Page 61 of The Vow

“Are you out of your mind? What do you call it then?”

“It’s not about intimacy!”

“I don’t care! What we had was sacred, but you’ve let other men touch you and be with you. Other men, not just one, have been with the woman I thought I loved with all my heart.”

Alex stopped crying and stood tall so that I had to look up at her. She belonged on her knees, penitent. “Thought you loved?”

“You know I loved you. I fucking loved you.”

“Why do you keep using past tense!?”

“Because you’re whoring around!”

It was the kind of conversation I thought I’d only read in one of Alex’s horror novels.

“Whoring around? I’m trying to get our lives back,” she said through gritted teeth.

“I’d rather die.” I wished that I could kick her farther away from me. “I’m glad my mother isn’t alive. If she found out about this, it would destroy her.”

“How dare you? You think I enjoy it. Is that what you think?”

“Look at yourself. You look like you’re about to go to the fucking opera.”

“You’re so wrong. This,” she said, punching her leg, “wasn’t caused by one of them. I do it to myself. I hit myself. If I feel pain, I don’t feel anything else.”

The bruise she called a U.P.W. Part of me wanted to forgive her for her sins. The other part of me wanted to cast the first stone. The only thing I had left in my miserable life was Alex’s love, devotion, and loyalty, but being merciful meant losing the last ounce of dignity I had left. Plus, she was dirty. My beautiful Alex was tainted, and everything we had dissolved in an instant.

“I know all about pain and wanting to erase it. But you once said that we should share everything. You didn’t come to me. All you did was lie.”

By now, her makeup had melted beneath sweat and tears, and she held her skirt scrunched in her hand where she had been beating herself. “I didn’t come to you? I’ve tried to talk to you a million times.”

“About this? No. Of course not.” And then the devil released my tongue. “No wonder it was so easy to pick you up at Nick’s that day. You’re pretty much a hooker.”

“You unfathomable bastard.”

The slap she gave me across the face was my only way out of this. I saw it coming. I didn’t stop her. “Get out. I can’t look at you. You’re going to go pack a bag and get the hell out of my house.”

“I... I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have hit you.”

“Go.”

“Where do you want me to go?”

“I don’t know. And I don’t care.”

She stomped away like a petulant child. I waited while she filled a bag with clothes and whatever else she needed to look appealing to the men in her life. There were no other words spoken between us; she left her key on the kitchen island and left quietly.

Wheeling myself into our bedroom, I found that God was on speaking terms with me again. What, exactly, He was trying to tell me, I didn’t know. Alex had left her crucifix on the bed.

Twenty-Four

Mrs. Biggs from two doors down was watching me with amusement. We had put up a sign to leave the newspaper on the porch, but someone was rebelling because they continued to leave it in the mailbox, or they were simply an asshole.

She called out to me from where she stood on her lawn that was decorated with various gnomes and woodland creatures. “Need a hand?”

“I’m good, but thanks. Have a nice day!”

“It’s supposed to be a beautiful sunny day for the Marshall’s annual picnic. Will we see you there?”