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“That bastard,” Judah said, and she managed a bitter laugh.
“You had to be there.”
The worst part was, she knew exactly what he’d been trying to do. She understood too well his need to escape, his desire to take her with him. A big part of her had thrilled to the whole idea—had packed its bags and skipped across the tarmac to fling herself onto his jet to San Jose and marriage and endless, loving bliss.
That part of her was a hopeless idiot.
She’d sacrificed her own dreams for Levi’s, and now Sean wanted her to sacrifice her present so he could escape his past. She couldn’t be happy with him that way.
Let him have his sterile life in California. She would stay here with the leaking ceiling and crumbling tiles, wasted and wrecked and wallowing in life.
“I said no,” she added, unsure whether that was sufficiently obvious.
Judah chuckled. “Yeah, I got that. Care to tell me why?”
“It’s kind of a long story. I’ll tell you sometime, if you ever come visit.”
“I’d love to visit. Maybe I’ll bring Ben after this circus blows over.”
Katie glanced at the picture on her computer monitor. It filled half the screen—Judah and Ben holding hands. An advance peek at the cover of next week’s People magazine. Leave it to Judah to come out of the closet with a big splash. It had been all over the news this morning, though Katie hadn’t seen it until she got on her office computer and fired up one of her favorite gossip sites, hoping to distract herself from her misery with snarky comments about celebrities.
She’d called him right away, but he hadn’t returned her message for a few hours, and in the meantime she’d left that picture where she could see it, wanting the reminder that Judah, at least, had wrested a happy ending out of the last few weeks’ adventures.
In the time since she’d left Pella—days she’d spent packing up Sean’s house and waiting for their relationship to slip under the surf for good—Judah and Ben had been talking and kissing, falling in love all over again.
Not that they’d had an easy time of it. Melissa was part of their equation, too, and she remained hostile toward Judah and Ben’s reconciliation. But she and Ben had met with her psychiatrist and talked about the situation, and she’d agreed to engage in a
much more intense program of therapy, with Ben’s involvement.
Katie could see the change in Judah in the picture, hear it in his voice. A joy so overwhelming, it made her cry.
Which was how he’d figured out something was wrong when he called. The crying.
“I’d like it if you could visit,” she said, and it came out a desperate, hoarse sort of whine that she hated but couldn’t do anything about.
Half her life, she’d never cried. Not like this, with snot and puffy eyes and all this unattractive leaking. Now she couldn’t seem to quit.
“Good. So tell me what you’re going to do to fix this.”
“I can’t fix it. It’s over.”
“Don’t be stupid. What happened?”
“He went home to California, just like he said he would.”
“But he asked you to go with him, didn’t he? Isn’t that what the proposal was about?”
“Yeah, but I can’t do that. He’s a mess, Judah. I can’t let him use me as a patch or—or some kind of drug.”
“You let me.”
“I wanted to help you.”
“So why don’t you want to help him? You like him a hell of a lot more than you like me.”
Katie sighed and rubbed the back of her hand over the spiky clumps of her eyelashes. Judah didn’t know the whole story, so he couldn’t understand how it worked. People didn’t leave him, no matter how awful he was. They left her.
“Because it’s not a relationship if I just give and give until he’s taken everything he needs and then he’s over it. It’s a dysfunctional disaster. I need somebody who wants to help back, you know? I need a partner who cares about what I need, too.”
