Page 26 of Chosen Road

Snatching away the stability of his home, in my eyes, marked me as a failure as a mother.

Divorce was listed alongside abuse and neglect as one of the causative factors of abandonment issues.

You’re just like me.

No.

This was a different situation.

It was not good, but I was not abandoning my child.

My drive to preserve the status quo for Alex lay in direct conflict with my need to get away from Gus, and in this case, I needed to prioritize myself over my son. It didn’t feel good, but it was not abandonment.

Gus’s affair with Jacqueline proved what I’d always known to be true. I was not enough. Made up of broken pieces, I couldn’t be.

I couldn’t communicate my feelings. I could identify them but would not allow myself to give them a voice. Giving them to someone else gave them the advantage of knowing my innermost vulnerabilities. If I told, and they abandoned me anyways? That would be so much worse. Even with my trusted therapist who helped me work off the residue from work, I could not reveal my deepest hurts.

Clinically, I acknowledged to myself at least that I was a textbook case.

I was bitchy. I criticized and complained about every little thing that irritated me. And there were a lot of things that irritated me.

I spent too many hours at work neglecting my family, and even so, made too little progress with my young clients.

I lost my husband.

Fresh tears spilled over, and I wiped them away. There were things to be done and I needed to pull it together for Alex.

And for Gus.

They would both need me to be strong for this.

An hour later, for the first time of many to come, I pulled into my driveway like a visitor and walked up the path to the front door. We had an hour before Alex was set to arrive home. I texted Ruby and asked her to drop him off and not to come in.

She didn’t question. During Gus’s convalescence, I’d been quite forward in telling Ruby and Yiayia when they could call and when they could come. I knew she would drop Alex at the door, wait for him to go inside, and leave.

I knocked on the door.

After a minute, Gus stood in the open doorway, one hand braced on a lean hip, his chin dipped down, studying me. He looked terrible.

“Do not knock on this door, Amber. This is still your home,” he stated quietly.

I sighed. We were off to a good start. “We should start the way we intend to continue,” I stated much more confidently than I felt.

“Then don’t fucking knock,” he retorted.

My gaze snapped to his and my eyebrows lowered. “Let’s not fight. We’ve done enough of that over the past two years.”

He turned his face away for a moment and stared into space. I watched the muscle in his jaw tick.

My eyes began to sting, so I tore my gaze away from him and walked into the family room.

“What do you want to tell him?” I asked.

He followed me in and sat down on the end of the couch. “Well, what is it? Is this a trial separation? A cooling off period? You ready to call it quits entirely? Because I’m not. I’m not willing to let you go.”

I dropped down into the chair beside the couch. “You should have thought about that before you fucked Jacqueline,” I hissed meanly.

Shame suffused his face, but he didn’t look away from my eyes. “I don’t know that I did, Amber. It’s a sliver of a memory.”

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