“I know,” I said. “I know, baby. Come inside. It’s cold.”
We sat at my kitchen table until almost two in the morning.
Lauren told me everything. Not just the summer. All of it.
She told me that Mark had called her at least twice a week since the divorce. That he’d asked about me every time. Where I was going, who I was seeing, what I was spending money on. That he’d told her, again and again, that I’d been cold and ungrateful for years, that I’d “abandoned the family,” that he’d only ever wanted to make me happy and I’d never let him.
“I believed some of it,” she admitted. “Not all of it. But some. Because you never told me your side. You never said anything bad about him. Ever. So I thought maybe he was right. Maybe you just… stopped loving him, and he didn’t know why.”
