Page 67 of Cruel Summer

She was starting to think that sounded like an okay solution.

“I don’t need this,” she said finally.

“I think you do. I think you need to face what your life actually was, so you can figure out if you want to go back to it. The truth is, you didn’t know what marriage you were in.”

“And you do?”

“I’m saying I fucking do. I didn’t know he wanted to sleep with other women. But I knew you wanted to sleep with me. Three years ago, you wanted me, and if I would have kissed you…”

“I said no,” she said. “I didn’t let you.”

“But if I had.”

The image nearly brought her to her knees. His mouth meeting hers. All that heat and strength wrapped even more tightly around her. What would she have done?

She didn’t have a clear answer to that because she’d been certain she would never be close enough to a man other than Will to be on the verge of kissing him, much less wanting to kiss him. So how could she say for sure what she would have done if he’d actually kissed her?

“It’s a dead-end hypothetical because that’s all it is. A hypothetical.”

“Were you as happy as you think? That’s my question.”

The question didn’t go down easy. It was like a spoonful of frosty dread, going all through her body.

“I was happy,” she insisted. “I will be happy again.”

“It doesn’t matter to you at all that this is an intellectually bankrupt exercise?” His words were just so…hard. There was no attempt at ease or companionability or niceness. It was all just truth. Unvarnished. Awful. “You’re using your separation as an opportunity to double down on everything that was wrong before.”

“You don’t know. You don’t…”

But she couldn’t argue. She found herself angry mostly at herself. Because she knew the truth. The truth was, you did not let a man get that close to you when you were married if there wasn’t something wrong. She had confided in Logan because she didn’t feel like she could confide in Will, and that meant nothing good. That meant something was wrong.

She saw it. The first crack in the dam. That little bit of water bursting out. The truth. Then it all just began to crumble. All of it. All the little things that she had ignored. All the ways in which they hadn’t been able to communicate.

She was flexible. So flexible.

But just because she could didn’t mean that she should be contorting herself into all of those shapes.

Will wasn’t awful. She couldn’t rewrite that. She didn’t want to. He was a wonderful father. He was a good husband. Somewhere along the way, she had gotten so obsessed with being a good wife for him that she hadn’t remembered to be the right woman for herself. Hadn’t remembered to look after herself and her own needs in any regard. She had surrendered her hold on what she wanted so long ago that she didn’t even know what it was.

When her mother died, she hadn’t known how to speak up for herself. Hadn’t known how to not be okay because it was so imperative to her that she be perfect. Because Will’s wife was perfect. She handled everything. He had an important job, and she was the type A homemaker. She had a job that fit around raising kids than was more of a showcase for her skills as a homemaker that it was anything else. Will was endlessly proud of that. That he had a wife who was smart enough to turn homemaking into an income stream.

But it was all bending. Bending to fit. Into a mold that she had fit perfectly when she was eighteen, but that she didn’t even know…

Suddenly she felt like she was standing out there alone, a tumbleweed in the middle of the parking lot. What would she have been if she hadn’t put herself inside that box when she was eighteen years old?

Like a goldfish in a bowl. Who could only grow as big as the bowl she’d leaped into when she’d been too young to know there was a sea out there.

She had loved the bowl.

She did love it.

She had chosen it.

But she had chosen it at a very specific time in her life. What did that mean for her now?

Well, clearly what it meant for Will was breaking it. What he was doing didn’t fit neatly into the fishbowl life. He’d clearly known—seen, felt—the issues in their relationship much more clearly than she had. How long? She had been so angry that he had blindsided her with that, but how was that fair?

She had nearly kissed Logan. That should have been a clue.

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