“I might love you and want you back, but there’s a whole bunch of hurt and mistrust between us. If we don’t talk about it sometime, we’ll never come out from under it. And after tonight, I’m all out of charm and guile. My better nature is gone, Nat. This is me, the bruised, hurting guy you left who still loves you. Who only wanted to make love to his wife tonight and then found out she really didn’t want him.”
Her nails dug into his hand. “I did want you.”
The pain in his chest was crushing. “Not enough to let me really love you. When I stood halfway between our houses on the bridge, it finally occurred to me that maybe I’ve been wrong this whole time—maybe you don’t really love me anymore. Maybe I’ve already lost everything.”
She pressed her free hand to her mouth and sniffed. Tears filled her eyes and started to fall down her cheeks. He’d never seen her cry before—really cry—so it felt like he was witnessing a miracle. A shaft of hope poured into him.
“I do love you,” she whispered.
And with those precious words, he fell through the bottom of his own despair, into a place of new beginnings. Her tears fell on their joined hands, and the warmth of them washed over the hurt in his heart. His throat filled with emotion, but he made himself wait for her to continue.
“I’m scared,” she said, dashing at the tears streaming down her face unchecked. “It’s like there’s this dark room inside me, and it’s filled with all the pain of losing Kim—and you. I’m…afraid…that if I go in there I’ll never make it out again. I used to think I was…strong, but this pain…Blake, it’s too much for me. I don’t think I know what true strength is, but I don’t think I have it.”
He knew that kind of pain, understood the desperate desire to make it stop, to run from it.
“I can’t take it,” she said, her voice hoarse. “I’m afraid I’ll go crazy again, the kind of crazy I was after Kim’s funeral, when you found me on my knees in the shower, the cleaning powder dusting my hair, coating my dress. I looked in the mirror and hated myself. And I saw the look on your face. I wasn’t…the woman you’d fallen in love with, the woman you’d asked to marry you.”
She’d scared him shitless that day, and she wasn’t mincing words—she really had looked like a crazy woman. More than anything he’d wanted to take her into his arms and tell her it would be all right, but the words wouldn’t have been true, so he hadn’t said them. Now, sitting beside her on the couch, he clenched her hand tight in his.
“Before Adam died, I…thought I’d be prepared for it, you know? We had almost a year between that first serious cardiac incident and…his passing. We all knew he was living on borrowed time, and that he wouldn’t grow old like the rest of us.”
A soft light shone through her eyes as her tears continued to fall. He had to cough to clear his throat.
“When my mom called to tell me…he was gone…I didn’t think anything could hurt that bad. Losing you hurt bad. Don’t think for a moment I’m saying otherwise. But with Adam…there was no hope of a second chance. He was gone. Just like that. I was never going to see him again or hear him laugh or have him tell one of his silly jokes.”
The pain of losing him surfaced anew, and he felt his own eyes fill with tears, his nose start to run.
“I wish…I’d been there for you,” Natalie said, pressing closer.
He turned so she could nestle against him and carefully wrapped his arm around her. “Then you would have seen me in my own crazy. I probably threw five hundred passes through my training net in the backyard until I broke down and bawled. It wasn’t pretty. I mean I’ve cried before, but this was…”
“Madness,” she finished in a whisper. “When I saw you flinch that day in the bathroom, seeing me like that, I was…”
His gut trembled, afraid of what she was about to confess to him. He knew it was going to be part of the answer to why she’d left. “You were what?” he asked.
“I thought if…I could just stay numb, I wouldn’t become that crazy woman I saw in the mirror. I knew you wouldn’t let me stay that way. You…loved me too much not to try and comfort me, and I was sure that would only make it worse.”
His sixth sense told him there was something more, something a lot scarier hidden in her words. He braced himself to face down the monster. “What else?”
An anguished sound rose from her throat. “I…I thought if I stayed and went crazy, you’d… stop loving me.”
Oh shit. He squeezed his eyes shut as the pain flooded him. She hadn’t trusted him to love her enough. Somehow that hurt worse than the rest of her fallout from that decision.
“Keep going. Might as well get it all out.”
“I…saw your face when you opened the door. Your whole face scrunched up when you looked at me. I felt…like a leper.” Her fingernails dug deep grooves into his hands now. “I didn’t recognize myself. I hated that crazy woman covered in cleaning powder. How could you love her? I didn’t.”
The wetness in his eyes welled up, sending tears down his face. So far, they’d been confessing their deepest and darkest secrets without eye contact, but this revelation…she needed to see what was in his eyes. He turned to face her.