Her Secret Santa - Miley Maine Page 0,66

grains of sand. Because that’s going to happen in a moment, isn’t it? It always does. “Taylor, don’t leave me…”

But of course, he does. He begins to fade away, leaving me with nothing but the incredible memory of him buried deep inside of me…

“Taylor?” I call out while patting my side of the bed next to me. “Oh my God, Taylor, last night was absolutely incredible.” I let out a little giggle. “You really are the best I’ve ever had.”

I expect him to make a joke about how he’s the only man I’ve ever had, but that never comes. Instead I’m met with a resounding painful silence, one that aches my brain.

Of course, it was a dream. I come out of my fog, push myself up into a sitting position and rub my head. I’m alone. All alone, and Taylor is gone. He has been gone for the last year, ever since I kicked him out and ended our marriage. Even if it is still weird that this bed is half empty, it’s for the best. I can’t have him around any longer.

“Don’t forget why you sent him away,” I whisper to myself. “He’s a liar, and a bad person. Just because he was good in bed doesn’t make it right to have him here.”

I keep telling myself that, but the pep talk isn’t working anymore. I hate myself for it, but I miss Taylor, I still miss the life we shared together as a family. I wouldn’t admit it out loud because I would get my ass kicked, particularly by my best friend, Maggie, but I can’t help how I feel. When I’m dreaming, all of that flies to the surface.

I force myself out of bed and head into the bathroom where I can stare at myself in the mirror. I don’t want to be yelled at by my friends, but I can do it to myself. And to get the real effect out of it, I have to look at myself while I scold.

“Rebecca, you didn’t even know Taylor. You might have been with him for all of your adult life, married for five years, and have a five year old daughter together, but you didn’t know him. He lied to you about being in jail, about being involved with money laundering, and that is messed up.”

I groan and grab on to the side of the sink, to keep myself standing up right as my knees turn to jelly. Every time I think about the life I lived in; it makes me fall apart. How can someone know so little about the man they were married to? It doesn’t seem right.

I still remember the day I found out about the man I thought I knew. Well, it wasn’t exactly me that found out, it was Maggie. She was at the local library, studying for her college classes, and looking up old newspaper articles for something to base her latest project on, when she came across article about a guy just out of high school involved in a money laundering scandal to help get his business off the ground. Taylor Braxton, my husband. Since he’s a few years older than me, I was too young to notice when he went to prison, so I didn’t know anything about it. I always thought that his business was built legally, and that he had an astute mind. How wrong I was. I don’t know if I would have believed it, had I not seen the article as evidence for myself.

My world shattered, the universe that I had built my life upon, vanished. Loving and living with a liar, I knew that nothing could ever be the same again.

Taylor tried to explain it away without denying anything, not that he could have, since I had evidence, there was no excuse for it. All the money we had as a family was from illegal activity, our marriage was built on a bed of lies, and that meant that everything about who we were could be fake too. He tried to tell me that it was all a mistake, but if it was a mistake, why didn’t he just come to me and tell me? He wouldn’t have kept it from me if it was a misunderstanding. That’s why I had to kick him out, and end our marriage.

“You did the right thing,” I remind myself. “These residual feelings are meaningless. I just need to get over him.”

But it isn’t as easy as that, is it? Otherwise I would have gotten over him already, I mean Christ, it’s been a year. Yet here I am, dreaming about him, imagining him in the bed next to me, still wishing that he was here. Sometimes, in the depths of my mind, I kind of wish that I could go back to the time when I didn’t know about everything because things were so much simpler then. Ignorance truly is bliss.

“Be strong,” I whisper to myself. “Jenny needs you to be strong.”

Speaking of her, my daughter skips into the bedroom, happy as a clam, and she wraps her arms around me. This girl is my ray of sunshine in all the sadness, the one incredible thing to come out of my marriage. She is the reason why I wouldn’t change meeting Taylor, even if it really hurts now.

“Morning, Mommy,” she declares with a bright smile. “I Love you.”

“Oh, I love you too, baby girl.” I pull her tighter to me. “I hope you slept well. Shall we go get some breakfast? Something warm, since it’s so cold.”

She runs in to the living room, and I follow close behind, trying my hardest not to look at the family photos still hanging on the wall as I pass them. I thought it was a good thing for me to get the house in the divorce, to keep Jenny’s life as normal as possible. But being surrounded by all the memories that me and Taylor once shared, makes it damn near impossible for me to move on.

Hope you loved the excerpt of The Perfect Reunion. You can read the full story here!

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