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“I can’t stand the guy.”
“You don’t even know him,” she said, laughing.
“I hate that I let him take my place, that I wasn’t the one to travel with you to Washington, D.C., and everywhere else you went.”
She played with his hair, letting the locks fall through her fingers. “I never loved him,” she admitted. “As hard as I tried, I couldn’t love him. That’s why we broke up.”
He rolled over and rested his head on her chest. “Why do you think you couldn’t love him?”
She stopped touching him and simply stared at what she could see of his face in the dark. “Because I never stopped loving you.” That was a frightening confession, one she’d been loath to make, even to herself, but it was true.
Slumping onto the pillows, he grew silent and Francesca sensed that his mood had become slightly morose.
“That makes you unhappy?” she said.
“No.” He took her hand, kissed her fingers. “It makes me want to explain what life was like for me when we first met, but…I’m hesitant to bring it up.”
She noticed that the storm outside had quieted. “Tell me.”
“You asked, at the motel, about the secret I keep for my ex-wife.”
“Lori.”
“Yes.”
She sat up. “And now you’re going to tell me?”
He leaned against the headboard. “I’m thinking about it.”
Francesca wanted him to trust her enough, to be able to say anything, but she also feared how she might react, considering the problems they’d had in the past. Had he been in love with Lori when he claimed to be in love with her? Was he still carrying a torch for his ex? He’d never even hinted at such a thing—the exact opposite, in fact—but her fears suggested the worst. And he was obviously uncomfortable about what he had to reveal. “She broke your heart?”
“It was more that she shattered my confidence.”
“By…”
“She left me for someone else, someone she’d been seeing all along.”
Francesca could understand why he might be reluctant to delve into this, given his own indiscretion with Adriana, and became even uneasier about hearing it. She’d just forgiven him. They were trying to start over. Why dredge up all the negative feelings?
On the other hand, maybe it was time for him to talk—and for her to listen, with her heart open instead of closed, as it had been for the past ten years. “So…you decided to pass along the hurt by doing the same thing?”
“No. I panicked.”
“You told me you loved me.”
“I did. That was the problem.”
“I don’t understand.”
Judging by the pause that followed, he was collecting his thoughts.
“Lori left me for a woman, Fran,” he said at length. “She’s a lesbian, was then, too, and somehow that made the end of our marriage so much more…complicated.”
Francesca blinked in surprise. This was the last thing she’d expected, probably because she was so attracted to Jonah she couldn’t imagine a woman choosing another man over him, let alone another woman. But she kept her mouth shut.
“I told myself it shouldn’t matter whether it was a man or a woman. Someone else was someone else,” he continued. “But…I was young and immature, and not only was I hurt, I was humiliated and embarrassed. I couldn’t even tell my closest friends. She’d asked me not to for fear word would get back to her family. They still don’t know the woman she’s living with is anything more than a roommate from college.”
At this point, Francesca had to interrupt. “How could they miss it?”
