Confessions from the Quilting Circle - Maisey Yates Page 0,98
that had been her home for fourteen years, she just sat there. It was so familiar. Painfully so. And in its walls, it contained years of relative happiness. And a lot of pain and regret. His car was in the driveway, and she knew that he was home. Working in his office.
She hadn’t thought about him very much. She’d been angry with him. She’d been ashamed at her anger.
She waited. And when she heard footsteps, she didn’t know if she was relieved or not. He pulled open the door, and her stomach went tight. She hadn’t seen him since the night before that Sunday in church, and, of course, none of them had been back since.
It was weird to look at him now.
Detached somehow. Like she was looking at a stranger.
He was a handsome man, her husband. The man who would be her ex-husband soon enough.
He looked at her, and he didn’t say anything, and she searched his face. For something. Anger, longing, sadness. She couldn’t read any of it there. But, then, she always had difficulty reading him. That calming presence that he had more often than not just felt opaque to her.
“Hi, Thomas,” she said.
“What brings you by, Anna?” The question was calm, as he always was, but tight-lipped.
“Believe it or not, I just want to talk to you.”
She expected him to say that he was busy. After all, he had been busy for the whole of their marriage. Too busy to talk. Too busy for much of anything.
“Come in,” he said, backing away from the door.
She walked in slowly, enveloped by the familiarity like a white-and-cream cocoon. She’d walked through this door every day for years. Arms empty, arms full. With this man and by herself.
Home. For so many years, it had been home.
She didn’t know what she expected when she walked in, but it wasn’t this.
It was strange, but she didn’t miss this house.
Having spent months away, coming back into it, she could recognize all the things in it that weren’t hers. So many things. From the carpets to the couches, it was all clean and sterile. Very much Thomas’s taste and not hers.
“You can sit,” he said.
So she did. She crossed the room and sat down slowly on the couch, trying not to get too caught up in the absurdity of being invited to sit down in the living room that she had called her own for more than a decade.
Except...
It really did feel like someone else’s.
This oatmeal-colored carpet and sedate, cream-colored couch.
She couldn’t blame him, though, for this room that looked more like him than her.
She had chosen it.
And so she wondered if it wasn’t so much that it was his taste, but as if at one time it had been both of theirs, and something had happened along the way that had changed her irrevocably. Something that had taken her from a place where this couch, and this man, seemed like decisions that she wanted to live with for the rest of her life.
Until they didn’t.
“I assume you’re here because you’ve been to speak to a lawyer?”
“No,” she said, realizing that she did need to do that. “I didn’t. I—I genuinely wanted to talk to you.”
“About?”
“Us.”
He crossed his arms, his posture defensive. “Okay.”
“Did you care? That I had an affair. Did you care?” Well, that hadn’t been what she’d meant to ask, but suddenly it mattered.
A muscle in his jaw worked. “That’s an unfair question. Of course I cared. You betrayed me.”
“Yeah. I did. You’re right. But what did I betray, exactly? Vows? Your pride? Or your heart.”
“Why does any of it matter, Anna?”
“Because you were my choice, my life, for fourteen years. And what I do with that life, our life, is going to matter in terms of how I go on. How the two of us continue to live in this town, how you continue to have your ministry. How I continue to have a life. I could leave. But my family’s here.”
And whether or not things were complicated with her mother, that was true. Her mother was here. Her sister was here. Emma was here, for now. And even if Emma left, this would be her home base.
She was angry at her mother, but did that mean she would leave? She—she didn’t know. She didn’t know what she wanted or if they could heal their relationship. She didn’t know what her future held.
Somehow she felt like her answer was here somewhere. Wrapped up in her past.