He looked at his daughters and knew he’d never forget this moment.
This was the price for every bad choice he’d ever made. And of all his poor choices, none had been worse than not loving Birdie enough to fight for their marriage. “This is hard on all of us,” he said. His words came slowly; he was a blind man feeling his way down a dark and twisting hallway. “But we love you.” He glanced at Birdie, did his damnedest not to cry. “And we love each other. For now, that’s all we know. You guys can either help us through this, or you can be angry and shut us out. You’re adults. We can’t control you anymore.” His voice almost broke. “But we need you now—both of us do. Maybe more than we ever have. We need to be a family.”
That took the wind out of Jamie’s sail. The anger seeped out of her; without it, she crumpled to her knees, whispering something Jack couldn’t hear.
Elizabeth slid to the floor beside her. “My girls,” she whispered.
Jamie and Stephanie launched themselves at her. The three of them clung together, crying.
Jack stared down at them longingly. He wanted to join them, to for once be part of that inner circle, but he couldn’t move. They’d always been a trio first, a family second.
It was Jamie who looked up at him first. Jamie, his warrior princess, whose face was ravaged now by pain. “Daddy,” was all she said, reaching out.
She hadn’t called him that in years.
Elizabeth reached behind her, felt around for Jack’s hand. When she found it, she squeezed hard.
He slid off the sofa to his knees and took them all in his arms.
Elizabeth felt as if she’d just gone two rounds with Evander Holyfield. She sat in the porch swing, gliding back and forth. A full moon hung above the midnight-blue ocean, its light a silver beacon across the waves.
The last four hours had been the worst time of her life.
They’d all sat together, alternately weeping and shouting. Jamie had vacillated between fury and despair; Stephanie had been stubbornly silent, refusing to accept that her parents might not get back together.
Now, finally, the girls had gone to sleep.
She heard the screen door open and bang shut.
Jack stepped onto the porch. With a sigh, he slumped down onto the swing beside her. The chains groaned at his weight.
Elizabeth wrapped the woolen blanket more tightly around her shoulders. “We should have lied to them.”
“I don’t know how you had the guts to tell them,” he answered. “When they started crying … shit, it was awful.”
“It’s my fault,” she said. “I refused to go to New York. I wrote that letter. I had to be the one to tell them.”
“We both know better than that, Birdie. This is a thing we did together.”
It meant so much to her, those few and precious words. He’d shouldered part of her guilt. “I still love you,” she said, realizing suddenly that it was true. That it had always been true. She turned to him. “Until tonight, I’d forgotten that.”
He looked at her steadily. “For years, I asked you what was wrong. You never really answered, did you?”
“You don’t know what it’s like to disappear, Jack. How could you? You’ve always been so confident, so sure of yourself.”
“Are you kidding, Birdie? I went from all-star in the NFL to nobody. Nobody.”
“That’s different. I’m talking about who you are inside. Not what your job is.”
“You never understood,” he said. “For a man, what you do is who you are. When I lost football, I lost myself.”
“You never told me that.”
“How could I? I was ashamed, and I knew what it had been like for you as a player’s wife.”
He was right. She’d grown to hate his football years; the better he did in the sport, the farther he moved from the family.
So she hadn’t been there for him in his time of need. Instead of his safe harbor, she’d been another port to avoid. “I’m sorry, Jack.”
“Don’t say that. We’ve wasted too many years on that.”
“Not wasted,” she said softly. “We did okay, Jack. We buoyed each other up for twenty-four years. We built a house and home that was a safe and happy place. We created two beautiful, loving young women.” She managed a smile. “Not too bad for a couple of kids who ran off to get married in the last semester of college. There were a lot of years when I thought we had everything.”
He stood up and offered her his hand. She took it greedily, held on so tightly his strong bones shifted within her grasp. “You’re something special, you know that?”
He’d never said that to her before. The simple compliment meant more to her than she’d thought possible. “You, too.”
“Well. Good night, Birdie.”
“Good night.”
She went to her bedroom alone.
Jack pulled into the airport’s underground parking lot. When he turned off the rental car’s engine, the silence was deafening.