Crash!
I pitched the glass vase of flowers at the register, aiming for his fancy display of bottles behind it.
Bull’s-eye.
The flying vase missed Kael by inches as he stood toward the corner behind his employees at the register, eating his soup, shoulder against a beam, one ankle crossed over the other.
The store fell silent as shocked expressions ping-ponged between me, the broken glass, and Kael.
“Deal with that.” I turned and pushed through the doorway out into the frigid air. It didn’t affect me, not with an inferno of anger racing through my veins.
In spite of the speech I gave Kelly about our loved one’s bodies being just that … bodies, I found myself driving to the cemetery to visit Craig’s body—or at least the ground above it and his headstone. I was good with anything symbolic at that moment.
“Hey.” I dropped to my knees in the snow, not caring if my jeans got wet or if I wouldn’t be able to stand after kneeling for too long. “It’s me, your terrible wife. Ex-wife. Widow …” I sighed and closed my eyes for a few seconds before opening them again and staring at his name engraved on the granite with “Beloved father and husband” beneath it.
Husband.
“I don’t know what I am right now. Not a good business owner. I’m closing the doors in less than two weeks. Not a good mom. Bella is about to find out I’ve been having sex with someone twelve years younger than me. Yeah … I went younger. You would have too. And I’m about to be shunned from the church because I stole Tillie Cunningham’s love interest. I still don’t think it’s a midlife crisis. I think I might just be a terrible human being. When Bella graduates, I’m going to leave Epperly. You can truly rest in peace.”
On another long sigh, I twisted around and fell back in the snow, so my body was on his grave, gaze aimed at the sky. I moved my arms and legs in and out, making a snow angel.
“Want to know the hardest … coldest … rawest truth? I don’t miss you because you’re no longer in my life … I miss you because you’re no longer in this life.”
Admitting that aloud, if only to a partly cloudy sky and a cemetery filled with embalmed bodies, made me feel a little better. At the core of all the truths and real talk I had with the grief group, or even with Amie, the hardest thing was acknowledging how I missed Craig. Had we been given the chance to divorce, I knew I would have seen him occasionally because we shared four kids together. Without kids, I could have moved halfway around the world and lived the rest of my life without him, and I didn’t know if my heart would have ever truly missed him.
That hurt the most. That numbing reality that I would have been okay without him for … the rest of my life. It was the jagged knife that cut so deeply it punctured my soul. In some ways, it made me question if I had a soul.
Why was falling out of love a flaw?
Still … I did miss him being alive. I grieved his absence in our children’s lives. It pained me beyond words to know that he wouldn’t walk Bella down the aisle if she got married.
“Stirring up trouble today, huh?”
I grinned at the words of my friend.
Amie plopped down next to me, leaning back as well to make her own snow angel.
“Thought you had a job.”
“I do. I have several jobs actually. But news quickly spread that the job I needed to attend to the most right now is being your friend.”
“Fucking small-town gossip.”
Amie laughed. “It’s the worst.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to say to Bella.”
“May I suggest the truth? At this point, I think it’s your best bet.”
“What if I don’t know the truth?”
“Well, you know something. Tell her what you know. Then tell her what you don’t know. Show her that we never stop changing. Show her that life never stops giving us opportunities to build character and be humbled by unexpected circumstances. She’ll love you more for not having all the answers. Humans gravitate toward imperfection. Like comfort food.”
“You want me to be her macaroni and cheese?”
“Yep.”
I chuckled. “I love you.”
She reached over and rested her hand on mine, giving it a tiny squeeze. “You should.”
“I loved him too.” I blinked and let several tears fall for Craig.
“I know you did. Everyone knew. You have four beautiful souls living on this earth because of that love. I’ve never told you to forgive yourself because there’s nothing to forgive. It’s okay to fall in love. And it’s just as okay to fall out of love.”Chapter Twenty-ThreeI’m not a goose. I am a duck. And I’m okay with it.