What I did before that has no excuse either.
I wish I could tell you the marriage was fake, because then maybe you’d hate me cleanly.
It wasn’t.
That is what makes me ashamed.
I loved you, and I still became the man who hurt you.
I hope someday you live somewhere my name never enters the room before you do.
I cried harder over that letter than I had cried over the divorce decree.
Because monsters are easy.
People are not.
Adrian was capable of tenderness.
He once sat beside my father’s hospital bed for eleven hours.
He made terrible pancakes every birthday because I loved terrible pancakes.
He drove three hours in a snowstorm to retrieve a necklace I left at a hotel.
And he hit me.
He deceived me.
He participated in a plan to control my assets.
All of those facts existed in the same human being.
