“And you think you’re special? You think he’s going to choose you when he can have a woman his own age?”
Diane waited until Tasha had finished.
Then she said, “You seem to believe that being chosen is the same thing as being loved.”
Tasha stared at her.
“It isn’t,” Diane continued. “And neither of us can fix that for you.”
For a moment, the porch went silent.
Then Tasha began to cry.
She threatened to call my customers. She said she’d tell everyone in town that I’d abandoned her. She promised to post our private conversations online.
“Do whatever you think you need to do,” I told her. “But you will not come to this house again.”
She looked at me as though she’d never seen me before.
Perhaps she hadn’t.
She had spent four years watching me retreat from conflict. She had learned to mistake my fear of hurting her for a willingness to surrender.
