AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Her eyes flashed with fury and she got right up in his face. “You don’t even know me! If you knew me at all, you’d know I could never be happy out here in the bu-fuck middle of nowhere, living with all these uncultured hicks. I want to talk to someone who’s read this week’s New Yorker. I want to go to the theater. I want to go to poetry readings and wine tastings and then I want to put on a skimpy sequin dress and go clubbing and then in the morning I want to go eat a bagel and lox at Benny’s on the corner of Broadway and Bleecker.”
“So, what?” Hunter threw up his hands. “You want to just up and move back to Soho?”
It was a rhetorical question but Janine shoved her hands on the table and shouted, “Yes! That’s exactly what I want.”
And then she’d gone to the bedroom and started packing.
“What?” Hunter had scoffed. “You’re just leaving? Right now?”
“Right now.”
“But it’s the middle of the night.”
“Well I can’t stand spending another minute in this house.”
Hunter took several steps back from the bedroom at her words. That was when he’d gotten it. She meant it. She was actually leaving him. It had come to this. How had it come to this?
His wife. His beautiful, neurotic, infuriating wife, was about to walk out the front door and out of his life.
And that was when he knew none of the rest of it mattered. Not the mortgage on the house. Not the veterinary practice he was in the process of taking over from Dr. Roberts. Not even his parents.
Janine was his wife. She was his first priority. And he’d failed her. He could deny it all he wanted her, but he’d known she was unhappy.
Hunter looked over at Isobel. They’d stopped walking right by the little city park along main street. Her eyebrows were drawn in compassion as she listened to him talk.
“Just a little more time, I kept telling myself.” He shook his head at how stupid he’d been. “Just a little more time and she’ll adjust.”
“But if you realized that… Before she left, I mean,” Isobel said, confused.
Hunter shook his head again. “It was too late. I tried to talk to her. I said that okay, we’d move to Manhattan. That I wanted to go with her. That I was sorry. That she was the most important thing to me.”
But Janine had pulled away from him and grabbed her suitcase. She said she needed some time by herself. She said she had to think.
“And then she got into her car and drove off.” Hunter’s voice was bleak and Isobel reached out and took both of his hands.
“What happened?”
“Car accident,” Hunter whispered. “It was winter. The roads were icy. Her car slid on a curve and she ran into a tree. Died on impact.”
Hunter had to strain to get the next words out. It was the worst bit of all—the part that kept him up at night torturing himself. “But from the time of night and the angle of her car—” His voice broke but he shook himself, determined to tell Isobel everything.
“She wasn’t leaving town. It was right before dawn. She’d driven about two hours away and had turned around. She was coming back. For me. She left because of me and came back because of me. She died because of me.”
Isobel’s hands went to his face. “No, Hunter, no, that’s not true—”
“I know,” he nodded, swallowing hard. “I know.”
“Do you?” Her eyes searched his.
He huffed out a short, slightly bitter laugh. “Knowing in here,” he tapped his head, “and believing in here,” he put a hand to his chest, “are two different things.”
He breathed out, feeling like a weight had lifted off his shoulders. “But I’m glad you know now. After Janine…” He shook his head. “I didn’t think I could ever feel that way again. That I’d ever want to.”
He reached up and covered one of her hands on his cheek. “But then you came to town. Even after that first night, I was already feeling so much for you. I’d been a dead man walking for a year and then—” He looked her in the eye. “It scared the shit out of me. You scared the shit out of me.”
Isobel smiled, her eyes full. She flipped his hand so she could kiss his palm.
“But I’m not scared anymore.” He moved back but still held her hands tight. “Bel, I love you. I can’t lose you. It’ll be August in a couple more weeks. I told myself not to think about the future, to just take this one day at a time. But dammit, Bel, I can’t do that anymore.”
