Challen and Addy

Chapter 25 (Addy): Why?

Copyright © 2025 by GroveltoHEA

I rolled back and forth in my chair, hating that I'd become so used to it that it felt like a part of me now. But not for long. Every day I was getting stronger, able to do more, and feeling more confident that I'd get back to me.

With that confidence, with that assurance that I'd conquer this, I'd also gained enough confidence to confront Challen. It'd taken being in an accident and waking up from a coma to find the guts to tell my beloved husband no more. In some miraculous, medical twist of fate, I'd broken my body but found my spine. Prior to the accident, I'd complained, I'd begged, I'd raged, but I had never put my foot down and told Challen that if he didn't stop with Jennifer, we were done.

Mostly because I'd been afraid he would choose her if I'd given him an ultimatum, and at that point, it'd mattered to me more than I wanted to admit. My marriage, as bad as it was, had mattered to me and I'd wanted to save it because I loved Challen. We'd been so good together until Jennifer.

Or had we? Now he had me questioning that.

It'd taken me aback to hear that he dated our problems from his father's death. I'd been thinking about it after he mentioned it and realized he'd been right. The cracks in our marriage had begun forming long before Jennifer, and I felt stupid that I hadn't seen the issues until Jennifer had been there to magnify them, to bring them fully into the light. 

The loss of Challen's father was our first experience with the grief that follows a terrible loss, and it had shaken all of us, changed us in many different ways, both small and profound. Death was an earthquake whose aftershocks were the ones that really got you. At first, I'd thought Challen's fitness obsession would be a temporary reaction to losing his father at such a young age, but instead of getting better, it kept getting worse as the months wore on. Sometimes I'd gone with him on his hikes or bike rides, and I'd even tried a couple of runs, but we always ended up arguing. The last time had been the absolute worst.

"That's it. I'm done," I snapped at him half an hour into our bike ride. I'd insisted we take the beginner-level trail, and I was already huffing and sweating. Challen hadn't even broken a sweat or elevated his heart rate, and I was about to die. "I'm not cut out for this. It never gets any easier."

"If you want to get better at it, you have to go more than once every month or two, Addy," he told me, and I could hear the impatience in his voice. He'd been excited when we'd started out this morning, happy we'd have blue skies and cooler temperatures for our ride. And now, I was done with the ride. I'd already had him stop three times, and I was just done pretending this was any fun or anything I wanted to do. I wasn't going to put myself through this anymore.

I knew what would happen next. He was going to take me home and then come back here and bike the hardest route available.

That was the last time I ever agreed to go biking, hiking or running with him.

Then Jennifer had come along to keep him company on his fitness obsession, and I'd latched onto her as the sole reason for our marital issues. But since Challen had said they'd started long before Jennifer, my head had been filled with echoes of our old fights. As much as I hated to admit it, he was right. Jennifer was a huge, nasty problem, but our marriage breakdown had begun before her. She'd just made it more obvious and it was easy to pin it all on her.

On my list of many things to discuss, I needed to understand more about his reaction to his father's death, but the list was long and I had no clue where to begin.

Challen knocked on my door in just under the ten minutes he'd promised he'd be here, and I looked at this man who was my husband but also a stranger as he walked in after I'd told him to. He had a bag in his hand that he set on the end of my bed, and he also had a cardboard drink carrier filled with four small iced teas that he put on the table.