Kindness and cruelty

She’d watched him drink himself into a stupor every night for a month after his father had died and she’d done her best to be there for him. She’d understood how difficult this was for him and her heart broke for her husband. Things would get better though. He’d find the strength to pull himself through this for her and Joanna, and they’d go on doing their best to put him back together. Time healed all wounds.

Only one month turned into two. And two to four. He was a functioning alcoholic if only just and it took every ounce of strength she had to make sure that the three of them were taken care of and that Jo didn’t see what her father had turned into. She refused to let Joanna be exposed to that, struggled to make sure the little girl was happy and distracted. Leonard distracted himself enough with the bottle.

Everyone had a breaking point, and six months into her husband’s drinking binge, she’d found hers. It was hard to reconcile the man she faced daily with the man she’d married, the man she’d given a child to, and the man she’d loved so much. The man she saw now did nothing but drain her, sap her of whatever strength she had like some kind of leech, and yet she still loved him. She couldn’t afford that. It was a weakness and he’d destroy them both if she allowed those feelings to remain.

The paperwork was the first thing to be drawn up. She needed to strike quickly and efficiently lest she change her mind, but it didn’t stop her from drowning her own sorrows at a bar later that evening. Her attorneys were working to follow her instructions to the letter and there was Clay Treadway. She was miserable and lonely, no longer mourning the death of her father in law, but of her marriage and the man she’d married. Leonard wasn’t that man anymore and that killed her more than anything. Clay flirted and paid attention to her, took her out on the floor to dance and started making the first of many promises he’d never keep. But for that moment in time he made her forget.

She cried after he fucked her but she left that out when she told Leonard.

Once it was all said and done, two months after he’d left and she’d done her solid best to erase every single part of him save for their little girl from her life, she opened the first of the letters he’d sent. In it he begged for forgiveness, made promises of being better, but she wouldn’t let herself believe.

She should have known he’d be the one to keep them.

( “Lyrics” )