Why didn’t I tell them? Why did I marry the boy I shouldn’t have been with in the first place? And I want to say I don’t know the answer to either, but I do.
Because I was scared.
To the first question, I was scared about what they’d say. I was scared to have the conversation I’m going to have with them right now anyways.
But it’s the answer to the second question, too. I was scared - scared of not taking that leap with the one who meant the world to me. I was scared of what it meant to not be with the one who held my heart.
“Why didn’t you tell us honey?” Mom says quietly. She worries her hands in her lap, her brow wrinkling before she looks back up at me.
“You’ve been married for eight years and we didn’t know?”
“I was scared.” I swallow. “I was scared of what you’d say.”
“Well you damn well should have been!” My dad erupts.
Stella reaches over from her end of the couch and puts a hand on his arm.
Rowan stops his pacing and glowers at me. “You married Silas.” He growls.
I nod.
“I’m going to fucking murder him.”
Stella sighs loudly and glares at him. “Okay, everyone needs to calm down. And stop pacing while you’re at it.” She shoots a look at Rowan. “Sit.”
Dad is still shaking his head, refusing to meet my eyes.
“I just don’t understand, Ivy,” he mutters, still stroking his beard as if giving a Sunday sermon.
“Dating the boy was one thing, but marriage?” He finally looks up at me. “Marriage is a serious thing, Ivy. I thought you understood that.”
“I do.”
But we were young, we were crazy, and it seemed like the only way to hold onto each other.
I’m looking at my wringing hands in my lap, chewing on my lip as my dad sighs heavily again.
“Ivy, I just do not understand why you’d tie yourself to a boy like Silas Ha-”
“Because I love him!”
The words burst from my lips like water from a broken damn. The words I’ve kept bottled up and held back, even from myself.
I love him.
Not past-tense, and not timidly.
Fully, fiercely, and very much in the now.
“I love him.”
My family is silent, their eyes all fixed on me.
My mother clears her throat. “You mean back then, right? When you were both too young to know what that means?”
I can feel my heart pounding in my chest, my breath coming in heavy gulps as I face the music I should have faced eight years ago. It’s the music I should have faced before I let him walk out of my life.
“No, that’s not what I mean.”
My dad’s eyes flash as he looks at me, his brow knitting. “What was that?”
“I said that’s not what I meant. Not past tense, not ‘back when I was young’.”
I look up, looking right into my dad’s eyes.
“Dad, I love him. I loved him back then, and I love him now, and that’s why we got married. It’s why we’ve been married for eight stupid years.”
My dad glowers at me as he turns away. “You knew how I felt about you seeing him, Ivy. We gave that boy everything, but there’s no changing some people from doing what they were always going to do, or from becoming who they were always going to become.”
“That’s not true,” I say through gritted teeth.
“I beg to disagree!” Dad says heatedly, his face going red.
Rowan is still glaring at me, his face tight, but I look at him pleadingly. He looks away, running his hand across his stubbled chin before dropping it to the knee of his bad leg and rubbing it.
The leg from that night.
Finally, he looks up at our dad.
“Dad, you know it was me who went that night,” he says gruffly. “As much as you want to blame Silas instead of me for it.”
Dad’s eyes narrow as he shakes his head at my brother. “Oh I blame you both for that night, but I also know you were only there because of him.”
“No, Dad.” He shakes his head. “I went. My actions. Silas was there to stop me, and you know that.”
“Ivy,” Dad exhales slowly, bringing a hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose before looking up at me.
“You know I thought of Silas as another son of mine. And I want to believe he’s everything you want him to be.”
He takes a deep breath, reaching for our mother’s hand before looking up at me. “But if he’s such a changed man, where is he now?”