The Break-Up Retreat(17)

You are the main character in your own life, and your journey is your own. By allowing someone who is no longer in your life to take up space in your mind, you are sidelining yourself, as so many of us so often do.

Do not let sadness and regret force you to question yourself. By rehashing the wounds of the past, over and over, you are preventing yourself from moving on.

What if nothing could have changed? What if nothing should have changed?

Or what if—and stay with me, here—you did not do anything wrong?

We are going to discuss the healing power of anger in a few chapters. But for now, I want you to just sit with this idea for a few seconds. Finish reading this chapter, and then put the book (or Kindle) down.

Close your eyes.

Breathe in deep.

Find those thoughts that have been swirling in your mind, late at night, when you are lying in your bed and sleep evades you.

If only, if only, if only.

Focus on them.

And then erase them. And replace them.

I am not responsible for their pain.

I did not do anything wrong.

Their happiness is not, and never was, my responsibility.





Chapter 9


I wake from a half-remembered dream, my mouth very dry and my heart pounding in my chest.

At first, I think that the dream was what woke me up. Despite the cool temperature inside the cabin, I’m sweating, and the blankets are half kicked off, twisted between and around my legs.

I sit up in bed, pulling my lank, damp hair back from my forehead. The T-shirt I’m sleeping in, one I stole from a one-night stand’s apartment a couple of years ago as revenge for him having scoffed at the idea of getting me off, is sticking to my torso.

I pull the thin, worn cotton fabric away from my skin, trying to find my bearings in the unfamiliar room.

What was it, in the dream, that woke me up?

The contents of it are slipping between my fingers even as I try to grasp for it. My father was there. So was Martina Hastings, I think. Or maybe it was my mother.

But . . . no.

It wasn’t the dream.

It was something else. A light, or a sound.

I look around the cabin. The door is still firmly closed; so is the window. Everything is as I left it.

Still, the creeping feeling under my skin won’t leave me alone. Like someone is watching me.

I close my eyes, so hard I see stars, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth. It happens instinctively, and it’s only then that I remember who taught me to do so.

I was five years old and going through a bad bout of nightmares. I can’t remember why; maybe I’d heard a scary story or seen something frightening on the news. My dad always argued that no child was too young to understand what was going on in the world. Sometimes he even read me one of his stories before bed, if he was particularly proud of it, and it made me feel very grown-up, chosen, and special, like a big girl, even if the details of it left me stiff and cold with fear once he’d left and the lights were turned out.

I had woken up, several nights in a row, and gone to my parents’ room, wanting to sleep in their bed, where I’d be safe, and protected. My mom had let me crawl in with her, but my dad had gotten progressively more annoyed with me, so one morning when it was time to get up for school, he’d come into my room and sat down on the edge of the bed, smoothing my unruly morning bedhead down with one hand and smiling fondly at me.

“You’re a big girl now, princess ,” he told me. “And big girls don’t sleep in their mom and dad’s bed .”

The night before, I’d tried to get in with them, only for my dad, with his flinty, angry voice, to tell me to be quiet and go back to my own room, stopping my mom with a hand on her shoulder when she tried to get up to comfort me.

I was too ashamed, and too scared, to look at him, so I just sat there, studying the bruises on my knees, the mystery scrape on one shin I’d gotten at some point. It was almost healed over, and I wanted to pick at the scabs, but I knew it would just make him angrier if I did so.

“I’m sorry ,” I told him.

“You don’t want to bother mommy and daddy, do you ?” he asked me, and I knew it was a trap. If I said no, it meant that I knew better but had done the bad thing anyway; if I said yes, it meant I was being bad, on purpose, and that wasn’t good either.

I went for the third option.

“I didn’t mean to ,” I said. “I just got really scared.”

I still had a slight lisp, at the time, so it came out as fcared .

Dad sighed, and I tensed up.

I was an expert at managing his moods-being cute, or precocious, or funny, whichever one was needed; taking his side, against Mom, or his boss, or the world; praising him, hugging him, telling him he was the best dad in the world, even when he was upsetting me.

Especially when he was upsetting me.

“Well, princess, if you wake up again tonight, you can’t come into our room ,” Dad said. “I’m going to lock the door, so you can’t get in. It doesn’t matter if you scream and cry. Do you understand? ”

My lips were quivering, so I pushed them together. He didn’t like crying. He didn’t care for messes, in general; snot and tears were unsightly, and especially so coming from me.

“Yes ,” I whispered, thinking about the monsters in my nightmares, the dark shadows at the corners of the room, which seemed to shift and whisper horrible things, the odd sounds that would mutate and multiply until I knew in my very bones that there was something very bad in the room, hiding in the dark, waiting to pounce and do painful, twisted things to me, like the things I had seen happen to other kids on the news, the things I had heard about in my father’s articles.