Unbeloved

Prologue

It was misery that washed her color away, leading her off her path and astray. So she wandered through her life, unknowing and unsure, until realizing her path had always been right there in front of her from the start. Hidden in the shadows of despair, she found her path, her color, within her beating and beautifully bright red heart.

I wasn’t always broken; we are all born pure. It is our journey that burdens us and leads us astray. Our mistakes that beat us down and cover us in guilt and shame, burying us a little more with each successive hardship. It is up to us to dig ourselves out, to come to terms with our faults, to embrace not only our imperfections but those of the ones we love, and to once again find the path we strayed from.

I had been a simple girl. I grew up in a small town in Montana surrounded by down-to-earth, simple people with small, simple dreams. I loved my mom, my dad, and my big sister with all my heart. I loved books with happy endings and romantic movies, and couldn’t wait to fall in love.

Unlike my ambitious older sister, I was a born romantic. I’d been in love with the idea of love for as long as I could remember, full of flighty, fluffy notions of what happiness truly was. And to me, happiness could only be found within the arms of a man . . . a man who loved me.

I wanted butterflies, holding hands, stolen kisses in the backseat of a car, late-night phone calls, all of it. The anxiety, the desperation, that beautiful, agonizing ache called love. And so I romanticized everything.

I had no aspirations, no big dreams. There was nothing I was working toward, no great goals or accomplishments. Instead of college, I dreamed of marriage; instead of a career, I yearned for children.

Visions of traditional white weddings and babies danced in my head. I wanted three babies—one boy, two girls—a nice house with a white picket fence, a cat, and a dog. By the time I was fourteen, I had it all planned out. The cut of my bridesmaids’ dresses, my wedding reception’s seating chart, the color of my living room curtains, the decor of my children’s bedrooms . . . no detail escaped my attention. I wanted to live the fairy tale, to become someone’s everything and anything, to be his princess.

I wanted my happily-ever-after.

There was only one problem.

Instead of finding my prince, I found a whole mess of trouble. At the age of fifteen, I’d found myself pregnant; by eighteen I was married to a man I didn’t love; and by the age of twenty, I was running around on my husband with a married man.

Then, at the age of twenty-four, I gave my heart away to yet another man, a mistake that would once again drastically change the course of my life.

My weaknesses, my choices, and my decisions—the ones I made and the ones I didn’t—all took me down a rocky road filled with regret, heartbreak, and pain. And eventually, they nearly killed me.

Would I change things if I could? Would I turn back time and do things differently?

Never.

This isn’t just my story, the story of a broken woman who lost her way. It’s also the story of my children, the men I loved, and the friends who were more family to me than my own.

This is the story of us all, all our fates intertwined. And for that reason alone, pain and death be damned, I wouldn’t change a thing.