Why Sophia Bush is Done Trying to Prove She and Ashlyn Harris Didn’t Have an Affair

“Everybody wishes they could have done a million things differently at the time,” she said. “Like, do I wish that instead of flying home and stopping in New York ‘cause I already had tickets to a comedy show and taking her on a date, I'd taken her on a date six weeks later?  Yeah, of course I do. But I can't change it.”

Even more so, “I can't change my reality for anyone else,” Bush, whose memoir And I Will Tell You Mine releases Oct. 27, added. “I also can't be my own personal definition of insanity, which is try the same thing over and over again with no result. I'm never going to change anybody's mind who made it up.”

Even knowing her truth, however, doesn’t make that period of their lives any easier to look back on. 

“It was awful and painful,” Bush explained. “And to be clear, not just painful on my side and her side—it's painful for everybody. It was dirty. I watched it traumatize her. You know, there are there's a lot of work she's had to do to not be held under.”

As the 44-year-old put it, “It became like a sport and that was ugly.”

In reality, their romance blossomed from friendship and the shared experience of losing love they thought would last.

“There were really hard conversations about how what we'd been fighting for so long that just wasn't there,” Bush recalled. “‘How do you rectify it? Why did you stay? Why did you double down?’ And a lot of our reasons for those things that—I don't mean to be rude, but aren't anybody's business—were the same.”

And once she and Harris—who shares kids Sloane, 5, and Ocean, 4, with Krieger—did take that leap from friendship to the early days of dating, everything changed.

“Later, obviously, we both talked about it,” Bush recalled, “it felt like meeting a new person. It was like every everything in my body just like clicked and I was like, ‘Oh, this is what alignment feels like.’”

For more on how Harris and Bush went from friends to the perfect teammates, read on.