“Because of how you reacted,” he said, pointing at her retreating from him.
“I’m going to get dressed,” she said crisply, and he understood the implication loud and clear. She was not going to let herself be vulnerable during this conversation.
She moved to her suitcase and pulled on a bra and panties faster than he’d ever seen a woman slip on clothes.
Fuck this. He wasn’t going to mince words. “I broke off the engagement fifteen minutes before she died,” he said blurting it out, and he wanted to scream from the pain. It was worse than ripping off a Band-Aid. It was like slamming his hand into a car door. Everything he’d held inside for more than a year was exposed, and it hurt like a motherfucker.
“What?” she asked, blinking.
Even with the ache all over, the open, bleeding wound, he had to keep going. Get it all out. “It was a week before the wedding,” he said, each word like gravel in his mouth. “I took her to the mountains for the weekend, thinking that would be the best place to tell her the news that I didn’t want to marry her.” The bitter sting of regret rose up again. How wrong had he been? He should have told Aubrey in her apartment. He should have told her at a park. Anyplace else.
“You picked the mountains because she was a skier,” Michelle said softly, seeming to understand as she tugged on a skirt and a shirt. But even if his choice had made logical sense, it was the wrong choice.
“The mountains were her favorite place,” he said, with a scoff directed at himself. “I wanted her to be near something she loved when I delivered the news. After I told her, she got on the slopes, tore down the hill, and hit a tree,” he said, getting the last part out as clinically as he could so he wouldn’t have to feel the fresh devastation of the moment he learned she died all over again.
She sat down on the edge of the bed, waiting for him to speak more.
“That part is all true,” he added, as he stood up and moved closer, but she held up a hand. This was as close as she wanted him to be. Damn. He knew this was how it would go. The second he’d opened his mouth around a woman and voiced the full truth, he’d caused more damage than he’d ever intended.
“Okay. Go on,” she said, scrunching her eyebrows together. “What part isn’t true then? Why you didn’t want to marry her?”
He shoved a hand through his hair, digging hard into his scalp. Is this what it would have been like to tell her in her office? As her patient? Maybe. He couldn’t know because he was someone else to her now. He was her lover who couldn’t even tell her how he felt. Frustration flowed thick in his veins. What he wouldn’t give to rid this guilt from his body. That was too much to ask, though. He sat on the edge of the table, and tore off more of the truth for her. “The image the media paints of me?”
“The widower with the broken heart,” she supplied. “That image?”
“Yeah,” he said, with the shame that the title brought surely evident in his features. “That image.”
“That’s not true,” she said in a calm, comforting voice. He suspected it was her work voice, and that she’d segued into it. He only hoped she didn’t start viewing him as a project, as someone who needed fixing. He didn’t want to be that person with her. He wanted to be so much more, but he hardly knew how.
“I cared about Aubrey deeply. I loved her as a friend. But I didn’t love her as a man loves a woman,” he said in a low voice, one he barely recognized as his own. Because he’d only said these words out loud to his sister, and to Nate. “I wasn’t in love with her.”
“Oh,” she said on a long, loud sigh of understanding. It was all out in the open. She could see him for who he truly was. “But everyone believes you’re the person the media portrays you as. The grieving widower.” She crossed her arms, protecting herself from the man before her.
A calloused jerk.
He nodded. “Yes. Because that was the least I could do for her.”
She tilted her head to the side. “How so?”
“She died,” he said, practically shouting as the guilt charged back up through him, rearing its ugly head. “She fucking died, and it was my fault because I didn’t love her. I couldn’t be anything publicly but the grieving widower. I couldn’t go tell the world I didn’t love her. I couldn’t do that to a dead woman.”
“I get that part,” she said, nodding several times, taking in what he was saying. Then she was quiet as she stood up, walked over to her purse and rooted around in it until she found a band for her hair. She twisted her wet hair up on her head and moved over to the couch near to him. A dangerous thing called hope dared to make an appearance. Maybe she’d forgive him. “But you think it was your fault she died?” she asked, continuing her questions. He couldn’t read her.