She met his eyes. “Sully, I gave the rings to Sotheby’s for auction. They were never my rings anyway—they were my grandmother’s. She was kind enough to loan them to you to propose to me. They weren’t meant to be there permanently. You were going to buy me my own rings, remember? Yeah, that never happened.”
He seized the papers outlining the legal separation and read through them hastily shaking his head in disbelief. He threw them down angrily and stood up, raising his voice. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, Kit! What the fuck is going on here? Where did this come from?”
She sighed and spoke evenly. “Sully, please calm down and take a seat. We can discuss this rationally. There’s no need for a yelling match. We already did that before you resumed the tour.”
He slumped into his seat and folded his arms across his chest, glaring at her. “Why are you doing this to us?”
She stared at him. “Are you really gonna ask me that question? Was I the one that can’t stop using cocaine and God knows what else? Am I the one that’s been unfaithful in our marriage and has a girlfriend? Can you answer that for me?”
He shifted his gaze down, tightening his jaw, carefully considering his response. He knew denial wouldn’t fly about the drugs and he wondered why she was spouting the same accusation about a girlfriend as Spencer had the day before. His mind raced, wondering where they were getting their information from.
She raised her eyebrows. “Sully? Hello?”
He got up from the table and started pacing, desperate for a solution. He finally stopped and stared at her. “First off, you need to your facts straight, babe. There’s no girlfriend. I told you before, all I did was kiss that groupie and she meant nothing to me. There hasn’t been anyone but you, so this whole me having a girlfriend thing can be put to rest.”
He continued, more determined. “We can fix this Kit. We’ve been through shit before. We can get past this.”
He spun around and walked over to her, taking his hands in hers. He knelt down before her and gazed deeply into her eyes, as his welled up with tears. “The only reason I kissed that groupie on that one night was because I was lonely and I couldn’t be with you and I know that’s not acceptable. It’s a massive mistake and I regret it every fucking day. If I could take it back, I would. I’ve started cutting back on the blow. I can go to rehab when the tour ends. We can start over. I’ll do whatever it takes and more. I’ll work with a shrink. I’ll work with a marriage counselor. Anything. I’ll be a better husband, I’ll do anything, Kit… anything.”
She shook her head and wriggled her hands free. “It’s not gonna work this time, Sull. It’s over. I need to move on… for me. I’m different now. Things have changed since the shooting. We haven’t really had a chance to talk about it and y’know what, we won’t. We’re on totally different pages now and I don’t think we can get back what we once had.”
He struggled to keep his tears at bay. “I love you so much, Kit. Please don’t do this. Please.”
She stared at him and felt her eyes welling up with tears. It was the same pattern all over again. She saw it clearly, yet it still hurt like hell and she felt like her heart was breaking in her chest. The pain was unbearable. He had been her life for the last nine years. She wasn’t sure what it would be like without him, but she had to try. She had learned that too much comfort and familiarity could lead to mediocrity and suffocation—exactly where she had been living for the last year.
As much as she wanted to give in to him and say yes to another chance, her iron will gave her the strength to move on without him this time. Despite the nagging prompt of her intuition screaming at her to stop what she was doing and work things out, she kept moving forward.
She did her best to compose herself. “Sully get up. Go sit back down. Go on.” She dabbed her eyes with a tissue.
He took a seat at the table. He collected the pages he had strewn across the dining room floor and put them back on the table in an orderly fashion.
He took a deep breath and then calmly started reading through them. He set them aside and faced her again. “What brought this on? I know you already found a way to take my inheritance away from me.”
She reminded herself to stay non-reactive to his digs, yet she could feel the rage start to simmer deeply within her. She smirked. “You did that one all on your own. Nana put that clause in there and you violated it. At no time did I put a gun to your head and tell you to do drugs or fuck someone else. You did that all on your own, babe.”
She leaned forward and continued seeing the look of shock on his face, not letting him get a word in. “I gotta say, Sull, I was on the fence about this whole thing. I had thought about divorce a few times in our marriage. When I got pregnant, I decided to see it through. I wanted us to have a happy family. But then the cracks really started showing. Maybe the shooting was a blessing. I almost died. And when I came to, I was as a different person. I started
