Em, its Finn. I just want to know you made it home safely. Pls txt me back.
How did Finn get my number? Of course… Harper would’ve given it to him. I wondered what he’d had to do to get it out of her. I knew he’d probably text me again soon if I didn’t respond, but I didn’t want to talk about what happened. I text him back, hopefully holding him off.
I’m fine. Home safely. Thanks for checking. Tired. Goodnight.
The response was immediate, and I wondered if he’d been waiting on my text.
Wait, can we talk?
Finn, I’m really tired. There’s nothing to talk about. Pls let’s forget what happened.
Fine. You can go to sleep. But this conversation isn’t over Em. We have a lot to talk about. Goodnight sweet dreams. X
As if I didn’t have enough to think about. What did ‘x’ mean? Did he do that at the end of all his texts? And what’s more, Finn wanted to discuss what had happened between us tonight. Or was it last night? It was so early in the morning, I didn’t know. Time had blurred together and I really needed to get some rest. Lying in the hotel bed for over an hour, the early morning light seeped through the heavy curtains before exhaustion finally overtook me.
It’d been two weeks since I had left Chicago—and my cheating husband—behind. Harper met me at the airport like she said she would, and she took me home with her. I didn’t want to go to my parents’ house. I knew that they loved me and I would have been more than welcome to live with them again, but nothing screamed failure to me more than getting a divorce and moving back in with Mom and Dad at twenty-eight. My mother begged me to come and stay with her, but after some convincing—and my Dad talking to her—she understood that I just needed some time and Harper was an excellent support for me. Finn continued to text me and even called a few times. I cleared the calls and sent him short texts back to try to keep him at bay. I still wasn’t ready to hash out what had happened between us, nor did I want to tell him about my failed marriage. But I didn’t know how much longer he was going to let me push him away before demanding answers, or going to Harper.
A week after I’d arrived back home, there’d been a knock on the door and Harper had answered. She called me over because there was a cop asking for me. Apparently my soon-to-be-ex-husband couldn’t wait to be rid of me and had gone ahead and filed divorce papers. I was being served. Once the shock wore off I realized I needed to do something to keep myself busy, and I needed to start putting my life back together. I needed a job and eventually a place of my own. Harper insisted that she loved having me around—I enjoyed being there too—but I didn’t want to overstay my welcome. We may have been best friends but we weren’t college kids anymore. We were older now and had our quirks. I’d been helping her out around the house by cleaning and making dinner for when she got home in the evenings.
A few days after being served, I went out and hired a lawyer that my Dad had suggested. Because West filed in Chicago, we had to abide by Illinois state law. Fortunately the lawyer that I hired had passed his bar in that state so I felt confident in his abilities. Harper thought I should take West for everything that I could. Part of me really did want to take him to the cleaners for lying to me for so many years, but I couldn’t help but feel like maybe I’d deserved what happened to me. I lost myself at some point during my marriage. I didn’t think I’d ever fully given myself to West. After Finn, I’d closed my heart, scared to feel any semblance of real love. I’d known that I would never survive another heart break like that and so I guess that made me selfish; for never fully investing in my marriage. Part of me thought that maybe West was right to leave me. I couldn’t forgive him for stringing me along for eight years, or for cheating on me. He should have let me go before he decided that he wanted