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“Did it cause problems between you?”
“We were certainly arguing a lot more than we’d ever done before, but my mom was in the hospital, and I was making changes at the bookstore, too. There was a lot going on. Even so, I was pleased when she got the contract from Mitch. He was famous around here, and I knew it would be good for her business.”
“She works for herself, does she?” I ask.
“Oh, God, yes. There’s no way Sabrina would ever tolerate taking orders from anyone else.”
I can’t help laughing, and Tanner joins in. “How did she care for Nash while she was working?”
“That mostly fell to me. Especially after she started Mitch’s project. I didn’t mind,” he says, smiling. “I enjoyed looking after him. But as time went on, it got harder and harder. My mom’s health was deteriorating, and I needed to go to the hospital more often, but whenever I asked Sabrina if she’d come home and take over with Nash, she’d find a reason not to. After a while, I got so fed up with the situation, I confronted her.”
“You realized she was having an affair?”
“No. I just wanted to know why she couldn’t make the effort to be home a little more… for Nash as much as for me. We had a huge fight, during which I asked her why it was taking so long to fix up Mitch’s house. At the beginning, she’d told me it was a three-month project, but she’d been working there for over five months already. She hadn’t mentioned any problems, and the more we talked – or fought – the less sense she made. In the end, I asked her outright if she was doing more than re-designing his house. To start with, she pretended to be hurt and insulted, and obviously she denied it, but I knew she was lying.”
“How?” I ask.
He tilts his head, giving my question some thought. “I think when you’ve been with someone for as long as we had, you get to know things like that.”
“So what happened?”
“Eventually she confessed, and I gave her an ultimatum. Me, or him.”
“And she chose you.” That’s not a question. Aside from the answer being obvious, I can’t see why any woman would choose another man over Tanner.
“She did. Once she realized I was serious, she promised she’d break things off with him the very next day, and that her meetings with him from then on would be purely professional.”
“Did you believe her?”
“No, but what choice did I have? We had a child, and when it came down to it, I had to put him first.”
“So you stayed?”
“Yeah,” he says, sounding depressed.
“What was it like?”
“Horrendous.”
“I presume she broke off her relationship with Mitch Bradshaw?”
“As far as I know. She certainly finished the work on his house.”
“Did that help?”
“Not really. I still couldn’t trust her. The atmosphere between us was dreadful, and sometimes I wondered if it was worth it.”
“But you persevered?”
“Yes,” he says. “Although nothing felt the same anymore. I suppose it didn’t help that I sold the house we’d been living in since we were married, and moved us into the apartment above the bookstore.”
“Was that a financial decision?” I ask, and he shakes his head.
“It was my dumb attempt at a fresh start. Sabrina didn’t see it that way, though. She saw it as a failure on my part, and even when I tried to explain that I wanted to put the past behind us, including the memories I associated with that house, she still couldn’t see it. Her argument was that we could just move to another house, but I didn’t see the point. The apartment had been empty since Mom had gone into the hospital, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to become cash rich and mortgage free for the first time in our lives.”
“Can I assume she relented?”
“Let’s just say she stopped arguing. She never let me forget it hadn’t been her idea, or that she didn’t like living in the apartment, but to my mind, we had a roof over our heads, and the security of the cash in the bank… plus we’d left our old life behind, and that felt like a win-win situation to me.”
