But now, with Aidan regarding her so hopefully, his voice laced with that now-familiar compassion and caring—the same emotions she knew had led to him giving Archie a home—she knew that perhaps it was finally time. It wouldn’t change how she felt about starting a new relationship, but maybe revealing the truth, sharing it with a friend, would ease the weight in her heart.
“I loved my husband more than anything,” she began slowly, allowing herself to remember that. There had been good times, way back at the beginning. She’d deliberately buried most of those memories along with her husband.
“Josh and I fell in love in high school,” she continued. “We were together all through college and got married a week after graduation. He went on to law school and I started teaching. He landed a job right away with a top law firm. I thought our life was just about perfect.”
“It sounds as if it was,” Aidan said.
“We’d even been talking about having a baby. Or maybe I’d been talking and he just hadn’t said no. Sometimes I didn’t listen, at least that’s what he told me that last night. And sometimes I saw only what I wanted to see, the perfect marriage. My family certainly saw it that way. To them, marrying Josh was the smartest thing I’d ever done.”
She blinked back tears. “I guess that’s why I didn’t see it coming. We had this nice dinner. It was our fifth anniversary and I’d gone all out cooking things he loved. I’d bought an outrageously expensive bottle of champagne to celebrate. And then, over dessert—his favorite red velvet cake made from scratch—he told me.”
Aidan frowned. “Told you what?”
She gave him a chagrined look. “That he wanted a divorce. That he’d been seeing someone else for almost a year.” She gave Aidan a bewildered look. “A year, and I’d been oblivious to it. What kind of an idiot does that make me?”
“He was the idiot!” Aidan said fiercely. “What kind of man makes an announcement like that out of the blue, especially during an anniversary celebration?”
“The kind who’d apparently been waiting for me to catch him,” she said bitterly. “Like I said, I was happy and oblivious. I gather he’d been dropping clues. All those late nights at the office, whispered phone calls that he claimed were about business, even a couple of overnight trips. I trusted him absolutely. I just took his word that they were part of the job, a requirement for getting ahead and making partner.” She shook her head. “I was so blind and naive.”
“You thought you were married to someone you could trust,” Aidan reminded her.
“Well, obviously I was wrong about that. And he’d run out of patience with my naïveté, so he hit me with the news. There was no easing into it, just the hard cold facts. He was in love with someone else and they wanted to get married because she, she, was having his child.”
Even now she could feel her heart breaking all over again at that. That woman was having the baby she’d wanted so desperately! She was sure that pain was still written all over her face, because Aidan looked as if he wanted to smash things.
“God, it was so awful,” she told him. “It was as if I snapped mentally as the truth sank in. I told him to get out, right then, that I never wanted to see him again. It was the worst sort of betrayal I could imagine, and I’ll admit I was pretty irrational.”
“I think you had a right to be,” Aidan said.
His understanding was surprisingly soothing, but she didn’t deserve it.
“Wait,” she warned. “The story doesn’t end there. I knew it was pouring rain, that the roads might be turning icy, but I couldn’t bear to look at Josh for another minute. He tried to reason with me. He said he didn’t want to leave me until I’d calmed down, but I didn’t see that happening anytime soon. I practically shoved him out the door.”
Tears flowed down her cheeks as she remembered what happened next. “A half hour later, a policeman came to the house. Josh had been going at a high rate of speed. His car had run off the road and hit a tree. He’d died instantly.”
Shock spread across Aidan’s face. “That’s when he died? Right after you’d fought? Sweetheart, I am so sorry,” Aidan said.
“I don’t deserve your sympathy,” she said.
“Why on earth not?”
“I sent him out there that night,” she said simply. “He died because of me.”
“He died because he’d made a whole slew of stupid decisions and you justifiably called him on them. What happened after that was a tragic accident you couldn’t possibly have foreseen,” Aidan corrected.
“I knew how bad the roads were,” she insisted, refusing to cut herself any slack. “There’d been warnings on the news. I’d seen them while I was cooking.”
“I seriously doubt the local news was on your mind after hearing that your husband was involved with another woman and that she was carrying his child.”
Liz still refused to let herself off the hook. “It was my fault,” she repeated stubbornly. It was a refrain that had run through her head every night since the accident.
Aidan, bless him, didn’t look convinced. “Didn’t you say speed was involved? Were you in the car pressing down on the accelerator?”
“No, but—”
“No buts,” he said firmly. “The accident was not your fault. He was on the road alone. He saw the conditions firsthand. He could have slowed down or pulled over. Instead, he chose to speed up.”
Liz sighed. It was comforting to hear him say the words, even if she
