“I did or I thought I did. I don’t know.”
A heartbreaking sound releases from her mouth. “I…I can’t…you…”
“I thought I did but it could never work and I had you. It was never a question with us. I knew I loved you. I loved you from the beginning.”
“But you loved her.”
“This isn’t about her. It’s about you and me.”
“No.” She throws her hands up. “No, it’s always about her. I’ve tried so hard to understand your friendship and accept it, but I can’t do this. I have to go.”
“Go?”
“Yes. Leave. I’m leaving.”
“Meghan.” I move in front of her. “Don’t do this. I swear, it’s not like that. I love you, damn it. I love our life. Our baby. Everything we have. Please, you can’t leave.”
She wipes the tears that paint her face. “I can’t be the third wheel in my own marriage, Derek!”
“You’re not.”
“No?”
I’ve fucked this up so bad, but the idea of losing her proves that what we have is real. It’s not a fantasy I’ve made up in my head. Meghan is my life.
“I don’t know that I can do this. I don’t know that I can be around her.”
My heart begins to race even faster. I know where this is going. “Around Teagan?”
“I don’t trust you now. I don’t trust her and you. I can’t be worried all the time. Those words will be in my mind forever. Seeing how you feel about her is too much.”
“I don’t feel that way,” I try to remind her, but she isn’t hearing that.
“Even if you’re telling me it’s not true now, there was some part of you that thought it was. I feel like you betrayed me and our marriage.”
Jesus Christ. I wrote about my feelings because I wasn’t strong enough to put them aside, and I hoped putting them down on paper would make them go away. I hurt Meghan when she did nothing wrong.
“Meghan, please, I would never cheat on you.”
She points to the journal. “You did. In your heart, you betrayed me.”
My own tears fall because I despise myself for hurting her. I look at the pain in her eyes, wanting to take it all away, willing to do anything to make this better. “What can I do? What can I do to prove that it’s you I love?”
Her eyes are no longer sad, they’re filled with determination. “If you want this marriage to work, you have to cut her out of your life. Completely. It’s me or her, you choose.”
Chapter Twelve
Teagan
Present
“I’m still not understanding. She read your journal and that was reason enough to stop talking to me? Was she mad because…?”
Derek looks uncomfortable, and I’m truly confused. He’s kept a journal since he was in high school, writing his random thoughts, making plans for things he wanted. It’s not like it held the key to his soul.
“Because I talked about you…a lot.”
“Oh,” I say, taking a step back. “So she was jealous and you just dropped me? Not an explanation, not a…‘I’m sorry, Tea, I need some time.’ Just a vague phone call that said you thought it best if we stop speaking, and if and when you thought the time was right, you’d be in touch.”
What Derek doesn’t know is that his call that night sent me into labor. I was so distraught, I couldn’t breathe. I cried with such force, knowing that my person was no longer mine and I was truly on my own. Not even his wedding had made me feel so alone and destroyed.
“No, that’s not it. I mean, she was jealous, but because I had written stuff about you…about us…and she almost left me.”
I cover my chest with my arms as a feeling of emptiness fills me. “What could you have written about us? We never dated and we were never inappropriate.”
“I know that.”
No, I don’t think he does. “There’s nothing that ever crossed any lines, Derek. We were just friends.”
He closes his eyes, releasing a heavy breath. “It wasn’t like that. You and I…we were different. We were more than just anything.”
“Clearly not. You threw me away so easily. You were the only person in this world I ever could truly count on and you abandoned me. You took what should’ve been a night that I smile over because I had a baby and it became tainted with losing you.”
His hand grips the back of his neck and he paces. “I’m sorry I did that to you. I’m sorry the whole damn thing happened, but understand that I was faced with the choice of you or my wife. My pregnant wife who I was married to for only two months. I loved you both, and choosing almost killed me.”
I was a friend. Of course he chose her.
My life was such a mess and I didn’t know if what I felt at that time wasn’t desperation for someone to love me.
Keith sure as hell didn’t. But I believed Derek did.
I thought that even when he got married, he would still have room for me in his heart.
“Well, when you chose, it did kill me. I had no one, Derek. I had a new baby, no friends, living in this stupid town that I hated, and was in the middle of the worst experience of my life and you chose to completely cut me off.”
“It wasn’t that simple.”
I’m trying to be mature, but the broken girl inside of me is screaming to lash out. “I don’t care that it wasn’t simple for you, and maybe that makes me a bitch, but there’s nothing that Meghan could’ve possibly seen in that journal. Hell, I read it how many times?” I yell. “You wrote random shit, weird notes about your plans for the future and song lyrics. So, I’m so sorry your new wife found some lame-ass excuse to finally be rid of me.”
Because that’s what it was. She hated our friendship, even if she pretended
