How I could break hearts and ruin lives.
It was a heavy burden to carry alone. But this was one thing that my sisters couldn’t save me from.
“Okay,” I whispered, the word silencing Rosie and Lucy as they bickered over who I’d babysit for the most.
“Okay?” Lucy said, shocked. “You’re going to tell us?”
I nodded.
And I told them.
Everything.
“Holy. Fucking. Fuck,” Rosie breathed.
It was the first words she’d spoken it what felt like a lifetime.
I’d stopped speaking a full minute before she uttered them. I’d counted. Braced for their reaction. Their judgment.
They were shocked because I was sure that they didn’t expect the history of me and Heath to stretch back to when I was eighteen years old. Obviously we’d done a great job at convincing my family we were strangers.
I’d done a terrible job at convincing myself.
But there was no judgment, not even an ounce on their faces. Not that I had ever witnessed it. I’d thought this might be different. This wasn’t me disappearing to the Dominican Republic and volunteering with my new boyfriend for three weeks.
This was years of half-truths, deceptions. This was me marrying another while breaking the heart of a good man. One both of these women respected.
“Holy fucking fuckedy fuck,” Lucy whispered.
I nodded in agreeance.
“This is a lot,” Lucy said.
“Even for you, this is a lot,” Rosie continued.
“For us, this is a lot,” Lucy corrected.
“Okay, it’s starting to get creepy you two speaking a run-on sentence,” I said.
“Why in the fuck didn’t you tell us?” Rosie demanded.
“Because I was ashamed,” I whispered, looking downward. “Not at the start, no at the start I wanted it just to be mine. I wanted to keep that weekend inside me so nothing could corrupt it. Like some really old painting that just crumbles to dust if it’s exposed to sunlight.” I picked at my chipped nail polish. “Especially since I didn’t think I’d ever see him again. I didn’t even entertain fantasies about us meeting randomly sometime. I didn’t let myself do that. So when I saw him, I didn’t know how to react. I couldn’t react. I made him into a stranger when moments before he’d been the most important part of my past. And then it got worse. Got messy.”
Understatement of the century.
“It was a moment that everyone would’ve expected me to grab with both hands if they’d known,” I added. “The storybook moment when that first love comes back and everything is right and perfect and it happens how it should’ve the first time around. But it didn’t happen like that. I didn’t grab it with both hands. I used both hands to push him away because I’m a big fat coward.”
I emptied my wine before looking to my sister, blinking away my tears.
“Everyone thought I was looking for the one. When in reality I was trying to find a way to lose the one.” I sucked in a strangled breath. “I made a mistake,” I whispered. “With all of it. All I wanted was the fairy tale.” I blinked at my tears. “But I ruined whatever chance I got at that.”
“You didn’t ruin a fairy tale, my love, because fairy tales don’t exist,” Lucy said calmly. “Watching you grow up in your beautiful world, I thought maybe they might, for my peaceful and chaotic baby sister. I hoped that the ugly world would grant that small thing as to give you a fairy tale. But that’s not how it works.” She smiled. “Sometimes the story didn’t follow the rules. The girl made the wrong decisions because she was scared and naïve and most importantly, human. We don’t make the right decisions when it comes to love, when it comes to the real deal. We make choices to protect our hearts when they fuck everything up even more. Take it from someone who knows. I didn’t get the fairy tale. But somehow I got the happy ending.”
I smiled at her, a real one, even in the middle of my pain. Because I was always going to be happy that the two women in front of me got that. Got their happy endings even though they didn’t get their fairy tales.
“I don’t know if I’m going to get mine now,” I whispered. “I think marrying someone else and running away to Europe after divorcing him has set fire to whatever future Heath and I could ever have had.”
“Why did you marry him?” Rosie asked. It was a question neither of them had asked me until now, despite their obvious disapproval.
“Because I was a coward,” I whispered. “Because he was someone that seemed safe. Easy. Because I loved him with the surface part of Polly that everyone knew. He would never know the deepest parts of my pain. Because I didn’t think he’d hurt me.” I laughed. “But it was me that hurt myself marrying him.”
I didn’t say more, even though there was more. More than even Rosie knew. I wouldn’t say more. No matter what. They had yanked all the truth out of me I could ever offer. I wasn’t going to say the rest out loud.
“And maybe, if I want to be really honest, I knew I didn’t love him, not properly,” I forced the words out. “And because I knew that what I had with Heath was real, and it was going to be a lifetime of pain, I wanted to take the easy way out. Because I’m weak.”
That was it.
The truth.
And it wasn’t pretty.
Neither was love. Maybe that’s why I’d been running for so long. Because I’d pretended to be looking for love my entire life, the hopeless and scatterbrained romantic, playing the part so very well. When in actuality, true love wasn’t pretty like I was trying to make it. Like I was trying to pretend, like some little girl in a plastic crown and a polyester dress pretending she was a princess. All those men were plastic crowns, polyester dresses. They fit, I could pretend with them, but they weren’t real.
And I hadn’t mourned them, not really.
It was onto the next one.
And if I had loved them, there would be no moving. There would be a lifetime of mourning. There would be a huge gaping hole in my life that I couldn’t cover up with anyone else.
And that’s why I ran from Heath. Because it was ugly, what I felt for him. Unhealthy. Uncomfortable. Heavy. Like the weight of a real crown might be.
Lucy had moved at some point and now her hand was tight in mine. It was comforting. Healing.
Well, as healing as it could be.
No one spoke for a long time.
Until Rosie.
“Okay, so there are people that say that nothing is certain in life, I disagree.” Rosie grinned, but her eyes were glassy from my words. “And not just because I like to disagree with people. But because there are things that are certain. Like your favorite lipstick will be discontinued the second you finish your last tube. It will start to rain the second you walk out in your new suede Manolos, or right after you’ve had a kick-ass blowout.” She scowled at this, and then down at her shoes that looked perfect in my eyes but obviously weren’t to her.
It had rained today.
She snapped her head back up. “You run into Chris Hemsworth on the street after a workout, makeup-free and scarier than that Stephen King book with the clown,” she continued.
And then her face changed. Turned a little more serious. A little more kind to me. “And, this is the biggy, you’ll always fall in love at the wrong time. Most likely with the wrong person. Then you’ll fuck something up. Or he will. Shit goes down. Because life likes to screw with us, babe, whether it’s ruining eight hundred-dollar shoes, or sending us the perfect man in the most imperfect—sometimes seemingly impossible—of circumstances. But here’s a secret, we’re not people. We’re kick ass bitches.” She looked to Lucy, then to me. “And just because you don’t literally kick ass like we do, ‘cause you’re into, like, peace, or whatever.” She rolled her eyes. “Doesn’t mean you don’t kick ass. I refuse to hear yourself talking about yourself the way you would never talk to us. To the people, you love most in this world. You were there for both of the disasters that were the beginning of the relationships. And I don’t think it’s presumptuous for me to say we both fucked up. A lot.” She looked to Lucy for confirmation.