Eileen looked at me from across her desk, somewhat stunned. "Seriously? You accept that easily?"
I shrugged, giving her a wan smile. "Sure. I have nothing keeping me here, and it's only for six months."
Her look is concerned. "You doing OK?" All she knows is Kade and I broke up. I didn't tell anyone about the mortifying marriage proposal because...humiliation.
"I'm fine," I sighed. "Just...stupid. So, this opportunity is what I really need right now. Get me out of town for a while."
"A change of scenery is just what the doctor ordered," she grinned at her terrible joke, and I shook my head at her. It'd been two weeks since I'd rejected Kade's proposal, two weeks of my heart feeling shattered beyond repair, as if I'd never be able to pull in a deep breath again.
He'd been shocked, to say the least, so sure of my love for him that he hadn't contemplated anything but my acceptance. He couldn't possibly have predicted that I'd finally, finally wake up and see the obvious truth that I'd denied for eight months.
Confusion had marred his features as if he couldn't have heard me right. "I don't understand. I thought you loved me. I thought you'd be happy about this."
There it was again. Not, "But we're so in love," not, "No, Abby, NO! I refuse to accept this because you're the love of my life and I want to marry you more than I've ever wanted anything else!" – simply that I was in love with him, that he thought I would be happy.
So I gently laid it all out for him, Charlotte always being between us, always present from the time he asked me out to his marriage proposal. Then I'd swallowed my pride and told him how much it hurt me that her pictures and their wedding rings were still out in his house, and that was why I'd refused to move in with him. Since I was on a roll, I barreled on, and told him I was aware of the differences between Charlotte's proposal and mine, and that he never once told me he loved me first and it took his emotionless, nothing-special proposal to finally force me to confront the fact that I deserved someone who was in love with me, not his dead wife.
I'd walked away from him that night, destroyed, while he sat stunned. When he opened his mouth, I just shook my head.
"You know every word I've said is true and there's nothing else to say. I should never have let it go on like this." For a moment, I looked away. "I hope you let yourself move forward someday, so you can be happy again."
Then I turned and fled into the crowds when he had turned to look out at the water. I didn't want to hear him justify himself, hear him try to explain away my pain with rationalizations. Contacting an Uber as I walked, I was relieved to see that one was only two minutes away. Racing toward it, I started a mental countdown until I got to my friend's house and I could release the tears.
Lane, my best friend since high school, opened her door, took one look at my face and pulled me into her house, at which point I erupted into tears. How she maneuvered me to the couch I have no idea, but I do know we were there for a long time as I bubbled and sputtered the disastrous, pathetic proposal story out.
When I finally began to calm down, Lane took my wet face in her hands and stared me down. "I'm so sorry, Abs. But you listen to me: you did the right thing. You're the most incredible person I know and you are not any man's second choice. If he can't love you the way you deserve, you were right to turn him down. And screw him for not thinking you deserve the fairy tale."
Katie had been devastated when I told her we'd broken up. She'd called a couple of days after the proposal disaster and asked me to have her brother call her since he'd been sending her calls to voice mail and not returning her texts.
