She tossed the bath sheet onto the counter and absentmindedly picked up the phone, keyed in Bette’s security code for it, and, when the screen opened to show what was playing from the “music app” she saw that Bette had put on the playlist Angelica and TJ had put together. She bit her lip as fresh tears began to spill.  She reached for her bathrobe and slipped it on.

My beautiful kids. My beautiful wife.  This beautiful life.

What the fuck have I done?

Her knees felt weak and she sat heavily on a nearby stool, bent forward, cradling her head, sobbing silently. That moment with Kaci exposed the secret chink in her armor, that “bent” gene that she’d seen time and again in her mother, the void that Dan had told her repeatedly was one she’d created inside herself, a self-invented “deficiency” she’d convinced herself, at some point in her life, that she’d been born with.  Before counseling, before anyone could even suspect she had this vulnerability, she thought she’d overcome that flaw, had learned how to control it.  But now she felt her soul was tortured, exposed.

In her late twenties and early thirties, exhausted by the string of failed relationships she’d entered into and had ended, when she felt like giving up on ever finding anyone, she’d realized that all her life she’d been looking for someone to close up this deficiency, to close it up forever. Everyone she became involved with hadn’t been able to; they’d all failed.

Maybe what she needed instead was someone who could help her do it, and not do it for her?

And then came Bette.

Bette.

People in the industry liked to throw the word “game-changer” around, often carelessly – a characterization Tina inwardly thought to be the product of mental laziness. But she’d smiled back in a polite manner, nodding in agreement, when people had described her marriage to Bette as something like that, a so-called “gamechanger.”   Bette was more than that, she sometimes wanted to say.  She was a life-changer.

Bette had always said that they’d saved each other. In the moving words she used when they wed to promise Tina that they would have a love that would last for eternity, in the tear-filled moment when they’d asked each other to each be their wedded spouse – Bette had invited Tina into the relationship that would come to define their lives.  For eternity. Forever.