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“You mind if I stay at the house one more night so we can talk?” he asked as they headed back up the street toward her office. “I can pick up some steaks.”
He probably wanted to talk about the divorce.
She was trying to watch her red meat intake, but protein was good for the baby.
“That sounds good,” she told him, and was surprised that the pain mixed in there, wasn’t debilitating her.
Maybe they really would find a way to be friends forever.
* * *
He knew where the candles were. The china Emily had insisted he help choose when they registered for their wedding. He found a decent tablecloth. And did a little cleaning, too, to fill the place with the lavender scent that was now showing up everywhere in the house—even the cleaning fluids.
He’d changed out of his khakis into the black jeans and pullover shirt that had been Emily’s favorites, way back when. She’d purchased them for him the Christmas before he’d left for ground training.
He thought about changing the sheets, too, but didn’t want to give her the wrong impression. This wasn’t a seduction he was setting up.
As hungry as his body had grown for his wife’s, he’d tamp down those urges forever if it meant he got to be in her life for that long.
By the time she got home, he’d worked himself into a bit of a manic state, completely unlike the man he’d ever been—before or after the desert.
It wasn’t a seduction plan. He knew that much. But what kind of plan was it?
Fate wasn’t being kind to him—not so that he could see, at any rate. He was presenting himself, standing front and center in the midst of the mess he’d made, trusting her to come up with a plan.
Emily pulled into the garage, and he had nothing but steaks on the grill and a salad in the fridge. She changed, into the leggings and loose comfortable shirt that had apparently become her new at-home wardrobe.
Maybe someone—him—should take her shopping for some maternity clothes. With nothing else coming to him, he suggested as much over his candlelit steak dinner that was going nowhere, solving nothing, with no goal in mind and what could only be billed as a failed mission.
“I don’t want to spend a bunch of money on clothes I’m only going to wear for a few months,” she told him. “I really think I’ll be able to get through most of this with just leggings. Plus, they’re really comfortable.”
The failed suggestion pretty much fit the rest of the mission. So much for fate.
“If I were going to have more kids, you know, like we’d originally thought, then, yeah, I’ve seen some cute things I might be tempted to buy, but as it is...”
“Do you want more kids?” What the hell? They’d known since they were fifteen that they wanted four. They’d each written down the number on a piece of paper, not showing the other, and had both written the same number.
And now here he was talking to her like he didn’t know that?
He dropped his fork. Stared at her. She wasn’t eating much. Had her napkin in both hands, just holding it. And was looking right back at him.
“We...were something, weren’t we?” he asked, trying to get them out of the hell into which he’d just inadvertently plummeted them.
“Yes, we were.”
He’d gone for levity. Her tone was as serious as his had been. Another fail.
It was time to be Winston Hannigan. A soldier. A man who put his life on the line for what mattered most.
“I think it’s possible that we still are,” he told her.
Hands clearly shaking, she put her napkin on her plate. “Oh, Winston, let’s not go there...”
“I’m not going, Em,” he told her. “I am there. Truth is, I don’t think I ever left. I shut down. But I never left.” Listening to Danny’s letter the day before had completely crushed the barrier that putting on the soldier’s clothes had given him. Stripped him bare to the nude, determined but frightened man he’d been that day in the desert when he’d changed clothes on his way to turning himself in to the enemy.
Tears in her eyes, she pushed away from the table. Shaking her head. “It’s too late, Winston. I sat around here for months, waiting, and...it’s too late.”
It had to be because of Afsoon. The one thing he’d known would break them. It wasn’t something he could undo.
