“She says I never told her the truth about my finances.”
“You never told anyone the truth,” Gretchen said.
A long silence.
“I lost my job.
I never meant for it to end like this.”
“That was always the problem,” she said.
“You talked about your good intentions like they erased the damage.”
He breathed heavily into the phone.
“I did love you, Gretchen.”
And she believed him — which was exactly what made it so sad, that a person could love you and still choose himself, every time, until he’d hollowed out the person beside him.