“I don’t want to hear this.”
“But I backed off. God, I felt good about that for at least a week. Smug and self-righteous.”
“Whatever you’re doing to yourself, I want you to stop it right now.”
“I want to start over. I thought maybe on our vacation . . . but we hardly talked to each other. Why can’t we start over?”
“Because you’d hate it now just as much as you hated it then.”
She was as unreachable as a distant star, but he still needed to touch her. “I loved you so much, you know that, don’t you? Even when I let my parents talk me into agreeing to a divorce, I still loved you.”
“It doesn’t matter now, Jim. Gabe came along, and then Ethan, and there wasn’t any divorce. It was all so long ago. There’s no sense in stirring up the past. We have three wonderful sons and a comfortable life.”
“I don’t want to be comfortable!” Fury exploded inside him, fueled by frustration. “Goddammit! Don’t you understand anything? Jesus, I hate you!” In all their time together, he had never once touched her in violence, but now he grabbed her arms and shook her. “I can’t stand this any longer! Change back!”
“Stop it!” Her fingers dug into his upper arms. “Stop it! What’s wrong with you?”
He saw the fear on her face, and he jerked away, appalled by what he’d done.
Her icy reserve had finally melted, leaving rage behind, an emotion he’d never until that moment seen on her face.
“You’ve been torturing me for months!” she cried. “You belittle me in front of my own sons. You poke at me and jab me and draw blood in a thousand ways every day! I’ve given you everything, but it’s still not enough. Well, I won’t put up with it anymore! I’m leaving you! I’m finished!” She raced from the kitchen.
Panic welled inside him. He started to run after her, but then stopped just as he reached the door. What would he do when he caught her? Shake her again? Christ. What if he’d finally pushed her too far?
He drew a deep breath and told himself she was still his own Amber Lynn, sweet and gentle as a mountain afternoon. She wouldn’t leave him no matter what she said. She just needed time to calm down, that was all.
As he heard her car peel out of the driveway, he kept repeating the same thing to himself.
She wouldn’t leave him. She couldn’t.
* * *
Lynn’s chest was so tight that she had to gasp for breath as she raced along the narrow, winding road. It was a treacherous piece of highway, but she’d been driving it for years, and not even her tears made her slow down. She knew what he wanted from her. He wanted her to open her veins again and bleed with love for him the way she once had. Bleed with love that would never be returned.
She struggled for breath and remembered that she’d learned her lesson years ago when she’d been little more than a baby, naive and ignorant at sixteen, utterly convinced that love could conquer the enormous gap between them. But that naïveté hadn’t lasted. Two weeks after she’d told him she was pregnant with Gabe—Cal had only been eleven months old—her innocence was shattered forever.
She should have seen it coming, but of course she hadn’t. When she’d told him she was pregnant, she’d bubbled over with happiness even though Cal wasn’t yet a year old, and they were barely managing as it was. He had sat frozen as she’d babbled on.
“Just think, Jim! Another sweet baby! Maybe it’ll be a girl this time, and we can name her Rose of Sharon. Oh, I’d love to have me a girl! But a boy’d might be better so Cal’d have somebody to roughhouse with.”
When his expression didn’t change, she’d started to get scared. “I know it’ll be a mite hard for a while, but my baking business is goin’ real good, and just think how much we love Cal. And we’ll be real careful from now on to make sure there ain’t no more. Tell me you’re happy about the baby, Jim. Tell me.”
But he hadn’t said anything; he’d just walked out the door of their little apartment, leaving her alone and frightened. She’d sat for hours in the dark until he’d returned. He hadn’t said a word. Instead, he’d pulled her into bed and made love to her with a ferocity that had driven away her fear.
Two weeks later, while Jim was in class, her mother-in-law had come to see her. Mildred Bonner had told her that Jim didn’t love her and wanted a divorce. She’d said he’d planned to break the news to her the same night Lynn had announced that she was pregnant again, but now he felt honor-bound to stick by her. If Lynn truly loved him, Mildred said, she would let him go.