William told me he didn’t expect us to recreate the past.
He didn’t ask me to leave everything behind.
He didn’t ask me to forgive him for things that weren’t his fault.
He simply wanted the chance to know Anna.
“If she wants that too,” he said.
I told him the decision belonged entirely to her.
It had to.
After everything that had happened, I wasn’t going to make that choice for her.
Neither was William.
And certainly not Rick.
Soon afterward, I filed for divorce.
It wasn’t easy.
There were years of memories to process.
There was anger.
There was grief.
There was the painful realization that the man I thought I had married knew far more about my life than I had ever known about his.
But the hardest lesson wasn’t that my past had been different from what I believed.
