It was overwhelming, and, at the same time, the most divinely right feeling she had had in her life. Well, except for one. When she looked up and saw the look on Aidan’s face, she felt like she was finally home.
Chapter Eight
“How is married life?” Daniel stood in the open doorway of Aidan’s office, startling him out of his thoughts.
“Considering that we have had one week of normalcy under our belts, now that Chloe and the family know, so far so good.”
“Good thing you’re an architect,” Daniel said. “Because you make a terrible actor.”
Aidan’s knee-jerk reaction was to pretend like he didn’t know what his brother was talking about, but why? One thing he had learned with Kate was you didn’t solve problems by pretending life was perfect. Kate had taught him that you had to come at the situation head-on.
“The other day you said I had a good poker face.”
“That was when you were keeping the marriage a secret. You were good at that. But I can tell that something’s bothering you.”
Aidan sighed.
“Okay, marriage is hard.” He shrugged. “We are adjusting. Or, at least, we are trying to and I’m trying to keep a positive outlook. You know, set a good example for everyone.”
Aidan pushed back from his desk and placed his hands behind his neck and shrugged.
“Chloe is happy. So that’s good. She loves Kate. She loves finally having a mother and Kate is a great mom to her. She’s good with Chloe. We haven’t told her about the baby yet. We wanted to break the news to her in digestible bites. You know, let her get used to us being a family first. Let her feel safe, and then we’ll tell her our family is going to grow some more. That she’s going to have a sibling.”
Daniel lowered himself onto the chair across from Aidan’s desk.
“That’s good,” Daniel said. “So what’s the problem?”
“Kate’s...quiet. You know, distant. I don’t know. I guess we’re still adjusting to living together. I’m not sure how I thought life would be, but I thought it would be different than this. I don’t know whether to give her space or if I should try harder.”
“Marriage, even under the best circumstances, can be difficult. Or maybe I shouldn’t say difficult. Difficult has a bad connotation. It can be challenging. Challenging puts a better spin on it.”
“But should you have to spin something like marriage?” Aidan asked. “Shouldn’t she and I just be happy to be together? We’re newlyweds.”
“Are you saying you’re not happy?”
“No.”
He had answered too fast, he knew it, which placed his answer squarely in the “doth protest too much” territory.
“I don’t know,” he amended. “I don’t know that we would have gotten married had the circumstances been different.”
“I thought you said you didn’t get married because of the baby.”
“We didn’t.”
“But you just said you would not have married her if she wasn’t pregnant?”
“I didn’t say anything about marrying her because she was pregnant.”
“Okay, I’m confused,” Daniel said. “Did you and Kate plan this Vegas elopement, or did you just get caught up in the moment?”
Aidan clasped his hands together tightly on top of his desk. Then he loosened them and steepled his fingers, tapping them together as he thought of how to best answer his brother’s question.
He inhaled a long and slow and steady breath as he chose his words. “It is more complicated than that.”
“My next appointment isn’t until after lunch. So I’ve got all the time in the world if you want to talk it out,” Daniel said.
Aidan explained about Kate’s wedding amnesia, following up with how the doctor said Kate’s pregnancy hormones could have created an allergy to the alcohol, causing her memory loss.
“She wanted an annulment before we found out she was pregnant. She didn’t want to be married—to anyone—but the baby changed everything. The pregnancy meant we couldn’t have annulled the marriage. We would have had to get a divorce. Looking at things honestly and with clear eyes, I believe the judge would not have granted the annulment anyway—even without the pregnancy—because of our personal history. But once Kate found out about the baby, it was clear that she resigned herself to staying married. Still, it feels a little precarious to know my wife had to resign herself to marrying me. I can’t shake the feeling that we’re living in a house of cards. You know, one wrong move and it will all come crashing down.”
Aidan knew what a mess it was when all Daniel did was sit there and nod. Squint at him and nod some more. Aidan didn’t expect his brother to have the answer, but he would have loved some positive insight.
“I don’t know what to say, man,” Daniel said.
Aidan waved away the comment as if he could clear the air with the gesture. “Look, it is fine. I don’t expect you to solve my problems. You’ve got enough on your own plate.”
Daniel held up his hand. “But I like my plate. My plate does not include a house of cards. So if you’re saying you want to make this marriage work, maybe you need to stop looking at it as if it is a problem. Try to put a positive spin on it.”
There was that word again. Spin. As much as Aidan hated to hear it, his brother was right. He had been turning this issue around and around, looking at it from every possible angle. He needed to spin it in the right direction.
“I guess you have a point,” Aidan conceded. “I don’t know why the word spin bothers me so much.”
“It is just semantics, dude,” Daniel said. “Call it whatever you want. Situations live up to the way that you see them. Is the glass half-empty or is the glass half-full?”
Aidan shook his head. “This is surreal. Between the two of us, I’ve always been the more positive one. Here we are and you’re giving me lessons on optimism.”
Daniel shrugged. “A
