He laughed. “At least I know that about myself, and I’m not pretending to be something I’m not. Jeremy pretends he’s a grown-up, but he’s just a child looking for someone to make all of his problems go away, which is why he’s so attached to you. You’re his fixer. It’s what you do.”

I had a flashback of Soph telling me that exact thing that night she called me in Boston to offer me the job. I stared at Greg and took in his long dark hair, his blunt features, the scar that split one of his eyebrows. He was handsome in a knuckle dragger way. He was the guy you wanted at your back in a bar fight or when fleeing the law. He had never needed me the way Jeremy did.

“Why didn’t it work out between us?” I asked.

His eyebrows rose.

“No, I am not looking to start anything here, I’m just curious,” I explained.

“It didn’t work out between us because I wanted a partner, not a mommy,” he said.

The words were harsh and I tried not to cringe. I failed. It was painfully close to what Nick had said to me, and I didn’t like hearing it any better this time.

“Listen, Annabelle, I love you. I always have and I always will, but you were never comfortable with that,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I protested. “I was very comfortable with being loved. I was crazy about you.”

“You tried to manage me,” he said.

“No, I didn’t,” I argued. I was coming in hot. There was no way he was going to blame his infidelity on me.

“Annabelle, as soon as we got married, you became a completely different person,” he said. “You started pestering me not to stay out too late, not to drink too much, you even started packing my lunch when I went into the studio to record.”

“I was worried about you and I thought you might get hungry,” I said. Oh god, Nick had been so right. I was only steps away from cute-shaped sandwiches.

“Annabelle, I am a fully realized adult male who can make himself a sandwich or not if I want one,” he said.

“I was just trying to show you how much I loved you,” I muttered.

“Were you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Once we got married, you stopped painting and all of that creative energy that made you such a free spirit started to fade. You became this Stepford wife who was determined to take care of me whether I liked it or not.”

“Why was it so wrong that I wanted to take care of you?” I asked. I was genuinely mystified. If you cared about someone, shouldn’t you want to help them in any way you could?