“Good!” Ava burst out. “But why?”
“He said that he’s about to lose his job. He’s pretty sure that he’s going to get fired for missing too many days and showing up late, and he also said that his parents are furious with him.”
“Why? What else did he do?” She bounced eagerly.
“He racked up a bunch of debt and he doesn’t have any savings anymore,” I said. “He can’t drive because his license is suspended. He’s several months behind on rent and he’ll probably get evicted from his new place. And finally, after all this time, they’re mad. After everything that he’s done in his life, after the other car accidents and the times he got caught cheating, or when he almost got kicked off his lacrosse team for hazing. Then he did it again in college at his frat and almost got kicked out of there, too.”
“Wow,” she marveled. “He sucks more than I thought.”
“It seems like his parents might have realized that. They spent years ignoring his behavior and excusing everything, but now they’re calling him on it,” I said. “I guess they’re drawing the line. He said that they told him that he needs a woman like me in his life.”
“He fell apart without you,” she said with satisfaction, “and he sees the error of his ways.”
“Maybe. Maybe he’s just looking for me to clean up this huge mess and get him back on track.”
“But you’re not going to do that,” she said pointedly. “You’d never, ever get back together with him.”
“There’s even more,” I said. “There’s the whole thing with Vivienne.”
“What?” Ava leaned forward, almost knocking her beer onto the ground. “Why? What did she do?”
“She was beautiful and perfect, the ideal woman. She was the role model for everyone, especially for me. That was what he always told me.”
“I hate this guy.”
“Now it makes so much sense that I can’t believe I didn’t see it.” I was still talking to Ava, kind of, but mostly I was hearing Grant speak as I sat on the top step of my building and looked down at him. “He admitted that he’s been in love with her since college. Back then, he and Lance both liked her, but Lance had money and a nice car, so he got the girl. Grant had to watch asthey paired off but he never lost those feelings. All this time, he wanted Vivi.”
Her eyes were huge. “Oh…”
“For five years, for our entire relationship, he was in love with her. He compared me to her all the time, in every way, and I always came up short. I worked at it, fixing how I dressed and how I talked, how I did everything,” I said. “But it would never have been enough, no matter what I did. He said that it always made him angry.”
“Because you were a different woman? He blamed you for that?”
I nodded. “But now he says that he changed his mind.”
“Well, it’s too little, too late. Right?” Ava prompted.
“He said that the blinders are off,” I went on. “He had thought that Lance was a liar and an idiot when he complained about Vivi. Lance used to say that she spent too much money, that she couldn’t keep plans straight, that he couldn’t trust her to take care of things. Like, once she was supposed to get airline tickets because his parents were already using their private plane, and by mistake she booked them into London, Ontario instead of London, England. I remember Grant laughing but Lance was mad. He asked who made the vacation plans in our relationship, and of course I did. We didn’t go anywhere, though, unless it was low-cost or free. I was trying to save money.”
“So now your ex sees that the woman he idealized for all this time is human, and also never paid attention to geography since she doesn’t know the difference between Canada and the United Kingdom. He wants you back but you told him that it’s too late,”Ava summarized, but then her eyes narrowed. “Right? You said it was too late, right?”
“I told him that we were doomed from the moment we met, since he was in love with someone else and I…I don’t know why I spent five years with him,” I said, but then hesitated. “No, I do know. I’ve been so mad about it and the app therapist told me that I needed to work on forgiveness, but she quit before she told me who I needed to forgive. It’s not him. He doesn’t need that, but I do. I have to let go of being so upset with myself for the mistakes I made. My thoughts kept running in circles around the idea of five years, that I’d wasted them. I was angry that I’d gone down that road in the first place because I never should have been with him at all. When he hit me with that cup of beer the night we met, I told him that he was an asshole and I should have walked away.”
“He hit you with a beer?” She sounded shocked. “Why was that ok?”
“It wasn’t!” I answered. “I knew that back then, but I made myself ignore it. I told myself that this was the way men acted, that if I wanted to have bonds with anyone, I had to be willing to excuse some flaws.”
“Little flaws, sure,” Ava said slowly. “I want to kill Jeff when he squeezes every tube in the middle. Glue. Lotion. We have separate toothpaste now, so that our bathroom can be a more peaceful place. That’s a flaw, but if he thew a beer at me and then told me that I needed to imitate another woman? No. No way.”
“I’ve never been good at making people like me but Grant seemed to, especially at first,” I said. “I didn’t know that I was second-best—no, I did know, but I didn’t understand why. I thought if I could make myself good enough and also make him happy and stable enough, then we’d be ok. I saw how much he admired Vivi but I didn’t know that he loved her, not until today. I guess I had blinders on, too.”
“Why would you have expected that your boyfriend would act that way?” she consoled.
“I felt a little sorry for him when he talked about his problems.”
“Don’t,” she said succinctly.
“He’s a mess, mostly about Vivienne. I had no idea that he had the ability to love someone so much,” I said. “I know that he never loved me like that.” All the work I’d done never would have made any difference in the end, not when his heart was leading him to her.
