It Starts with Us by Colleen Hoover

“Oh.” His eyes dart around, as if he’s hoping someone else will help me.
Not that I need help. I just needed a moment of respite.
Marshall sets the bags on the floor and walks over. He takes a seat across
from me and stretches out his legs. He scratches uncomfortably at his knee.
“I’m not sure what to say. I’m not good at this.”
His discomfort makes me laugh through my tears. I toss up a frustrated
hand. “I’m fine. I just need to cry sometimes when Ryle and I fight.”
Marshall pulls up a leg like he’s about to stand up and go after Ryle. “Did
he hurt you?”
“No. No, he was fairly calm.”
Marshall relaxes back to the floor, and I don’t know why, maybe it’s
because he’s the unlucky one in front of me right now, but I unload all my
thoughts on him.
“I think that’s the problem—that he actually had a right to be mad at me
this time, and he was relatively calm about it. Sometimes we can argue, and it
doesn’t lead to anything more than a disagreement. And when that happens, I
start to question whether I overreacted by asking for a divorce. I mean, I
know I didn’t overreact. I know I didn’t. But he has this way of planting seeds
of doubt in me, like maybe things could have gotten better if I just gave him
more time to work on himself.” I feel bad that I’m laying all this on Marshall.
It’s not fair to him because Ryle is his best friend. “I’m sorry. This isn’t your
issue.”
“Allysa cheated on me.”
Marshall’s words stun me silent for a good five seconds. “Wh-what?”
“It was a long time ago. We worked through it, but dammit, it hurt like
hell. She broke my heart.”
I’m shaking my head in an attempt to process this information. He keeps
talking, though, so I try to keep up.
“We weren’t in a good place. We were going to different colleges and
trying to make long distance work, and we were young. And it wasn’t even
anything big. She had a drunk make-out with some guy at a party before she
remembered how amazing I am. But when she told me… I’ve never been so
angry in my life. Nothing had ever cut me like that did. I wanted to retaliate: I
wanted to cheat on her, so she’d know how it felt; I wanted to slash her tires
and max out her credit cards and burn all her clothes. But no matter how mad
I was, when she was standing right in front of me, I never, not for one