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She needed somewhere quiet to talk to him. “Why don’t you come over here?”
“Great. I’ll bring coffee and your favorite banana muffin and be there in a few minutes. Can’t wait to see you, Grace,” he said, his voice thick.
“Me, too,” she said before hanging up the phone.
She rushed through a shower and was about to apply a little blush and eye shadow when the doorbell rang. “I’m coming,” she called out as she strode toward the door. When she opened it, Aidan stood there holding a bouquet of her favorite yellow roses and a cardboard carrier with two coffees and a bag of muffins.
“Grace Fellowes, I want this to be our first date of our new life together,” he said, passing her the roses.
She took the flowers as her eyes met his. “It’s been a while since we had a first date.”
“Eighteen years, four months and thirteen days, to be exact,” he said, following her to the kitchen.
“You have a better memory than I do,” she said, putting the roses in a vase and adding water, all the while delighted that he’d remembered with such accuracy.
“I wanted to impress you, so I did the math and counted up the time. We met when we were sixteen. We’ve been together for over half our lives.”
“Leave it to the engineer to figure that out,” she said, seeing the ardent expression on his face.
“Grace, I’ve missed you. I can’t live like this anymore. You have to come home. Please.”
She wanted him to cross the kitchen floor and kiss her senseless, but she knew if he did, she would give in and move home with nothing being resolved. As much as she wanted her husband, she couldn’t go back to the way it was.
“First we have to talk, really talk, about what has gone on in the past few weeks.” She took the coffee and muffins to the table.
“Anything.” He sat across from her, took the lid off her coffee and slid it across to her before opening the bag and passing her a muffin with a napkin. “First, I’d just like to say how much I appreciated you coming over last night. Lisa and I were at our wits’ end. And the peanut-butter thing was pure genius. Emma asked where you were when she was having her bath and went to bed without a tear.”
He took a sip of his coffee. “Emma got up this morning and was her old sweet self. Of course, yesterday was a difficult day for her. I should have realized that it was too much, but I really felt that getting here was the best solution.”
“To what?” she asked, hoping to get him to talk about them, about what was going on in their lives. She was eager for him to express his concern for her and how she was coping with all of this, if only to have him recognize how much of her time had been devoted to him, and would be, if only he’d include her in his plans.
“To this. Us living apart. Everyone is talking at the office about what is going on. They know about Emma and naturally are asking about you and how you’re doing.”
“And what do you think is the answer?”
Telling him flat out how she felt, how much he’d hurt her hadn’t worked. And leaving him to cope hadn’t worked. But maybe he’d figured it out himself.
“Look, Grace, I really messed up when I didn’t talk to you about what we should do. As I said before, I was so focused on helping Emma that I lost sight of what was really going on between us. Then, when I tried, I did it while sitting in the absolute wrong place.”
Was he finally going to talk about all of that? She felt her body relax in relief. “You left me out completely. Even though you were aware that all of this was a shock to me, that my belief in us as a couple was shaken to the core, you didn’t get the fact that I felt abandoned while you and your daughter came first.”
