And for himself.
“I think maybe this had been the most difficult couple of hours in my entire life,” he said finally, sinking into a chair across from her and dragging a hand through his hair.
Eyes shimmering with tears clashed with his. “It hasn’t been much of a picnic for me, either.”
“No, I’m sure it hasn’t been. I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “For what? For being honest? I asked for it, didn’t I?”
“But I think we both thought it was going to be a simple matter of airing a few gripes, vowing to try harder and then forgetting all about it.”
“Yeah,” she said, “silly us.”
“There is a bright side,” he told her, trying to earn a smile.
“Oh?”
“We haven’t had to pay a fortune for shrinks to get to this point.”
“Now that is something to stand up and cheer about,” she said, her voice steadier at last.
Tears still clung to the ends of her lashes, but she looked stronger somehow, as if she could withstand anything. Perhaps he’d underestimated her ability to stand on her own and overestimated the depth of her need for him.
Whichever it was, Kevin knew in that instant that he had never loved Lacey more. Whatever faint, lingering doubts he had had about that had fled. His heart still turned over at the sight of her. His head still demanded that he protect her from the sort of hurt he himself had inflicted on her. Old habits obviously died hard.
“Feel like talking?” he asked. “Or should we take some time out? Go to a movie or something?”
She met his gaze evenly. “Hey, it couldn’t get much worse than this. Let’s get it all out now. I don’t think I could concentrate on a movie, anyway.”
Her glib words were sheer bravado, but Kevin knew there would never be a better time, that what he had to say would hurt whenever he said it. It was better to get everything out in the open now, so they could begin to pick up the pieces.
If there were any left to pick up. Dear God, why did that thought creep in so often? It terrified him. Like an earthquake, it seemed to shake the very foundation of his life.
He stared at the fire before he spoke, gathering courage, censoring harsh accusations. “It’s funny,” he began slowly. “I never knew that I felt quite so angry until the words came out of my mouth earlier.”
Lacey regarded him intently, as if she were weighing his words. “I still don’t understand,” she said finally. “You talk about feeling pressured. Why? What did I ever do to make you feel that way? I built my life around making you happy.”
“Exactly. Instead of caring about the world as you always had, you limited your concerns to just me and our family. I guess I felt that you had betrayed me long before it was the other way around.”
“Betrayed you how?” she asked, looking wounded. “By loving you? By needing you?”
“By changing,” he said simply.
“But I’m not the one who changed,” she protested.
“Yes. Maybe you can’t see it, but I can. You were always strong and independent. You always had this clear vision of what you wanted out of life, what we should be doing to make the world a better place to live. There we were, these two intrepid souls going off to tilt at windmills. We were so self-righteous, I suppose, thinking that we knew more than our parents, that we could fix all their mistakes.”
“We did fix some things,” she reminded him, a little sadly it seemed.
“Maybe some,” he agreed. “Then we had Jason and everything changed. The entire focus of your world centered on our son and on me.”
“We had a new baby, Kevin. What did you expect?”
“I’m not talking about the first month or even the first year. I could have understood that. But that absorption with our own narrow world didn’t end. I began to feel pressured for the first time since I had known you. No man should ever have to carry the burden of being totally responsible for another person’s happiness.”
With a growing sense of shock and dismay, Lacey listened to Kevin’s version of what had happened to their marriage and tried to reconcile it with her own. It wasn’t that she could not accept part of the blame. It was simply that the way he described the changes in their relationship weren’t the way she remembered things at all.
There had been so much magic once. There had been so many times over the past couple of weeks that she had thought for sure they were recapturing it. Now she knew that had been only a naive dream.
This time, magic wasn’t quite enough. Lacey struggled with the fact that the life she’d chosen for herself—the role of homemaker in which she’d been so happy, could never be quite the same again. Jason was married now and her husband didn’t need her to see to his every need, in fact resented her devotion.
Could it possibly be true that the very things she accused him of were true of her, as well? Was she no longer the generous person who thought only of helping others? Had she lost the vision they’d once shared, just as she believed he had? It had been only recently that she’d rediscovered a sense of activism in the form of the housing project in which Paula had involved her.
“Maybe I should leave, go back to Boston,” she said finally, expressing a thought that had already come to her while Kevin had been gone. In fact, her mind was already made up despite the tentative way she’d phrased it.
Kevin regarded her angrily, as if the suggestion were yet another betrayal. “Leave? Now? Lacey, we’re just starting to get somewhere. You can’t run away now.”
“It’s not running. I just need to find some answers to questions I didn’t even realize existed. What you’ve
