Confessions from the Quilting Circle - Maisey Yates Page 0,61
Maybe she needed a little romance. Not love, but romance.
“You should go out with him if you want to. There’s not a time. I mean, maybe you shouldn’t go getting married again yet...”
“I don’t want to get married. I don’t even want to fall in love. I don’t want to have feelings. I’d like to scoop them out of my chest with a spoon. But... I don’t know, going on a dinner date with someone who thinks I’m pretty doesn’t sound terrible. Maybe in another month.”
“Maybe. That makes sense. You told me... You told me that was part of your marriage that you didn’t have anymore. It makes sense you would be ready for that first.”
“Sex? Oh, I am not there yet.” She paused. “Well, maybe I’m a little bit getting there.”
“Do you want to hear a secret?” Anna asked.
“In the spirit of sharing, I suppose so.”
“Michael was the best sex I’ve ever had. And sometimes, when I regret that everything fell apart around me... I just think of that. Because I didn’t know it could be that good. Fourteen years with the same man, and I didn’t know it could be that good.”
“And that is something else Thomas has to answer for. Because I’ve had some good sex, Anna.”
“Well, I hadn’t. Not like that.” Her mouth twitched. “I guess... I guess that’s not supposed to be very important. I mean...”
“But it is,” Rachel said. “And I say that as someone who couldn’t have it in their marriage for quite a while. We did have it. Real intimacy. And we took pleasure in each other. And I loved being with him. It mattered because it was something only we shared, and something only we wanted to share with each other. It’s so much harder when you don’t have that. If you never did. We spent so many years taking it for granted, and then clinging to it while it lasted. And then like seasons of life, we let it go, and we did it together. We held the memory. Because it wasn’t my life and his. It was ours.”
Anna couldn’t grasp the concept. Not in a tangible way. “We were just never like that. I think we wanted to be. I think in the beginning...even he wanted to be. The thing is, it just didn’t ever come together. I don’t know if it was getting married young and growing in different directions or...what.”
“You don’t have to know,” she said. “The marriage isn’t your burden anymore. Sure, you have all this divorce stuff. But...the marriage is gone. You could sift through the wreckage, but it won’t put it back together now. You don’t have to know what caused it.”
She blinked, feeling like she had just been staring at a web of knots and tangles that she’d been trying to sort out for so long she was strained with the effort of it. And suddenly, she realized she could put it down.
That was the gift, she supposed. If you decided to throw something away and start over...you didn’t have anything left to untangle.
The only knots left to go through were inside of herself.
Because their lives were separate, and she could begin again from there.
Those knots, though—those she couldn’t leave alone. Because they came with her.
“Thank you,” Anna said.
“For what?”
“For trying to understand me, even though it’s hard.”
“It’s really not all that hard,” she said. “The further I get into examining everything in my life, the more I feel like we’re a lot more alike than I realized.”
“Well, it means everything to me.”
“To me, too,” Rachel said.
They turned and walked back up the path, heading toward the Captain’s House. Their mom would be wondering where they’d gotten to, and that made Anna smile slightly.
That was the gift of being home.
There were definitely downsides to it as well, but the gift was that sense that any moment she could step backward in time. Find a simpler version of herself and maybe start from there, instead of contending with this complicated adult version of herself that she had never aspired to be.
Wendy didn’t ask where they’d been, but as they worked on dessert, Anna turned to her mother.
“What happens if you don’t end up with the perfect life you dreamed of?”
Wendy blinked. “You either change your life, or find a new version of perfect.”
“Is that what you did?”
Her mom faltered. “Yes. I found a new version of perfect. And I never looked back. This place, you girls and all the years since became my dream.