The Breakaway Heart
an excerpt

As they finished off their meal with coffee and a brandy, Taylor realized that although they’d chattered non stop all evening, Brendan really hadn’t told her much about his life. So she asked, “Hey Brendan, it’s time for tit for tat. I told you about my pathetic love life – how are you doing? Are you in any kind of relationship?”

Brendan, momentarily preoccupied with measuring a precise half a teaspoon of sugar into his coffee, looked up and smiled. “Well, I do have some news on that front. In fact, that was one of the reasons I wanted us to get together.” Drat, Taylor caught herself thinking. He is involved with someone. Totally unavailable. I should have known.

“I know we haven’t kept up much the past five years, and I’m sorry about that. I did meet someone really special about four years ago, and we’ve been pretty much of an item ever since. This might or might not surprise you, Taylor, but I fell in love with another man. I’m gay – although a rather late bloomer, I suppose.” Brendan stopped and looked closely at her.

As soon as she heard him say it, Taylor realized with a kind of immense flash, that of course Brendan was gay. How had she ever missed this? In a way, it had no meaning to her – she had never had any gay friends that she knew of, and only followed the “gay culture” wars in the distant abstracted kind of way that one might skim news of the day from some foreign country one had never visited. (Although she knew about gay stereotypes. Suddenly she remembered their long ago argument in Gimbels over china patterns.)

But in another way, it meant everything to her. She had married a gay man and not realized it? She had fanaticized about getting back together with a gay man? Her mind was numb, although a very tiny, rationally compassionate part of her brain said, “Give yourself a break. Give Brendan a break. Obviously he didn’t know back then. And so what if he’s gay?” She tried to give that tiny part of her brain a space to breathe. She forced a smile and then said exactly all the wrong things.