Chose the Wrong Guy, Gave Him the Wrong Finger (28 page)

Even though everyone else on earth might have said it was never a question.

“This isn’t easy for me, but, to be really uncool but honest with you, the truth is I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Chewing on it, you know? Wondering what the truth was.”

He looked at the floor, but I saw his jaw twitch. “That probably would have been a good conversation to have at the time.”

“I know, I’m sorry, I just—it was so confusing and upsetting that I didn’t know which end was up. I should have—”

“Quinn.”

I looked at him. “Sorry, I was rambling.”

“Please stop apologizing.”

My heart was pounding like a scared rabbit’s. “Okay, I’m so— Okay.” Who the hell was I all of a sudden? This wasn’t like me. My nerves were betraying me terribly. “Look, I have some questions about … everything. Frank’s allegations. The business that made me call off the wedding.”

He nodded. “I figured.”

“Actually, I guess it all just begins with the one question.”

“Right.” He took a sip of the beer, swallowed, then let out a long breath before meeting my eyes and saying, “I’m not sure you’re going to like what I have to say.”

Dread snaked through me, then morphed into grief as sharp as a razor. There it was. There it was right there.
That
was what my nerves were about. Not the girlish attempt to dress up for my ex, not the sight of his beautiful face in the light of my porch, but the truth I must have known was underneath it all, had been underneath it all the entire time.

An outsider might not have been sure what Burke’s response meant—after all, there were plenty of things he could say that I wouldn’t like—but I knew exactly what it meant.

“Frank was telling the truth.”

He gave a slow nod. “Probably.”

My body went numb. It was like a replay of the wedding day inside of me. Shock, disbelief, anguish, anger, hatred, all wrapped in this tattered shroud of love and trust.

“I don’t know
exactly
what he said to you,” Burke went on. “You never said and I never asked him.”

“You just”—I shook my head and shrugged—“weren’t that interested?”

“In what
Frank
said? No. Your reaction was probably appropriate. At the time I didn’t think so. I was marrying you, Quinn. I was ready to give everything else up and be yours alone.”

“And by
everything
you mean
everyone
?”

He looked me in the eye. “There weren’t that many.”

Ugh. When I heard him say it like that, the shock was as sharp as if it were new.

“
One
was too many,” I said, feeling both the desire to cry and let this out and the desperation to not let him see me lose my composure. Such as it was.

“I know. And I knew then. So there wasn’t any point in elaborating, was there? I can’t see that there is now.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “This was my
life
, Burke. This changed my whole life.”

“Mine too.”

“So I don’t think there was
no point
in ignoring any of the huge disgusting facts that led to that.”

He looked suitably chagrined. “What I meant was, the details could only hurt you more than you were already hurting.”

“Then again, the facts might have been a
lot
less painful than the many,
many
scenarios I envisioned and tortured myself with.” I stood up and started pacing in front of the sofa. “So why don’t you just start at the beginning? Did you cheat on me the entire time we were together?”

“No!” He actually looked surprised. “Of course not.”

“You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t see things to be as obvious as you think they are.”

He gave a concessionary nod.

“How many other women were there? How long did they last? Years? Were there scores of them? More than five? More than ten? Did you ever see them before you saw me? Or leave me early to see them?”

“Slow down,” he said, in what I recognized as his “soothing voice,” but there wasn’t a chance of soothing me right now.

“Fuck you.”

“There was only one when we were engaged.”

I wasn’t proud of the fact that my first reaction was relief, since I should have been outraged at any betrayal at all. And I was. In that sense, yes, one was better than the cheerleading team that had been rapidly forming in my imagination.

But my second reaction, following the first almost immediately, was an even bigger horror. One woman. One girl. Whatever.
When we were engaged
. I almost couldn’t put voice to the question. “Did you … did you
love
her?”

“Of
course
not, Quinn, I loved
you
.” He sounded completely sincere. It made no sense to me. “I only saw her a couple of times.”

I stopped and looked at him in disbelief. I wanted this moment to end. I wanted to go back and have this to do all over again so that I could
not
do it.

And those moments I was talking about earlier? Where
now
feels even sadder than a previous sad? This was one of those moments. Only an hour and a half ago, I’d been sitting on my front stoop with a lonely little melancholy and some niggling questions that turned out to be ice cubes compared to the iceberg I’d run into.

I resumed my pace. “Who was it?” I ground out, clasping my hands together so he couldn’t see them shake.

“No one you know.”

I looked at him sharply.

“I mean it,” he said, looking me square in the eye. “It was no one I knew either. I met her at Shenanigans and, I swear, I don’t remember her name.”

“You don’t remember the name of the woman who broke up our marriage?”

“
Her
name was Quinn.
You
are the one who stopped our marriage.” Before I could lunge and kill him, he added, “Because of
me
. Because of what
I
did. No one else matters in this, or ever did, except for you and me. She was a prop at best. An experiment for me to see if I really wanted to get married.”

“Yeah? Wow, the pain just goes on and on. Is this fun for you? Is this how you get your kicks, hurting someone who did nothing but love and
trust
you virtually her whole life?”

“Wait a minute.” He got up and stood in front of me, his hands on my shoulders, while he looked into my eyes. “Consider this, just for a minute. It’s possible that I’m enjoying this conversation even less than you are.”

I scoffed. “Somehow I don’t think that’s true.”

“You get to be mad,” he said. “You get to hate me. You have one object of all your discontent and you can walk away from it if you want. You’ve done it before.
With my brother
. Without even looking back. Good on you.” He nodded. “But
I
have to live with knowing I fucked up my own life too. I can’t blame anyone else or get away from the motherfucker responsible, because it’s me.”

“Yup.” And at that moment, I didn’t feel bad about being with Frank at all. It felt like a completely different situation. A different world. A different family.

Burke had pushed me away all by himself.

“But worse, Quinn, I have to live with knowing I did this to you, that I put you through this, not just then but now too. And anytime in between when you might have felt pain over it. This is
torture
for me, Quinn, I
never
wanted to hurt you, and I couldn’t have done a better job if I’d set out to do it on purpose.”

That’s when the tears started to come. I shrugged his hands off my shoulders and took a step back. “At least
on purpose
would imply some awareness of me. This just happening, just going on with some slut you used as a
prop
or however you termed it just tells me I was of no consequence to you.”

“No, you were of
every
consequence to me. You were all I ever thought about, all I ever wanted. I was ready to marry you almost the moment I met you. But when it came down to it, when it was time to really take that step, I wanted to be sure I wasn’t just under some spell of infatuation or something.”

My jaw dropped and I splayed my arms. “Really? Seven years and you weren’t sure?”

“Seven years of
no one but you
. Not even considering anyone but you. But I didn’t want to make a commitment and find out it was based on an illusion or something.” He shook his head, frustrated. “I’m not wording this right. But basically, I didn’t want to have my parents’ marriage all over again. I didn’t want to become them, and I didn’t want to change you into that.” He put his hands back on my shoulders and held me steady as I tried to resist. “It wasn’t the right thing to do, I
know
that. That’s why I never told you. Because the truth sounds like a lie. But it made me realize even more how much I valued you. That I never ever wanted to lose you. I don’t know what kind of man could have taken the chance on that by telling you the truth, but I couldn’t.”

“Frank could have.”

“Frank never cared this much about anyone or anything in his life. Of course he could have risked the truth. He’s always got a plan B. He’s always either got backup for what he might lose or he risks it because he feels he can afford to lose it.”

That was true, that was a perfect characterization of Frank. Except when it came to me. I truly believed one of Frank’s only weak spots was me. I couldn’t say why. But it had always been my feeling. “Then why did you tell him?”

Burke stepped back and raked his hand through his hair. “I didn’t. He saw us.”

“Where? Was it really at the farm?” I braced myself, though I was so wobbly at this point I couldn’t say I was really
prepared
for anything.

“
What?
Why would you think
that
?”

Not a denial, I noticed. “That’s what Frank said. That you took her there and she got stoned with Rob.”

“She got stoned with Rob,” Burke said dully, like he was repeating a math question he wasn’t even going to try to figure out. “At the farm. And I was okay with all that.”

I gave a broad shrug. “Hey, you were okay with enough of the rotten parts that I don’t know
what
to think. If you were okay with cheating on me, then I have no idea where you’d draw the line.” Tears burned my eyes and I couldn’t stop them even though they made me lose whatever small tenuous hold I had on my cool.

“Why would he say it if it wasn’t true? I’ve never known Frank to be a straight-up liar.”

Burke thought about this. “Maybe he imagined it was true. Extrapolated the truth out to include that. Or maybe he was just so sure you were wrong to marry me, in light of that he felt he had to add details he knew would send you over the edge.”

That seemed plausible. And, though presented as noble, made me want to kill Frank for adding such a personally devastating story to what was already the worst news I’d ever received. “So never at the farm?”

“No,” he said, looking into my eyes. “Never.”

“Then where?” I asked, fearing it would be almost as bad. But what would be almost as bad? My bedroom in my parents’ house? The roof of the shop? Nothing came to mind as nearly as bad as the farm.

He shook his head, like he knew there was no point in delving into the details, yet he had no right to refuse them to me now. “It was at that cheap motel by what used to be Price Club,” he said.

Again, I had that feeling of relief, and again it was quickly replaced by another facet of grief and betrayal. This was something I’d picture every time I drove that way now.

But there was no surprise there. I was asking for things that could only make me feel worse. He could have said
on Mars
and every time I looked at the night sky, I’d feel that little tremor of betrayal.

No good comes from learning the details in a situation like this one. None.

“So
Frank
,” he went on, “knew I knew he’d seen me but that I thought he understood it wasn’t going to happen again and there was no point in telling you. Instead, I guess he decided that the risk of losing his brother was worth it. Especially if you were the prize. So he told you.”

I felt another resurgence of the old anger I’d felt toward Frank too. He’d waited and told me at the worst possible moment. Yes, maybe he’d hoped I’d come to my senses and realize the truth myself, but, good lord, what about giving me a week’s notice? Even a day’s!

Suddenly I just wanted to get away from these guys. Both of them. Their entire family. I didn’t even want to finish Dottie’s dress, though I had to. I wasn’t going to let her down because her grandsons were jerks. But I desperately wished I could.

“Go,” I said to Burke.

“Are you okay?”

I looked at him with teary red eyes. Much like a stoner, come to think of it. “What do you think?”

“I don’t want to leave you like this.”

“Oh, please. Your time to care about doing the right thing passed a long time ago. Just
go
, Burke.”

“All right, I will,” he said, with a strange sense of nonsurrender. “But first I need to know that you understand what I’m saying.”

“You need that, huh?”

“For your own sake, if not for mine. I need to know that you understand it meant
nothing
.
You
meant everything to me and I never got over that.”

“Really? I’m sure your wife would have been surprised to hear that.”

He winced. “You were gone.”

“
And
forgotten.”

“No. Never forgotten. I will never in my life get over losing you. I was young and stupid and immature and selfish, and instead of doing one of the millions of better things I could have done to make sure getting married was right for us, I did the cheapest trick in the book. There’s no excuse, but I want you to at least know the reason.”

I nodded, mute.

“I know you, Quinn. I know this tainted your whole view of everything we ever were together. But we were happy. We had fun. We loved each other. Even if you hate me now, even if you never talk to me again, don’t punish that girl you were by believing she wasn’t loved. She was. More than you’ll ever know.”