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СКАЧАТЬ wasn’t just that.”

      Oh, great, there was more? Was there anything she did right?

      “You sure you want to hear this?”

      She wasn’t sure of anything anymore. “No, but tell me anyway.”

      “After we got married you nagged me constantly.”

      Oh, ouch. That one really stung.

      Her mother’s nagging had driven her nuts. Had she really done the same thing to Dillon? “I nagged you?”

      “No matter what I did, it wasn’t good enough.”

      That wasn’t true. Although she did recall thinking that being married hadn’t been what she’d expected. In fact, it hadn’t been any different than when they’d been dating. Dillon hadn’t changed at all.

      May be that had been the problem. She’d been expecting him to change. To mature overnight.

      “I think I had certain expectations about being married,” she told him. “I thought we would settle down and get serious. Start acting like grown-ups. But things didn’t happen the way I planned. You were so…irresponsible. I think May be it scared me.”

      “I wasn’t ready to grow up,” he said. No apology, no excuses. Hadn’t that always been his M.O.? This is the way things are and if you don’t like it, tough cookies. But that wasn’t the way it worked.

      “Part of marriage is learning to compromise,” she reminded him.

      He opened his mouth to argue, she could see it in his eyes. That stubborn, I’m-right-and-you’re-wrong look. Then he caught himself.

      Jeez, were they both that stubborn?

      He sighed and rested his head back against the headboard. “You’re right. It is. I guess May be I felt as though you were asking me to be something I wasn’t.”

      “And the harder I pushed you to change, the more you rebelled and acted the complete opposite.”

      He nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.”

      “And the more you rebelled, the harder I nagged and pushed, making things even worse.”

      “Until we self-destructed.”

      “Exactly.”

      And there it was. Their entire relationship in a nutshell. It was a genuine “lightbulb” moment.

      Two stubborn people, neither willing to meet the other halfway. She had never considered the possibility that it wasn’t entirely his fault. It had never even crossed her mind.

      “All this time I’ve had myself convinced that it had to be either your fault or mine. But the truth is, we both screwed up. It’s both our faults, isn’t it?”

      “I guess so.”

      “We were young and stupid and had no clue what we were getting ourselves into.”

      He shook his head. “Well, damn. I guess I’m not as perfect as I thought I was.”

      Neither of them were.

      Knowing that, accepting it, seemed to lift the weight of the past ten years from her shoulders. She felt free.

      Until the meaning of it, the repercussions, dropped on her like a ten-ton block of solid steel. Then she just felt like she wanted to barf.

      She’d been basing her life’s work on her own experiences, her own failed marriage. All this time she held herself up on some sort of pedestal. She’d been wronged, she was the victim. The real truth was, she had been just as responsible.

      She was a statistic. Just like everyone else.

      Even worse, she was a fraud.

      Half of what she’d written in her book had turned out to be untrue, and the other half was skewed so far out of proportion it was hardly credible.

      How many times, as a form of therapy, had she suggested her patients write down their feelings in a personal journal, or in a letter that they would later shred? To accept and validate their emotions. Which is exactly what she’d done. Then she’d sent them off to a publisher and printed them for the whole world to see.

      And the really frightening part was people had actually listened. They had taken the ranting of a hurt, embittered woman and made them sacred.

      What had she done?

      And how could she justify doing it again?

      She had a contract. She’d taken an advance. It was too late to back out now. To say, oops, I was wrong. What I said before, just ignore that. This is what you should really do.

      She didn’t even know what this was. What if she never figured it out?

      “You look disturbed,” Dillon said, genuine concern in his eyes. “I thought you would be happy.”

      “I am,” she lied, because to admit what she was really feeling was a humiliation she just couldn’t bear. And she owed him a huge apology. “I’m sorry for all those things I wrote about you.”

      He shrugged. “Like you said, you didn’t write a single thing that wasn’t true.”

      “May be, but I had no right to publish it in a book. If I had issues about our marriage, the only person I should have talked to was you or my shrink.”

      “I guess we’ve both made our share of mistakes. What do you say we forget what happened in the past and start fresh. Right here, right now.”

      He had every right to hold what she’d done against her. Instead, he was willing to forgive and forget. And she would be wise to do the same. “I’d like that.”

      He looked at her for a second, just looked at her face, as if he were seeing it for the first time. She wondered what he saw. If he could tell how conflicted she felt.

      “You want to get out of here?” he asked.

      “And go where?”

      He shrugged. “Does it matter?”

      He was right, it didn’t matter. As long as she was anywhere but here, torturing herself.

      She couldn’t run from the past any longer, and she couldn’t change the fact that her life was in total chaos. But this was a vacation, darn it.

      She would worry about fixing this mess after the wedding. Tonight, she just wanted to forget.

      Twelve

      It can be very tempting, particularly on lonely nights, to look up your ex. But the more you fall back on your old ways, the harder it will be to truly move on.

      —excerpt from The Modern Woman’s СКАЧАТЬ