Total pages in book: 88
Estimated words: 83718 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 419(@200wpm)___ 335(@250wpm)___ 279(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83718 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 419(@200wpm)___ 335(@250wpm)___ 279(@300wpm)
By the time I got home, Molly and Noah were in the middle of their bath-and-bedtime routine. I went for a run on the treadmill in the basement, and when that didn’t clear my head, I came out here.
Molly offers me a tentative smile and hands me a beer. “I thought you might need this.”
I take it and study the label as she settles into the seat beside me. “Thanks.”
“Do you want to talk about Sara?”
I want to talk about you. I search her face for any indication that she might understand what’s really gotten under my skin, but I see none. “Ten years ago, Sara up and left me, and I didn’t know why. Today, she explained.” I swallow. “So, now I finally know, and . . .” I squeeze the back of my neck, but it does nothing to release the tension knotting there.
Molly puts her beer down and stands behind my chair. Her hands settle on my shoulders, her thumbs rubbing circles on my neck. I close my eyes and feel the tension leak away. Not just because she’s massaging my tight muscles, but because she’s here.
I bow my head to give her better access to my tight spots. “I can almost understand why she did it. She knew I would’ve walked away from everything to be with her. Not just the family business, but Jackson Harbor. And she knew how important my family was—is—to me. She needed to get away from it, and I was so blind to her battle with alcoholism that I didn’t even know.”
“She hid it? The alcoholism?”
Shame washes over me. “I like to think I’d have seen it if we’d lived together, but we didn’t. She didn’t want to move in until after we were married, and I never questioned her wishes.” I sigh as I see those days through a new lens. “I knew she could get out of hand when she drank. Sometimes it was hard to pull her away from the booze at parties and out at the bar, but we were young, and I told myself it was only sometimes. She was in law school, for Christ’s sake, and at the top of her class. It was easy to write off any passing concerns I might have had, because other than those bad nights, her life seemed great. Seemed is the keyword, I guess.”
“If you weren’t living with her and she worked to hide it, I’m not sure how you could have known.”
“I didn’t want to know. That’s on me. Until today, I had no idea how much she was struggling. I caught her sleeping with her law professor a few days before she left, and even that didn’t clue me in. I thought they were having an affair, but she confessed this morning that she’d agreed to sleep with him if he’d change her grade. It’s just one more piece of evidence proving I had no idea what was really going on with her when she left.”
“Brayden,” she says softly. “She hurt you. You couldn’t have been expected to see through such a betrayal when you were in the middle of dealing with it.”
“I saw what I wanted to see—the woman who made me relax, who helped me cut loose when I was stressed, and who dreamed of the same future I did.”
Molly stills behind me, and her touch goes lighter. “What did you dream of?”
“The normal stuff. A family, kids, to stay in Jackson Harbor and turn my father’s business into something so big the whole world could see how talented he was.” I blow out a breath and watch it cloud in the cold air. “I can take responsibility for not looking closer at what I sometimes suspected might be a bigger problem for her, and I can understand why she thought leaving was the best thing for me.”
“Then what’s bothering you?”
I’m glad she’s behind me. I’m glad I don’t have to see her face when I admit, “I wanted to be enough for her to be selfish. I wanted to be so necessary to her happiness that she could have at least given the choice to me, let me decide if the sacrifice was worth giving us a chance.”
“She . . . wants you back?” Was that a hitch in her voice or just wishful thinking on my part?
“Yeah. She does.”
“Maybe you’d feel better if you talked about it.”
I reach back and take her hand, squeezing her fingers in mine. “There’s not much to talk about.”
I swallow. The truth is, between the time Sara left until last spring when the job with Jackson Brews brought Molly into my life more regularly, I thought I wouldn’t ever feel like that for someone again. I’ve avoided any relationship that would make me that vulnerable. I didn’t want to give anyone the power to hurt me like Sara did. But I know without a doubt I’d happily hand that power over to Molly.