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“Most of my life I suppose.” She finished her champagne. “I was never quite what my parents wanted me to be and then, for a little while when we were first together it felt so right nothing else mattered. But then as you climbed the career ladder, things changed. People judge you by what you do. All those dinner parties where I was introduced as Professor White’s wife. As if without you I wouldn’t exist as a person. Even though I knew that raising the girls was probably the most important thing I would ever do in my life, I still felt—” she struggled to find the right word “—less. I felt less.”
He frowned. “I never once felt you were less. I never made you feel that way.”
“Your colleagues did. Once they discovered I wasn’t one of them, I wasn’t worth their attention except as a way of getting to you.”
“Academics can be a strange bunch.”
“People can be a strange bunch.” Her toes were warm, her whole body relaxed. “When people asked me what I did, I talked about academic publishing as if that gave me the credentials I needed to be accepted into the group, but my job was something I did to bring in extra money. You were the success.”
“As I said the other day, I may have succeeded at some things, but I didn’t succeed at our marriage.”
“There is no blame, Nick. And there’s no pass or fail with a marriage.” She spoke softly. “Maybe we got the balance wrong. I don’t know. I didn’t want the girls to feel your absence, so I worked doubly hard to make sure we had fun when you were gone. I didn’t want to spend the time counting the days waiting for you to come home.”
Was that why they’d drifted apart? Was it her fault?
In the beginning his absences hadn’t mattered so much. If anything they’d added an exciting edge to their relationship and his homecomings had been accompanied by passion and a greater appreciation of each other.
She picked up her fork. “I suppose life got tougher. The demands were greater. My focus was always on keeping the family stable and happy. We were a three, and sometimes a four, but hardly ever a two. The truth is it took effort to be a two, and I didn’t have much energy left.”
“I was the same. Work and family came first, and that didn’t leave anything much for the two of us. Maybe if we’d done more things like we’ve done today we’d still be a couple.”
She didn’t want to think about that. She couldn’t think about that. If it was true, then it was heartbreaking. “It’s not easy to have a snowball fight in Oxford. And dogsledding through the Bodleian Library would definitely be frowned on.”
His gaze softened. “We had fun today, Mags.”
“I know.”
“We had fun together. We were a couple.”
“We were pretending.”
“We might have been pretending to be a couple, but the fun part was real enough.” His tone was rough. “Rosie left home four years ago. The last four years was our chance to reconnect. To make time for us. We should have grown closer, not farther apart.”
She ate half the goat’s cheese without tasting any of it and then they swapped plates.
“I’m sure we’re not the first couple who has grown apart.”
> He put his fork down. “Do you hate me, Mags?”
“What? Do I—?” She was astonished by the question. “No! How could you even ask that?”
“Because all the divorced couples I know hate each other. John and Pamela don’t communicate at all. Ryan and Tracy aren’t even in the same country.”
“She moved?”
“He moved. Took a job in Frankfurt.”
“Oh.” She pondered that new piece of information. “I suppose some people might find that easier.” But not her. She liked the life she’d built, and the comfortable nest of memories that cocooned her when times were hard. Was this a good time to mention that she didn’t want to sell Honeysuckle Cottage? No. That conversation would be better had another time. Probably when she’d worked out a way to afford it by herself. Maybe she could rent a room to a student. There was demand for it.
“I feel responsible.”
“For the fact that Ryan took a job in Frankfurt?”
There was a gleam in his eyes. “For the demise of our marriage.”
She nibbled at her half of the fish. “It’s a shared blame, Nick. It takes two.”
“Does it? Because I see a lot of things I did wrong—things I regret—but I don’t see anything you did.”
