At least he’d admitted what I’d always known. I was his second-place wife. But now that she was back, I wasn’t even that. I didn’t know what I was. He had always assumed we were the same, and even though I’d tried to set him straight over the years, he had refused to hear it. But that was the thing. Scott was my first-place husband. I’d fallen for Scott in a way I’d never fallen for James, but Scott loved me because of our shared pain. In the beginning of our relationship, I had understood that was why he loved me, not because he’d stopped loving Kate, but part of me had hoped that he would grow to love me the same way he’d once loved her after enough time had passed. Those dreams had died when the police had knocked at our door.

He turned around. “Come on, Meredith. You know I didn’t mean that. You of all people have to know how confusing and weird all of this is.” But he wouldn’t look me directly in the eyes while he talked. “This is super complicated. You’d feel the same way if things were reversed. Can you just please admit that?”

But I couldn’t. It wouldn’t be the same. Not even close.

“I went to meet with a divorce lawyer two weeks before James’s cancer diagnosis,” I blurted out.

His eyes widened. “What?”

I nodded, swallowing hard, my mouth dry. “I did.”

The weight of my secret forced him to sit. He sank into his office chair. “Why would you do that?”

“I was going to divorce him.” It felt good to finally say it. It was never supposed to be a secret.

“What happened?” he asked.

“We got married young because I was pregnant, and it was the right thing to do. We had Caleb and fell in love with being parents. We didn’t waste any time getting pregnant again with Thad. And, honestly, we were a good team. Our lives revolved around them, but then they grew up and didn’t need us as much. You know how it is. Anyway, we were strangers and ones who didn’t really even like each other. And then he got cancer. I couldn’t divorce a man with brain cancer. Nobody is that evil.”

“So everything was a lie?” I could see his head swimming with questions.

“The work I did in group wasn’t a lie. I loved him once. More than anything. I’d been grieving his ghost for years.” I’d spent most of Caleb’s freshman year of high school crying in secret, because I knew our marriage was dead and had no idea what to do about it. “And I tried to tell you. I did, but you wouldn’t listen to me.”