Chapter 23

“Abby?”

Something had shifted, right in front of him. Something big.

The woman he loved with every cell of his being regarded him. Her face was drawn, stone-like, in the dim flicker of the light.

More than the dankness of the cave crawled over him now. For a scant second it felt like his blood stopped in mid-flow, arrested in his veins at the permafrost in her passionless glare.

He knew when she was so angry she couldn’t say a word, and it had never been about him. Ever.

What could be so bad?

He leaned toward her, reached for her fingers. A touch. Something. “What’s going on? What are you thinking?”

She moved back almost imperceptibly, and his fingers slid from hers and hit the dirt. When she stared at him, the small hairs on his neck stood up like brittle iron shavings.

And the disconcerting thought hit him. Perhaps this was what she’d been getting to, from the first moment they’d laid eyes on each other, here on Chandelle.

There was no backing away from those eyes. That gaze.

Her eyes bored into him. “Just what exactly did you do while I was gone, when I first left? When we broke up?”

Dare blinked, leaned back. Paused, then spoke slowly. “I told you. I wasn’t in good shape. First I was mad, then I was a royal mess. Everywhere. I didn’t do good at work, and then…”

The vision of the woman…what was her name? Ah yeah, Stella. Stella Prentice, the regular at their favorite haunt that had been after him forever, even when Abby’d been around, slammed into his mind.

The real answer, the one he was suddenly so aware of now that they were back together again, or almost back together, train-wrecked into his brain.

The real answer was he’d fucked Stella Prentice.

A chill scraped through him, created a schism in him he didn’t like.

“I told you. I messed up.” He seized on the only thing he could. “And I came to see you.” Maybe she was forgetting that little tidbit. “And you dissed me in front of your whole office!”

There. Let her stew on that for a moment.

But it didn’t seem to faze her.

“I did.” The words rolled from her as easily as if she was discussing new brands of latte to try. “Do you have any idea why I might have done that?”

“Spit it out.”

“A week before that, I came back to town.”

His mind raced to unearth what simple point she was wrapping in complexity.

Nothing.

What had happened, around that time?

Stella bouncing under him. Locking her lips on his cock, drawing with all her might. Her silky blonde hair spread over his thighs, tickling the curly hairs.

He winced.

“The doctor’s office called. They had some test results from before I left. I came back for that, and to see you.”

The doctor’s office?

She continued, as if she’d been discussing her favorite lens, or something similar. “I slept at Monica’s and came to see you the next morning at the house.”

A dark curtain came down, the feeling of being smothered. “Well, if I wasn’t there, I was at work.”

“You were there.”

“I never saw you. Did you knock? Did you change your mind?”

He saw an expression, defiant, knowing, edge onto her face. “No. I had my key. It was early, so I came in.”

No.

No no no no no no…

A helpless feeling assailed him.

“You were fucking someone.” The words were stated without fanfare, without vitriolic finger-pointing. As a simple matter of fact.

And a weight, a cold stone jabbed into his heart, slammed into his gut. “Crap, Abby. I was drunk. I’d gone to see your parents, and they’d said all the stuff about you running from me. I wanted to get wasted, and I did. She got in my car. Said she’d drive me home.” He remembered pushing the woman away once she’d gotten him into his house, but she just kept coming. Wrapping those arms around him, pressing up against him.

And suddenly, he’d been as much of a madman as it was possible to be while being completely sloshed. He’d lunged at her, taken the curvaceous body of the woman who’d offered it and lost himself in the drive of his body. He’d bedded her, and added the flaming regret of it to the huge list of shitholes his life had suddenly become. “We slept together. It never happened again.”

She shrugged as if it wasn’t the point. Not the point at all. And something cold clawed through him, touched his extremities with sub-zero ice. “The only problem is, I had news to tell you. I didn’t get to tell you.”

Her eyes were full of tears and she was shaking. Rocking back and forth, her bloodless fingers clenched her ankles as she sat on his tousled windbreaker cross-legged.

He grabbed her by the shoulders, stopped the motion abruptly. Scared. “Tell me what it was you came to tell me. Tell me, sweetheart. It’s okay. Whatever it is, it’s okay.”

The tears streaked down her face, glistening in the scant lighting. And the awful words she spoke twisted his heart with a force he hadn’t ever realized possible.

“We were going to have a baby. I thought maybe Kayla or…or a little boy, like you.”

But her eyes were the worst. He’d never forget her eyes, as she told him the last, world-altering fact, the scant words she breathed that he’d never be able to make sense of, no matter how long he lived.

“Only…she died.”

His gut blew apart with the emotion as it splintered inside him.