I had my time.”

Harlow squeezed my arm. “She’s definitely your person, but you haven’t had your time. She’s still here, right in front of you, still every bit as in love with you as you are with her. And, yeah, she tried to move on, but she’s done a truly shit job of it. Just… ask her about it. It’s probably a good place to start.”

I looked at her, my eyes narrowed. “I’m not asking my ex-wife about her romantic life. That’s the weirdest suggestion you’ve ever made about anything.”

She laughed. “It’s really not. You can ask Alicia about that, too, if you like. Break the ice a bit, maybe.”

“I’m not asking her anything. We’re moving forward, not going back.”

“You really do need to go back to go forwards, especially in a relationship like yours.” She looked at me like some kind of oracle, but I didn’t really get it. She sighed. “I’m just saying, if I were in your shoes, I’d be doing everything I could to get that love back. Sure, you’re ex-wives now, but there’s something more there. And you can take that from someone whose ex-wife is running around the place and is nothing like the two of you.”

She turned immediately, returning to the other room as if things really were just that simple.

I could admit I’d never moved on, never gotten over Alicia, but she had. She’d lived her life, built a whole new one, and, it seemed, dated other people. You didn’t just come back home and pick up the life you chose to leave behind. Things didn’t work like that—even if we sometimes wanted them to.

Plus, there were all the reasons we’d broken up in the first place. Which, admittedly, probably was mostly to do with communication. When we’d first gotten together, we’d talked about everything, all the time. We’d learned each other inside out.

As the years went by, and we’d become familiar with one another, we’d slowly stopped doing that. Frustrations from work slipped in and came home, more and more dinners were eaten alone or to a background of frustration, not at each other, but at the things we were dealing with, both too caught up in our own heads to find the space to verbalize them, perhaps. Neither one wanted to bother the other with more stuff. We each tried handling our own troubles. And slowly, we weren’t a team anymore. And, the less we talked, the less we knew each other, the less we felt comfortable, and, at least for me, the more difficult it became to be intimate with each other. Each time, things became more nerve-wracking, more terrifying. Alicia became more and more like a stranger, and I didn’t know what to do with that, I didn’t know how to deal with it, or mention it, or how to fix it.

And then, we were strangers. Roommates, really. Two people who lived together under the guise of love and marriage, but who didn’t really talk to each other beyond superficial platitudes. We were married but alone, each feeling lost, abandoned, and angry at ourselves, and each other, for how we’d gotten there. On and on until there was no way back, only a way out.

Then the pain hit. It’s easy to feel regret and hurt, and wish to change things when you’re at the end. Rose-colored glasses and all that.

And then it was over, and all that was left were the memories. The more time goes by, and the more your heart holds on, the harder it is to remember the bad times, and the more you regret losing the good ones.

Which brought us here. A place where Alicia was all the things I loved and missed, the memory of how much losing her hurt, and no real recollection of all the tiny ways things had changed, or how we’d lost each other. So maybe it did feel like we still belonged together, but it wasn’t that easy when you knew the path to destruction was so easy for you both to wander down.

And had we even really grown? Could we communicate with each other any better than we had then?

Not out loud, that was for sure.

Even on paper, we were still dancing around the topics. Flirting with enough plausible deniability that we could pretend not to be doing anything wrong. Touching on our lives but not really getting into them. Had we learned anything in the last eight years, or were we destined for all the same problems again?

I wasn’t sure, and a huge part of me wanted to run, wanted to get away from it all and protect myself. But that was what had gotten me here in the first place, and, as much as I loved my life, Alicia had always been missing from it. I still loved her, I always would. And I wanted to be loved in return. Maybe that wasn’t the type of thing you were supposed to admit or feel or want, but it was real and human and here, and so was I.

And maybe I wanted to try. Maybe I wanted to be a better person. Maybe I was simply won over by Alicia, or by Morgan and Harlow and their whole thing. Or, maybe, I’d regretted not trying harder for eight years, and, now that a second chance was sitting in the very next room, I wanted to give it everything I had.

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