“Then closure is not going to do you much good,” he said honestly. “You’re still going to be sad about the relationship ending, whether or not you get closure.”
“Well then…fuck me.”
He gave me a sympathetic smile. “I know you’re hurt and angry,” Mel said bracingly. “But there are relationships that have been through worse.”
“Oh, yeah?” I said challengingly. “Like what?”
“Like cheating,” he said softly.
It was his expression that got to me. “Wait,” I said, in shock. “You cheated?”
“I wasn’t the one who cheated,” he replied.
I raised my eyebrows, realizing what he was telling me. “No way… Dana?”
“We had been married about three years,” he explained. “I had just become a full-fledged firefighter and was working all the time. I was so consumed with work that I forgot to carve out time for her. Even when she begged me to spend some quality time with her, I was either too busy or too tired. After a while, she just stopped asking, and I figured she understood. Then a few months later, she came to me and confessed.”
“She told you herself?” I asked.
“Yep.” Mel nodded. “She came clean. She told me she’d been seeing this guy for a few months and the guilt had finally led her to break up with him and tell me the truth.”
“How did you react?”
“Not well,” he sighed. “We separated for a while, and I thought about filing for divorce several times.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Because I realized that Dana was still the love of my life and that kind of love didn’t come easy. She had made a horrible mistake, but she admitted to it. She apologized and wanted to make our marriage work. Slowly, I realized that my life just wasn’t the same without her. So I went to her parents’ house where she was staying and told her I wanted to start fresh. We decided to go for couples counseling, and a couple of months later, we were living together again.”
“Fuck,” I breathed. “How did I not know this?”
“Because it was before you joined up and it’s not something I go around telling people.”
“Right…”
“But we have two amazing children now,” he said. “And a marriage that’s as solid as ever.”
“And the fact that she cheated never comes back to haunt you?”
“It used to,” Mel admitted. “But not anymore… I know my wife now, and I know I can trust her. I accept my part in her mistake, and we’ve moved on. We both learned something extremely important from that experience, and that was that relationships are hard, and if they mean something to you, you need to fight to stay together.”
I sighed. “It sounds very romantic when you say it like that.”
“All I can say is if Megan is your Dana, then forgiving her might be in your best interests, too,” Mel said. “But only you can say whether that is true or not.”
I wasn’t a big believer in fate, but just after that conversation with Mel, I got a message on my phone. When I glanced down, I saw Megan’s name; I froze as I read her text. She wanted to talk and had asked to meet me at the park where we had ended up after our first failed attempt at a date. I stared at her message for a while, wondering if this was my big choice… But I knew it couldn’t be.
I agreed to meet her and then I spent the rest of my shift obsessing over the coming meeting. As soon as I hung up my uniform, I showered, put on fresh jeans and a t-shirt, and drove down to the park. Everything about it was familiar and nostalgic, and I felt a pang in my heart that was a cross between happiness and pain. I walked into the large park. Megan hadn’t mentioned exactly where she would be, but she didn’t have to. I knew exactly where to find her.
She was sitting on the same swing she had been sitting on the first time I had approached her. She was wearing a lily-white dress with soft, billowy sleeves and a cinched waist. Her hair fluttered gently in the wind, hiding half her face from sight. The other half looked beautiful and sad. There was something strangely poetic about approaching a beautiful woman in a white dress.
I imagined that we were strangers, and this was nothing more than a new beginning filled with hope. I would say hello, and she would turn to me and smile. I would ask if I could sit down next to her and she would nod. We would spend the next hour talking and slowly, we would both come to realize that we were meant to be together. We would be inseparable for the next few months and then slowly the new romance would fade into solid commitment. We would go from star-crossed lovers to newlyweds, from newlyweds to young parents, and from parents to grandparents.
I almost didn’t want to call out her name because then the fantasy would fade, and we would be back to reality. It was a reality that hurt because I wasn’t sure I could forgive her yet. I hoped this conversation would help in some small way, but I wasn’t sure if it would give me clarity or confusion.
Before I called her name, Megan looked up and caught sight of me. She didn’t smile. She didn’t say anything. She just sat there, so I walked over and sat down on the swing next to hers. She looked me directly in the eye, and I could see how sad she was. It looked as though she had been crying by herself in this lonely park for some time now. A part of me wanted to reach out and touch her face and wipe away her tears, but another part of me bristled at the thought of comforting her when I was the one who was hurt.
“How are you?” she asked, at last breaking the silence.