Tear Stained Beaches by Courtney Giardina

mine.
    I’d cried often since that night. I thought about how Chase and I met, and how happy we were on our wedding day, and all we’d been through as a couple. It was heartbreaking to end it and scary to even think about trying to find that same passion with someone else. How does someone who’s given their entire heart to someone, and loved someone with all they have, ever let someone else in so intimately again. I struggled with the fact that I wasn’t good enough. That someone else had given my husband what I couldn’t. No feeling in the world was worse than that.
    Finding out your husband is having an affair is pretty similar to the grieving process one goes through when losing a loved one. You grieve for what you’ve lost, try and remember the good times you had with them and then, at some point, you learn how to find peace in a memory. I hadn’t gotten that far yet. I was still grieving—for what I had not put an end to yet and for what I knew I had to come face to face with.
    The next few days went just as quickly as the last. I continued my morning workouts and sometimes Meghan joined me. During the day the two of us went to local boutiques for shopping, toured a few of the local museums and, of course, made sure we spent some time lounging on the beach to get a tan. There were times here and there where I would see Meghan check her phone, smile, and text back.
    I could tell she was excited for her reunion with the guy sending those texts. She never said much about it; I think it’s because she wasn’t ready to accept that she’d really fallen for him. She wanted to play the tough girl. She liked to show the strong, independent, don’t-need-anyone-to-take-care-of-me attitude. But I could see it by the way she jumped off her towel each time to grab the phone. Her silent laughter at whatever conversation they were having made it obvious she was invested. Good for her, I thought. She had become the person I believed I needed to be. Sure, I thought about going home, talking to Chase and putting it all behind us. Maybe if he was truly sorry for all he had done we could move past it and rebuild the life we had planned. However; as much as I’d hoped, I didn’t see it as a real possibility. There wastoo much he had hidden from me and lied about that my trust in him had disappeared. I knew in my heart that there was no excuse for what he was doing. There was no way out of it. I would have to start over.
    I had to learn to depend on myself now. It was time to take care of me, and focus on what I wanted. The hardest part was already done. I had walked out, made the first move to leave, even if it was just for a little bit. I was sending a message to Chase that this type of behavior was unacceptable, and that I wouldn’t stand for it. It was just one step, the first of many, but don’t they always say: the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.
    I had just a few more days left on Kettlewood Island as Labor Day was quickly approaching. The last week and a half had gone by way too quickly. One of our last dinners together, Meghan relented and we went to The Pier Shack. It was the lobster tail and crab leg special that hooked us. I was keen on crab legs. I could eat an entire plate in one sitting and probably still want more. It was in between shell cracking and tail pealing that I tried to pry into Meghan’s love life. I started off asking when she was expecting his arrival.
    “He said it will definitely be sometime before Labor Day.” She didn’t talk much about what he did, just said he owned a bunch of stores on the east coast and regularly had to travel to them to make sure they were running smoothly.
    “You have to meet him. The three of us will go to dinner one night.”
    “I thought three was a crowd?” I joked.
    “No way! Not at all. I want you to meet him. It would really mean a lot to me. I feel like you and I have been friends for years. Our friendship is important to me.”
    “Well,