Confessions from the Quilting Circle - Maisey Yates Page 0,103

to live hating you. I want it gone. I don’t even want the seeds of it there. I want to dig it out completely.”

“I never knew how to do that for me,” Wendy said, her heart squeezing tight, because what Anna was saying was so beautiful and compelling, and she wanted it so very much. “Because I was afraid that if I did I would just...stay the same. That I wouldn’t change. That I might do something else that later I could see was wrong or repellent. I felt so much guilt for what I did.

“But I look at you, Anna, and I see that you deserve a new life. One where you’re happy. And you certainly don’t deserve to walk around carrying the weight of your mistakes for the rest of your life. And I don’t even mean the affair. I mean your marriage. You and Thomas weren’t suited to each other. And you know what? The one thing that I regret isn’t the affair that I had that resulted in you and Rachel—I got to the place where I can never regret that, because it gave me the two of you. What I regret is the pain that I caused you. I didn’t mean to set up a fake, unrealistic standard for you. And I didn’t mean to push you into marriage. But I was afraid. I was afraid of the pain that I knew you could feel in this world. I’m afraid I pushed you into it, anyway.”

Anna shook her head. “I loved Thomas. You could never have told me that he was wrong for me. You could never have told me that I shouldn’t be with him. Not ever. Because I was sure that I loved him, and that I wanted to be with him. And maybe, knowing what you thought about marriage made it all the easier for me to jump into that kind of commitment... But who knows? I could have found whatever justification I wanted. I was eighteen and thought that I knew the world, and you know how that is.”

“Most definitely.”

“You don’t deserve to be kept in your past,” Anna said. “Least of all by me. I think part of moving forward is learning to take my own fault and just deal with it. To accept that what I did was wrong, the method that I went about getting out of my marriage was wrong, and let myself move on, anyway. So what. We made a mistake. We’re not perfect.”

Wendy looked at Anna, and she felt...proud. Because it had taken her more than thirty years to even begin to move on from who she’d been and what she’d done.

And if she’d known that dragging her secret out into the light would be the beginning of all that ugliness inside her dying, she would have done it ages ago.

“I didn’t think...” Wendy shook her head. “I didn’t think that it was possible. That exposing all this rot was what would get rid of it. I’m just glad that you figured all this out earlier than I did. That you don’t have to sit in a mistake forever.”

Last night with John had been a revelation. Not just because it had been wonderful, pleasurable and deeply gratifying to be with a man again in that way, but because she’d allowed herself to have pleasure, and she hadn’t been instantly punished. Because she’d let herself feel something wonderful, and she hadn’t dissolved.

Because without so many words, that had been part of forgiving herself. And maybe it was a strange thing, that the forgiveness had come when so many other people were angry at her.

But it was like she had taken out her own personal demon into the open and discovered it was old, decrepit and losing its teeth.

In the darkness, hidden away, it had been free to be the snarling, fanged monster that haunted her dreams and made her feel a deep sense of unease with who she was and everything she had in her life.

And seeing Anna like this... It was like all the pieces fit together. Because, of course, she didn’t think that Anna should exist in that darkness. Of course, she didn’t think she should be punished. Not for the decision she’d made at eighteen to marry Thomas, when she hadn’t had the first idea of what she wanted from her life, and who she wanted to be, but also for what she’d done when she’d existed in a state of such despair