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He set his iPad aside and we went to the kitchen, where I found a container of fennel and beans waiting for me. My stomach was eating itself. I put the food in the microwave and hit the button.
“So. Are you okay?” I asked, reaching into the beverage cooler for a bottled water. I leaned against the fridge to drink.
“I think so?” Neil hopped up to sit on the island countertop.
“Oh my god, get down! What are you, nine?” I spluttered, mid-swallow.
“Yes, mother.” He rolled his eyes playfully, but obeyed. “I’m strangely energized by this. Maybe, because I’ve been dreading it so much, it’s almost a relief being closer to getting it all over with.”
“You’re actually fine with this?” Whether I believed him or not, I would still be running in full-time observation mode. He’d been doing so well with not drinking, I felt like I had to protect his progress.
He put his hands in the pockets of his jeans and shrugged. “At the moment. Five minutes from now, who knows?”
“Fair enough.” The microwave beeped, and I retrieved my dinner. I was so hungry I starting eating while standing there in front of the open door.
“You worked quite late. How are things at the magazine?” he asked, sitting on one of the tall stools on the other side of the island.
“Busy. But I kind of brought that on myself.” I covered my mouth with the back of the hand that held my fork as I talked around my food. “I’ve been taking a lot of time off lately.”
“You have,” he agreed. “I blame myself for most of that.”
“Nah. I just need to buckle down and get ahead of things, instead of keeping up with them.” I set my plate on the countertop and reached for my water. There was a heartbeat of silence between us before I swallowed and asked, “How did you do it? Balance work and family?”
He inhaled and lifted one hand to cup his chin thoughtfully. “I didn’t. Valerie was always better with that, even though she had Emma less. Emma spent more time with her nanny than with either of us, because we were both working so much.”
I shook my head and looked down. “Ugh, that was not the answer I wanted.”
“What answer did you want?” he asked, laughing gently. “Starting a company is difficult, but it’s even more so when it becomes very successful, very early. Your magazine is starting off well, and that creates certain demands. I think you’re doing wonderfully.”
“I thought we moved to the Hamptons to settle down, but we’re still fighting to make time for each other.” I couldn’t find the magical key to controlling the situation, and it was driving me batty. “You retired so we could be together.”
“We’re certainly together more now than we were when we were both working,” he argued. “This is just one of those challenges that come along with having such a wide age difference. It was always going to be that I was retiring while you were still working, whether it was at fifty or at sixty-five.”
“Yeah.” That didn’t mean I had to like it. “I just feel guilty. People are depending on their jobs, and I’m running off, doing whatever. We have our honeymoon coming up—”
“We are not going to cut our honeymoon short,” he warned. “I desperately need sand. And cold drinks.”
I gave him a minute to correct himself.
“Or not, I suppose, if therapy continues to go well.”
“Iced tea?”
“Sophie, that’s disgusting,” he admonished.
“I’m not going to cut our vacation short. But I am going to be spending more time here, I think.” My lower lip wobbled. I was tired and over-emotional. This was the worst time to talk about this.
“Are you going to cry?” he asked gently.
I wiped my eyes with the heels of my hands, remembering my eye makeup a fraction of a second too late. He came to my side and turned me to cradle my head against his shoulder.
“A few nights apart won’t hurt us. Perhaps you can make it a point to come home on weekends, and I’ll come here a couple of times a week. We could always close the house up and move back here temporarily—”
“No!” I stepped back and swatted furious tears from my cheeks. “No. We just spent millions of dollars on that place. And it feels like home now. This place does, too, but our house… That’s just ours.”
“This place is ‘just ours’ as well.” He looked genuinely confused that I didn’t feel the same way.
Ugh, I hated having to explain things that made me sound jealous. “It’s not, though. This is the home that you established with Elizabeth. You
