Lacey didn’t respond to that.
Kevin threw down his napkin. “On second thought, maybe Boston would be simpler. I wouldn’t have to worry about you looking over my shoulder making judgments, would I?”
He stood up and started for the door. “I’m going for a walk.”
“Kevin,” Lacey called after him.
The last thing he heard before he slammed the front door was her muttered curse.
* * *
“Damn,” Lacey muttered for the tenth time as she paced and waited for Kevin to come back. How had a simple phone call reopened every wound and shattered the cautious tranquility they had finally managed to achieve?
Because it had been from Brandon, of course. She had heard more than enough to realize he had work for Kevin to do. If she hadn’t guessed, Kevin’s guilty expression would have told her. She suspected there was more—probably unwanted advice about their marriage, if she knew Brandon.
Even so, it had been stupid to force the issue with Kevin. She couldn’t keep jumping down his throat over every little thing.
What on earth was wrong with her? Was she so terrified of losing him that she wanted to wrap him in a cloak of that protective bubble wrap and watch over him for the rest of their lives? What kind of life would that be for either of them? Longer, maybe, but rife with tension.
She was going to have to get a grip on herself. She was going to have to ignore her obviously futile plan to hold reality at bay and start talking. No matter how much the words hurt. No matter how angry they got. They could not allow their pain to fester any longer. Tonight had been proof of that. After a wonderful day of pretending that everything was normal again in their marriage, they had slammed into reality with one phone call.
Lacey was waiting in the living room when Kevin finally came in. She heard him start down the hall and called out to him. For an instant she was afraid he would ignore her, but finally she heard a cautious movement, then a quiet, “Yes?”
“Will you join me?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”
“Please, Kevin.”
“Why, Lacey? What’s the point?”
“Our marriage is the point.”
“Right now I don’t give our marriage a snowball’s chance in hell,” he said with bleak finality. “Maybe I’ll have a different view in the morning, but I wouldn’t hold my breath, if I were you.”
He was gone before she could force a single word past the tears that clogged her throat.
Chapter Thirteen
All the pretense, all the games had to end, Lacey reminded herself as she sat at the kitchen table in the morning. She had made a pot of tea and laced it liberally with milk. She didn’t need the jagged edginess of too much caffeine on top of everything else today. Her nerves were already shot and it was barely six a.m.
She could hear the first faint sounds of the birds as dawn finally broke beyond the horizon. Black became gray, then purple, then softest pink as the sun edged its way up through the clouds. This was her favorite time of day, a time when anything seemed possible. She needed that sense of hope more than ever as she waited for Kevin to join her.
Lacey thought of all the emotions she’d kept hidden, all the desperate thoughts she had never dared to voice, and tried to pick one above all the others as a place to start.
It would be so much easier if healing could take place without all this airing of past betrayals, she thought wistfully. But it would be false healing, one that could never last.
Above all else, she wanted whatever happened today to be the beginning of forever. Her marriage would be salvaged today.
Or it wouldn’t.
Either way, she would go on. Both of them would. They were too strong not to fight for happiness—together or apart.
* * *
Kevin was wide awake when he heard Lacey leave her room and go into the kitchen. It was still dark outside, too early to be up on a vacation day, far too early to begin dealing with anything that required soul-searching.
But this was no normal vacation, he reminded himself wearily. He couldn’t begin to recall the last time he had taken one of those. As for soul-searching, what difference did it make if he went over and over things here in his head or voiced them aloud to Lacey?
Even so, as he lay on the bed, his hands behind his head, he was struck by an odd reluctance to get up and see what form their confrontation was likely to take. After last night, he doubted they would have anything pleasant to say to each other. There was the heavy sense of impending doom weighing him down. He no longer had any idea whether the fault for that was Lacey’s or his own. He just knew, as he expected she did, that they couldn’t go on this way.
He’d expected something simple to come of this trip, something magical. Instead he’d been faced with a hard dose of reality. For a man who prided himself on having outgrown so many naive attitudes, he’d clung to this one about his marriage for far too long.
He heard the whistle of the teakettle, a sure sign that Lacey’s distress was as deep and dark as his own. She drank tea only when she needed comfort. He could visualize her sitting at the kitchen table, an old china cup cradled in her hands, her gaze fixed on the splashy display of daybreak, her thoughts…
Well, who knew where her thoughts were? He definitely didn’t anymore, not with any certainty.
How he regretted that, he thought with a sigh. He regretted too damned much these days, it seemed.
Then fix it, a voice inside his head muttered. Fix it now or forget it.
With understandable reluctance, Kevin finally dragged himself out of bed and pulled on a comfortable pair of
