Page 17 of Blossoms of the Heart
Chapter 5
Phoebe
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Chicago, 3 years ago…
No one could tell me that it was okay to not love your husband.
Not be in love?
How could that be okay?
Maybe that worked for some people, but I was struggling. Really struggling. I always struggled with my feelings for Jason.
I thought that there should at least be a spark. Something that connected us and made us click. Something that bonded us and made us want to see each other all the time, or at the very least miss each other when we were apart.
I didn’t feel either, and lately there was something else that I was beginning to sense. More than usual.
Cheating.
It was something I saw and picked up on. No one had to tell me, and no one would dare imply that Jason would do something like that. He was the Governor of Illinois, had been since last year and he stood for integrity. Besides that, family image mattered to him too much to do something like that.
That’s what the general mundane person would think.
I felt differently.
Last year was when I first got that niggling suspicion. It was just after he’d been appointed the position. He’d come home drunk from a party with lipstick on his collar, what looked like a hicky on his neck and smelling strongly of perfume.
I wanted to chalk it up to nothing but we had such a terrible argument after I asked him about it. He accused me of being jealous and paranoid.
The argument was so bad that I had to leave the house and stay in a hotel.
That argument highlighted a lot of things to me. One main thing was that I needed a place of retreat, just in case. I couldn’t go home to my parents because Mom would never see things my way, and I couldn’t rely on Emma. She couldn’t stand me.
So I rented the lake house. I wasn’t there a lot, but just in times where I needed to break free of the suffocation from my marriage.
And times when I felt something was going on.
Like last week I saw him with his secretary in the foyer of the Cook Building. I’d been trying lately to be more invested, as my mother put it. So I went to see if he wanted to catch dinner with me.
He was standing by the glass windows with her and he leaned down to whisper something into her ear. They were standing awfully close and the way that she giggled and then inconspicuously looked around to see if anyone was watching or heard alerted my suspicion.
It was such a small thing but it got me thinking. I walked up to them and the guilty look on her face added to my thoughts.
Then yesterday when I made another attempt to see him for lunch. I was told that he’d already left for lunch with his secretary.
“Phoebe, are you listening to me?” Mom asked, bringing me out of my thoughts.
I blinked and focused on her. She gave me that impatient look, suggesting she’d asked me something.
I didn’t know what it was.
She’d summoned me home to a mother-daughter dinner. Emma would be here soon. I was told to arrive an hour early because Mom wanted to talk to me.
That was how she was. Treating everything like it was a business meeting.
I hated it. Nothing was ever just normal and ordinary. I guess that was what happened when you were practically raised in the White House.
