Second Love

Chapter 12

I'm cold.

It's December in New York.

It's slightly windy and it's starting to snow. I'm standing in this cemetery facing the headstone of a grave. I'm kneeling with my 3 inch high-heel black boots tucked underneath me, while happy tears filled with memories run down my cheeks as my newly manicured nails grip the ends of my cashmere gloves and I lightly graze the dead grass around me.

I'm alone. Just alone in the cemetery. But it's the only emotion I've understood for far for too long.

Matt's officially been gone for 16 months, but it feels like 10 years. It doesn't matter that we would have been married 8 years in August or that I spent my 28th birthday alone. All I know is that man I first loved and wanted to spend the rest of my life with was taken from me, taken from me with only having spent 7 years with him instead of a lifetime.

I'm not angry...or least not anymore.

I showed anger at my late husband's killer court date and when the final verdict was given. I was angry at Peyton for making me acknowledge my anger after a year and angry that I left him.

The young man might have ruined his life, his mother's and stole my husband's, but I will not let it ruin me anymore.

I will definitely go down in the history books as someone who possesses the greatest restraint in all mankind for not professing my undying love for Peyton when I should have.

But here I sit. No longer feeling Alone. And no longer feeling numb.

You think on a Friday morning I would be at the office busy with phone calls, returning emails, meeting with clients, and proving to my boss time and time again that I'm his girl to get shit done...to close the deal like I've so many other times. But after two months of being forced to take a vacation that resulted me falling in love, throwing myself completely in it at times, sleeping his bed and refusing to go back to my cottage, and leaving him without telling him how much I truly loved him I have had enough.

"I love you Matt...You were and always will be my first great love" I whisper. I bend down and kiss his headstone. I have to be at the airport in an hour.