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”Really?” Mia asked, not believing it for a minute. She could feel the speculation from every single person in the room like hot air suffocating her.
Claire stiffened, her eyes shooting out sparks. “No,” she said. “I’m not. But my husband and yours are the only two on the team with wives and…”
Realization sank in. Claire wanted someone to commiserate with. Someone to hold hands with and pray, to pour over the papers and pull apart embassy reports.
Do I have to do this? she asked herself, bitterness making her feel a million years old. She wanted to find her rusty, beat-up truck in the employee lot and head back to the land she loved and that loved her back. I have to live all of this again?
“I’m just so scared for him,” Claire breathed, and Mia could not resist the fear in the woman’s voice.
A fear she knew too well.
“Stay away from the internet,” Mia said, staring into her wine glass, being sucked unwillingly into the past. During the first trip Jack had taken to Sudan, Mia had been glued to her computer and the unsubstantiated reports had given her ulcers. “Try to stay busy. Focused on something other than your husband.”
“That’s it?” Claire asked. ”No internet and get a hobby?”
Mia nodded, remembering the crushing anxiety all too well and knowing that there was nothing Claire could do to really combat it.
“Unless you can convince him not to go?” she asked.
“That didn’t work with Jack, did it?” Claire asked softly.
Mia finished the wine in her glass, gulping it down without tasting it, wishing the rest of her body could go as numb as her taste buds. “I didn’t bother trying,” she said.
She and Claire made difficult small talk—it was all too obvious that Claire wanted to ask Mia about her relationship with Jack. Hash it out, woman to woman.
But that wasn’t going to happen.
Finally, Claire made some excuse about needing a bathroom and left.
Thank God, Mia thought, stepping to the balcony where it was quiet. A cool breeze blew off the ocean and her skin chilled. Her nose went cold and her eyes stung.
He was leaving. Again. It had become so common, he didn’t even bother to tell her anymore.
“There’s my girl,” a happy British voice said from behind her, and Mia turned, her heart a stone in her chest, to see Jack’s partner, Oliver.
Mia wasn’t what anyone would call a hugger. But the sight of Oliver, his bright bald head, his dashing dinner jacket with gold buttons, drove her right over the edge and she pushed herself against his barrel chest.
“Whoa there, Mia.” he said, stroking her arms. “Are you okay?”
“You’re going back,” she said against his chest. “Next month.”
“He didn’t tell you?” Oliver whispered, and at her silence he swore.
“The government and JEM signed a cease-fire.”
“That doesn’t comfort me, Oliver.”
“We’ll be fine, Mia. You know that. We have lots of security—”
“And you don’t take risks,” she said, finishing the line she’d heard seven times over the last four years. Jack and Oliver had the same script.
She stepped away, already regretting the show of emotion. Wishing she could take it all back.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said with a bright smile. “Great. Just surprised. How are you?” She squeezed his big shoulder, a far more Mia-type greeting.
“Bored to tears,” Oliver said. “And wishing I had a wife to liven things up at these parties.”
“Well, don’t do anything drastic,” she said, proud that her voice was just light. None of her grief or bitterness leaked out.
But Oliver’s piercing eyes saw through her. “You and Jack make quite a pair,” he said, sipping at a glass of tonic water. “He’s about to bite off every single hand that’s here to feed us, and you look like you’re going to cry or start a fight.”
“Jack doesn’t like these things,” she said with a shrug. “And I’m not so hot on them either.”
He watched her carefully and she watched him right back. If she was here to be the loving wife, she’d better get her act together.
“You know, that first summer when Jack and I worked together and I found out he was married, I thought people were joking. We’d worked side by side, twelve hours a day for a week, and he never said a word about you.”
“Are you trying to start a fight?” she asked.
“No.” Oliver leaned against the banister, looking like a man settling in for a big chat. A chat she had no interest in. “But when I asked him about you, he wouldn’t shut up. I heard about when you were a baby, when your family first moved to his ranch. I heard about how you followed him around as soon as you could walk, snuck into the bed of his truck when he drove away to college.”
“What is your point?”
