Page 17 of Cruel Summer


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She didn’t need anyone else. She didn’t need another life.

She needed their life. This life.

“I wanted to do thiswithyou,” Will said.

“I know, but… Will, if you want to try another life, try another life. Then if you decide that you like it better than ours, we’ll talk then. About what the options are. But I can’t pretend nothing is different.”

“That isn’t what I want…”

“It kind of is. You want to do this…different thing but you want to have the same thing too, and I’m not sure that’s going to work. I can’t watch you. I can’t let you stay and be unhappy. But I can let you go for a while.” She didn’t know where that came from, the strength to say it, the strength to believe it.

“I didn’t want to let you go.”

She nodded. “I know. But I’m not sure there’s a way to have everything. Maybe there is. Maybe in a few months I’ll have changed the way I feel.” She didn’t think so. She took a sharp breath. “Just for the summer. We don’t talk. We don’t see each other. We don’t stay here. We go on vacation, in every sense of the word. You can travel, I can travel. You can…do whatever you need to do. Then we’ll meet back here and we’ll…talk about it.”

“So…neither of us lives here.”

“No.” She felt definitive on that. “If we’re doing different lives, we’re doing different lives.”

“What are the kids going to think when they find out we’re going to be gone all summer but not together?”

What are the kids going to think when they find out you want to have sex with other women?

“We’ll figure out how to talk to them about it,” she said. “We’ll make it clear we aren’t getting divorced. It’s just…”

That word lingered there.Divorce.Because if at the end they didn’t agree, she knew that was a possibility.

But it wouldn’t happen.

In the end he would decide he wanted their life.

It was just one summer. It wasn’t going to wipe out twenty-two years.

He was searching. He was curious. She could give him that, even if it hurt. Because Elysia was right, he wasn’t going off and cheating. He wasn’t betraying her. He’d flipped the script, yes, and that hurt. It was understandable that it hurt.

But maybe they could do this and come back stronger.

She wanted to believe that was true.

“Okay,” he said. “If that’s what you want.”

She didn’t want any of it, but she was determined to find some way to fix it. Some way to make it salvageable.

“I don’t want it, but… I’ve loved you for more than half of my life, and I can’t love you being unhappy, even if I wish I could magically make this happy for you. I can’t live knowing that I’m the only one who feels satisfied with that we have. So yes, it’s what I want. On a spectrum of things I really don’t want. But that is marriage, isn’t it?” She took a jagged breath. “Sometimes you have to compromise in a way that hurts.”

Will took her into his arms, and she let him. She buried her face in his neck and tried to hold back her tears.

She needed to believe that if he had this one sparkling summer, like the kind he’d never had in high school because he was with her, and the kind he’d never had after because he was working and helping raise their kids, well…they would get back to who they were.

They’d always had the perfect life.

She needed to believe they’d find their way back to it.

THREE

In high school, she could remember the promise of summer feeling like the promise of endless possibilities. The beginning of something amazing.

The beginning of this philosophical summer did not feel that way.