Since I confronted Cruz, we hadn’t spoken. He had, of course, tried to explain himself, but I just wasn’t ready to hear it yet. He had thrown himself into spending every spare moment with the kids, little Druzella looked exactly like him and sometimes it was hard for me to look at her for too long without bursting into tears.
Anastasia, on the other hand, could have been my clone. The twins looked nothing alike, but resembled their parents so very much. The girls got so much attention from Cruz they barely needed any caring for from me. Of course, I had to give them attention of my own so they would know who their mother was and how much I loved them. Without me, Cruz put all his love into the other girls in his life. I couldn’t help but think how much time he was putting into his doctor friend.
Cruz had been spending a ton of extra time at the hospital and had been making a ton of extra money with that. It worried me though, that maybe I had been right about this girl, whoever she was. Maybe my husband really was having an affair.
I had thrown myself into learning new recipes for my new job at De-La-Bec, a local French restaurant. I really wanted to excel at my new job, who knows I could be supporting myself soon enough if things didn’t get better with Cruz.
Gus also needed lots of attention, but wasn’t really getting it so besides practicing my cooking I would spend my time with my son. I never really told him what was wrong, because I didn’t want to involve him in mine and his father’s problems. I did, however tell him I was very frustrated with his father and just needed some time apart from him. Gus seemed to really understand and always tried to comfort me no matter how upset I became.
Gus also spent his time playing with our bird, Cocktail. He told me once he was teaching her to talk, but I didn’t really think that was possible. He would spend hours repeating words to her, but I don’t think she ever really said any of them back to him. I’m sure he could tell Cruz and I didn’t really have a wonderful marriage right now and I wondered how that was affecting him, if it was at all. I didn’t want to ask him, of course, but I also didn’t want to hurt my little boy.
With all the extra money Cruz had been making he surprised me and built me this lavish master bathroom off of our bedroom. The bathroom also connected to Gus’ room so he could make use of it too. I couldn’t hide from my husband forever and this most recent attempt to get me to talk to him had seemed to have worked. It was now or never and deep down I knew I didn’t really want a divorce from a man who had made me so happy in the past and had given me three wonderful children.
I made my way down to the chess table I had gifted Cruz when we were first married, knowing that’s probably where I would find him.
“Hi.” I said as I came down the stairs toward him.
“Hi.” He said back, keeping his eyes lowered to the table. He seemed like he was almost scared of me.
“Mind if I join you?” I asked, standing above the table. He nodded and I sat in the chair across from him, quickly resetting the board. “I think maybe, we should talk.” I offered, bringing my eyes up to look at his floppy mess of dark hair.
“Estella, you know I haven’t done anything this whole time, don’t you?” He sighed, pushing his large framed geek glasses up on his nose.
“How can I believe that, after what everyone has been saying?” I asked moving on of my pieces on the board.
“Because you trust me.” He said simply.
“Cruz, I do, I did. It’s just, you’re at that hospital every day you’re around other women all the time how can you not look at them? How could something really not happen?”
“Because I love you, always have, always will. No one compares to you Estella. Look, the only thing someone might have heard about was Imogen Pelly.” He took a deep breath, suddenly looking old and worn out. I knew better than to interrupt him and simply sat and waited for him to continue.
“Before I found you again I had this thing with Imogen, she was much older than me and since my mom didn’t pay any attention to her testosterone filled teenager I went to her house a lot. She and I, well we did things we definitely shouldn’t have. I never would go all the way with her though and she would get very angry at me for it. Once she tried to force me, but I threw her off me and ran all the way home. I didn’t speak to her after that, and I found you anyway. When we were first married I got a call from her, she claimed she had my baby. I told her, of course, it wasn’t true and couldn’t even be possible since that had never happened between us. She threatened that if I didn’t divorce you and marry her she would tell the whole town I was sleeping with her and cheating on you. I told her that no one would ever believe her and she was better off finding someone she could be happy with. We haven’t spoken since then, but I bet whoever told you that rumor was either Imogen or one of her friends.” I couldn’t believe all he had just told me, I knew he had a bad child hood, but I had no idea it was like this.
“Oh Cruz, I’m so sorry. She was an older women, maybe in her sixties. I’m sorry I wasted so much time being angry, I should have just heard you out. You’ve been a great husband to me, I can’t believe that happened to you.” I broke down in tears, realizing I wasn’t the only one with a terrible past.
We both jumped up from the table and embraced, making up for all the time we had let come between us. I sure had missed my husband.
DisneyDreams 