reverberated around the room, followed by a hushed silence. All she heard was the pounding of her heart.
“When?” Ethan asked. Mia looked around and noticed Lizzie and Luke staring at her, probably both wondering at the timing, she was sure.
Oh, don’t worry, you two.
“After I ended our engagement.”
His honey eyes widened, his face clouding in disbelief. “You broke up with me and went straight to him?” he asked, his voice rising in shock.
She shook her head slightly. “No. A few weeks later.”
She saw it dawn on him. The reason she had gone AWOL after their only conversation they’d had after their broken engagement. Tom.
Mia defiantly looked at Ethan. There was a mixture of anger and hurt on his face. He didn’t even mask it. She knew he wanted her to see it. And that’s one of the reasons she’d never told him before.
“When did it end?” he spoke through clenched teeth.
“The week before Memorial Day weekend,” Lizzie answered for her.
“Yes,” Mia confirmed. How did she even know that?
“Why?” Ethan asked.
“Lots of reasons but mostly because I was a fucking mess. I was using him to forget you. I was drowning myself during that time—in alcohol, in sex. When I finally realized what I was doing, I broke things off with him. He meant too much to me,” she said, poking at his chest. “I felt awful for hurting him, for hurting you … I should’ve been getting married to you that weekend and the fact that I wasn’t killed me. Crushed me. That was an all-around bad week for me. Just the beginning, right?”
She let the question hang. Everyone in that room knew what she’d done that Memorial Day weekend. Some better than others. No one really brought it up anymore—it was in the past—but they all remembered. She saw it in everyone’s faces.
“Do you remember that night you came with me to see Tom when I came back to town after my time away in rehab?” Marc asked, breaking the silence. She turned to him and nodded. She hadn’t wanted to go to that dinner, hadn’t wanted to see Tom, but Marc had needed her support and she would never turn away a friend. So she went with Marc and her heart ached with all the pain of having pushed Tom aside so she could be with Ethan, but then Ethan left her and she was left with nothing.
“I always wondered what you meant when you told Tom that you’d gambled and lost. Until now,” Marc stated.
“You heard that?”
She had said that to Tom when he’d hugged her before they left the restaurant. Their very last embrace.
Marc nodded. “Why didn’t you ever tell anyone about you and Tom?” Marc asked. She shrugged her shoulders, not wanting to say it, but knowing she needed to. She took a deep breath and told her story, her confession. Not many people knew what had happened after she and Ethan broke up.
“After I broke off my engagement with Ethan, I, uh, drank a lot. I did a lot of drugs. And I had a lot of sex with Tom. Those three things kept the pain at bay. They were my twenty-four/seven prescription. Until my overdose and had Death look me straight in the eye. I thought it was my time but He wasn’t ready for me yet. It turned out He wanted to torture me some more when I got a call from Marc telling me that Tom had died.
“I couldn’t believe it. The last I saw him, he was happy and in love. He shouldn’t have died. If anyone should’ve died, it should’ve been me. And that day, when all that pain overwhelmed me, I almost took Death’s hand,” she confessed to the room, hot tears falling quickly from her eyes, remembering walking out into the cool water of the Pacific and almost letting it take her. But the love of the people in this room plus others not there made her fight. She pushed herself to the surface and took the biggest, deepest breath of her life. That was not her day to die.
With a deep exhale of breath, Mia turned to Lizzie and continued. “I remember going to Tom’s funeral and meeting you for the first time. The moment you heard my name, you knew, and instead of being hateful like I thought you would, you took me in your arms and told me he loved me. It wasn’t said in a mean way. It was said in …”