We’d had a fight the night before. She said she was tired, broken. She needed to leave, to get away from me, to save her sanity. After three years of marriage she decided to leave on a trip to find herself.

I hoped I could change her mind. I was scared, so scared, of losing her. I’d fought so long and so hard to keep her by my side, finally thinking that all the obstacles that had been in our way were melting, proven to be useless. I couldn’t let her walk away from me before I gave saving us my best effort.

I’d stopped to get her peach roses. She always claimed to dislike the roses that were colored the traditional red, had hated the uniformity they represented, but grudgingly admitted she held a certain fondness for the wild beauty of the flower itself. Thinking to please her, one night I had procured peach roses. She loved them, and from then on it was normal to request peach roses from the florist.

On the way home I observed the roses, the delicate beauty and the heady perfume they gave off. They were just buds, tightly knit but just beginning to unfurl their petals. I recall thinking that they reminded me of her when I first saw her, really saw her. She had been wound so tight, so isolated from the world, not letting anyone get close to her, but beginning to reach out to the world surrounding her. She was still closed off but she was trying, trying so hard to connect to someone, to love someone.

I thought I had given her that love. Then she made me confront the fact that maybe what I gave her just wasn’t enough. Not enough to keep her happy, not enough to keep her with me.

Nowhere along the line had I even stopped to consider that maybe she had fallen out of love with me, or in love with someone else.

I remember walking into the kitchen, setting down my jacket as I strolled through to the living room. I called out to her, hoping that maybe she wasn’t so angry and upset. What I found was the sight of my wife and my best friend in each others’ arms.

“Dawson!” They had jumped apart guiltily, each giving me the woeful look of someone who has been caught doing something they know will tear the bonds they had tried so carefully to preserve. Joey’s face had been stricken while Pacey’s was nervous.

I couldn’t do anything more than stare at them, my mouth hanging open slightly. For the longest time, my vocal chords failed me. When I finally retained their use, the only thing I could manage to utter was, “How long has this been going on?”

Joey looked to Pacey, the pain and fear in her eyes mirroring his own. “A year,” she said quietly. I glared, stupefied, at the two people I loved the most, the two people who had betrayed me the worst. She took a breath and looked at me sadly, though determinedly. “I want a divorce, Dawson. It’s not working with us. It hasn’t for a long time.”

“Because you couldn’t be faithful enough to me to try and work out whatever problems we had,” I seethed. I shook my head in disbelief. “Get out. Just get the hell out of my life. I’ll give you the divorce. I’ll give you whatever you want. But I never want to see you, either of you, again in my life.”

The tears were streaming down Joey’s face. Pacey had yet to say a word. They opened their mouths simultaneously and I shook my head angrily, daring them to say anything and infuriate me even more. I turned around and walked out, but the image of Joey making love to my best friend was one I would never be able to erase from my mind.

Two days later, her things were gone. The divorce papers came days later, and less than a week after the fight, I was suddenly single once more.

It was a Thursday.

It’s been seven months since I lost the one person in the world who could make everything right. The one person who could never be right in my eyes again.

Seven months. Funny, it feels like a lifetime.

I saw the birth announcement in the paper today. I flipped past the usual news, the comics, my eyes seeing everything and nothing at the same time. A baby picture caught my interest and I stopped to read the printed words.

Sierra Lynn Witter, seven pounds three ounces, born at six-twenty-eight pm, November 11, to Mr. and Mrs. Pacey Witter of Boston, Massachusetts.

I threw the paper in the fireplace and lit a match. I watched, with tears in my eyes, as the final installment of Joey’s betrayal burned to ashes. I guess now I knew how her new life was treating her. I shouldn’t be surprised, she’d always landed on her feet and she made herself happy no matter what it took. I had just always imagined that she would be happy with me.

I’d never stopped loving her. It killed me to know that she’d cheated on me with Pacey, but I regretted more than anything telling her to leave me, get out of my life. I could have forgiven her. We could have worked through it. My dad had forgiven my mom; they had gotten back together and they were happy. I even had a little brother out of the deal, weird as it was to have a sibling eighteen years younger than myself. If I had let Joey stay, if I hadn’t driven her into Pacey’s arms, maybe we’d have solved our problems and we’d still be together, still in love. My life was full of “maybes.”

The only thing I can think anymore is that I won’t ever have that second chance. I blew it when I refused to see her, refused to talk to her and let her talk to me. All the maybes in the world couldn’t rectify what I had done. All the maybes in the world wouldn’t get her back for me.

I’m not supposed to love you anymore, Jo, but I do. I’ll always love you.

Today is a Friday, and I’m all alone.