Chapter 1 - The Gift I Never Handed Him
I married my best friend. A week before our fifth weddi
ng anniversary, I let myself into our own house and heard him say into the phone, "She walked RIGHT INTO MY TRAP. My plan is about to work. I've been planning this since we were teenagers."
For most of my life, Ethan and I had looked like a sure thing.
Our parents' driveways shared a property line in Delmar, Ohio. Our mothers traded casseroles over the back fence and complained about the same broken streetlight for a decade. I can't remember meeting Ethan, because there was never a version of my childhood without him in it.
We started kindergarten the same September. We sat together on the bus. When a kid named Trevor called me "stork legs" in fourth grade, Ethan told him to shut his mouth and then sat with me at lunch every day for a month so I wouldn't have to eat alone.
We studied for finals at his mother's kitchen table. When prom came, he was the boy who knocked on my door with a corsage in a plastic box and sweat on his forehead.
Half the neighborhood told us we'd get married one day. We rolled our eyes every time. Then, somewhere in the last stretch of senior year, we stopped rolling our eyes and started holding hands, and it felt less like falling and more like finally admitting something.
After college, at a corner booth at a restaurant called Rosetti's, he got down on one knee between the bread basket and the water glasses and said, "Marry me?"
I said yes before he finished the word.
Five years in, our life looked seamless. Same starter house two miles from where we grew up. Same Sunday routine. I honestly believed I was one of the lucky ones.
So when our fifth anniversary came around, I wanted to do something big. I ordered him a watch from Halbrook's Jewelers over in Fairview, forty minutes away, and I told him I had a full day at the office. Really, I'd taken the day off to go pick it up in person.
I drove home with the box riding on the passenger seat, rehearsing how I'd hand it to him. I figured he was still at work.
His car was in the driveway.
I slid my key into the lock as quietly as I could, thinking I'd surprise him. Through the door I could hear his voice, easy and low, the way he talked to people he trusted.
Then I heard my name.
I stepped back behind the half-open door and went still.
For a second I thought: he's planning something for the anniversary. He's telling someone about a reservation, a trip, a ring upgrade.
Then he said, "Don't worry. She walked RIGHT INTO MY TRAP. My plan is about to work."
My stomach dropped straight through the floor. I pressed my shoulder blades against the wall so the hinges wouldn't show my shadow.
"I've been planning this SINCE WE WERE TEENAGERS," he said. "Everything's going to line up perfectly. You'll see."
Then he said one more thing.
May you like
And I was off the porch and down the steps and crying before I got the car door open.
I could not have imagined the size of the lie I'd been living inside.
