| "I thought I loved her when I married her, of course. Things were kind of crazy back then, I was prone to making decisions based more on the feeling in the moment than considering the reality of situations." |
| She waited for me to continue.
"We had a baby, a little girl, we named her (
)," I said. "She died."
She made a little gasping sound, and reached to me over the little table that was between us. "I’m sorry," she said.
|
| "For a long time, I blamed
her for that. It affected everything that I did, and most significantly, it tore our relationship apart. What little relationship we actually had, as I discovered through the course of the divorce."
"What do you mean?"
|
Kindling |
| "When the baby died, there was an investigation. She was at the center of it..." I paused. Changing approaches, I continued. "I just thought I knew her, and it turns out that all I knew was the character that she was acting out for me, that she was living a lie whenever I was around her and that I never really knew her at all. She was who I wanted her to be, or who she thought I wanted her to be, but she had this dark side that I never really saw completely, not until later on.
"She was a character that you wanted her to be?" she asked, understandably wanting me to clear it up for her.
|