Page 147

She nods, but the movement is small.

“I knew what would happen if I stayed,” I continue. “Sooner or later I’d say something I shouldn’t, or I’d stop being objective when Spencer needed me to be. Either way, I’d become a liability.”

“So you resigned.”

“Three weeks after the gala.”

Her eyes return to me. “Because you couldn’t stop thinking about me.”

“Because I didn’t trust myself to stay around you and pretend I felt nothing.”

The words leave less room to hide than I’m used to, but I’ve spent long enough keeping this time behind vague explanations.

“You hadn’t done anything to encourage it,” I add. “You barely knew me. I didn’t leave expecting you to follow me, and I wasn’t waiting around for your relationship to end.”

“I know that.”

“I need you to.”

She turns toward me more fully. “I do.”

Emma doesn’t ask the next question immediately. Her fingers move over the seat belt where it crosses her stomach before she settles her hand there.

“I noticed when you left.”

I glance across at her. “You did?”

“I didn’t know why.” She watches the traffic ahead while I slow behind a line of brake lights. “Spencer said you wanted to do something different, and I believed him because I didn’t have any reason to think it had anything to do with me.”

“It wasn’t supposed to.”

“I know.” Her thumb moves against the fabric of her dress. “But I thought about that night for a long time after you were gone.”

“The gala?”

She nods. “I spent ten minutes telling someone I barely knew how miserable I was, fixed my makeup, and went straight back downstairs with Spencer.”

I remember watching her reenter the ballroom later that night, smiling beside him as though the dressing room had never happened.

Emma looks over at me. “I know what you’re wondering.”

I wait.

“Why I stayed.”

The question has crossed my mind, but asking it has always felt too close to blaming her for what Spencer did with the years she gave him.

“I was unhappy that night,” she continues, “but knowing I was unhappy didn’t suddenly make me ready to leave the life I’d built.”

She looks down at her hand resting over her stomach.

“By then, Spencer was built into almost every part of my life. Our friends treated us as a unit, and half the time plans were made for both of us before I knew they existed. Leaving him meant changing a lot more than who I went home with.”

I move with traffic as the lane opens ahead of us.

“Whenever I started questioning the relationship, Spencer had a way of making the problem sound temporary or convincing me I’d made it bigger than it was.” She adjusts the seat belt away from the curve of her stomach. “Then things would improve for a while, and I’d think maybe we’d finally worked it out.”

My jaw tightens as I remember Spencer arriving at work in a good mood after nights when I’d heard enough of their arguments to know Emma had gone home angry with him.