Chapter 2: The Man I Called
The man I called was my husband, David.
Not because I needed a man to fight my battle — I want to be clear about that. I called David because I wanted Jason to see, standing right in front of him, the whole shape of the life he’d told me I’d never have. And because the lesson I wanted to teach Jason wasn’t going to come from a scene. It was going to come from the truth.
Let me back up, because the ten minutes I asked for weren’t about freshening up. They were about deciding what kind of person I was going to be.
I could have humiliated Jason. It would have been easy, and God, part of me wanted to. I had twenty years of his cruelty stored up — the « hit the gym, » the « I don’t want anyone seeing us together, » the « looked at her and looked at yourself » on the day I was still grieving my dead parents. He’d taken a sixteen-year-old girl who’d just lost everything and taught her she was disgusting, and then he’d cheated on her for being disgusting, and now, two decades later, he was standing in front of that same girl — thin now, in a beautiful dress — flirting, mocking his wife, offering to cheat on Katherine the way he’d once cheated with her.
