Chapter Twenty-One
“The whole village came out to see us off, which was the most incredible part.” Jared rubbed his hand along his jaw, where the predictable five o’clock shadow made him appear grizzled and raw. “They spent weeks trying to keep us out by whatever means they had at their disposal, but once they saw how we were able to reattach that boy’s ear, it was like those decades of bad feelings toward Americans just disappeared.” He paused. “I’m boring you, aren’t I?”
Whitney didn’t bother suppressing her yawn. Bored, uninterested, mind-numbingly indifferent—it was all the same. “I’m not one of your sentimental med students, hanging on your every word. I’ve heard the stories. I was there for a good half dozen of them, remember?”
Her sarcasm didn’t appear to bother him. Leaning in, he placed his hand on hers. “You can’t tell me you didn’t feel anything when you were out in the field. You forget that I was there when you stepped off the airplane—remember that tiny little one-engine passenger plane, the one we thought would never make it? You were sentimental. I remember. The first to get up every morning, the last to go to bed.”
She remembered—all of it, the memories as clear as if they were moving pictures before her eyes. “God, that plane was something, wasn’t it? To this day, I’d swear the wing was held on with duct tape and sheer force of will.”
“You weren’t scared then.”
She snatched her hand back. “I’m still not. Don’t make the mistake of confusing apathy with fear.”
“I know I made a mistake—believe me, I know.” Jared’s eyes glittered at her over the table. He’d chosen the most romantic restaurant in the whole borough, a small Italian bistro with smells that, though tempting, didn’t rival the ones she’d left at home alone with Matt. “I really hurt you, didn’t I?”
“And don’t make the mistake of confusing my dislike of you now with deep-seated emotional pain. I resent your intrusion in my business life. That’s all.” Her gaze sought a place to land—anywhere but his face.
“Then why did you agree to let me on the team?”
What other choice did she have? From the moment Jared swooped into town, all their troubles seemed to simply fade away. The bank loan came through. Their client list began to grow. People stopped sticking protest signs in front of their building. She’d even gotten a call from the principal at Matt’s school asking her to fill in on a last-minute opening for Career Day.
Jared was a magic charm, the key they needed to open doors left and right. And as much as she hated to admit it, he wasn’t as terrible a person as she remembered. Still arrogant, yes, and still likely to cause her head explode at the least provocation, but also...human. If Matt could find a way to coexist in the same town with the person who’d broken his heart, maybe she could too.
“I agreed because I’m not a completely selfish bitch, no matter how much you might like to think I am. I care about Kendra and John and the success of New Leaf, and I’ll do anything—including working next to your sorry ass every day—to make it work. Satisfied?”
“I doubt I’ll ever be that.”
Now it was her turn to be nosy. “What are you really doing here, in this town and at dinner with me? What is it you hope is going to happen?”
A heavy silence settled over the table, and she fought the urge to wipe it away with idle chatter. Unless they wanted to reenact this morning’s drama at work every day for the rest of their professional lives, the truth needed to come out.
“This was my dream too,” he finally said. “It belongs to all of us.”
“Am I supposed to believe you’re giving up your adventuring life of heroism, peace and goodwill for a chance to do lipo on ladies who lunch?” She shook her head. “I’m not buying it. There’s more to your story.”
He studied her carefully, ignoring his plate of food, not moving until she uncomfortably acknowledged his desire for eye contact. “Almost twelve years, Whitney. One hundred and forty-three months. Four thousand three hundred and forty days. I can even tell you the number of hours, if you’re interested.”
“I know. It’s been a long time.”
“You don’t know. You have no idea. I could easily do another twelve years, and another twelve after that, and none of you would have any idea what it’s like. I’m done.”
“Good for you. If you don’t love the Make the World Smile work, you shouldn’t keep doing it.”
He laid his hands on the table and stretched his fingers flat against the tablecloth—a motion she recognized as the exact opposite of making fists. “I don’t just mean that I’m done with the organization. I mean I’m done atoning for the errors of my youth. Isn’t it time? Haven’t I suffered enough?”
The pasta in her stomach began to feel like a lead weight. She pushed her plate away and tossed her napkin on top to signal that she was rapidly approaching her limit.
“You seriously expect me to believe that you spent the past twelve years risking your life in the field as penance for shacking up with an anesthesiologist? Bullshit.”
“I made a mistake, one I know I can never undo.” His glance was stricken, and it would have taken a much stronger woman than she not to be moved by the entreaty she saw there. “But how much longer do I have to pay the price for our relationship ending? How much longer do I have to bear the responsibility alone?”
“No.” Her tone and voice echoed those of Matt earlier, and she couldn’t help but feel that he’d been right in forbidding her to come here. How much nicer would it be to have Matt’s arms around her right now? Those strong, kind, gentle arms? They made no demands. They would never hurt her. They’d promised.
“No,” she repeated. “You don’t get to blame me because you couldn’t keep it in your pants. Oh, excuse me—because you couldn’t keep it in your military-grade combat slacks.”
“Come on. You’re a doctor. You know as well as I do that Nancy wasn’t the disease. She was a symptom. A symptom I deeply regret, but that doesn’t change the fact that we were over long before I slept with her. Or the fact that you knew it just as well as I did.” He paused, a silence weighing several tons pulsing between them. Quieter and with infinite control, he added, “I saw the letter you wrote. I read it that same day you found me with Nancy. I’m not proud of that part, and I’ll never be able to make it okay, but all I could think about was finding some way to hurt you even a fraction of the amount you hurt me.”
Whitney’s vision filled with lines of electric white light and her whole body shook with the effort of remaining calm. “What are you talking about? I tore that letter up. I never intended for anyone to see it.”
“I saw it, Whitney. I read every last word.”
“You know what? F*ck you.” She stood, unable to stomach another second of sitting there, pretending to share a meal with this man. “A note I wrote to my parents as a scared, insecure twenty-two-year-old trapped in the middle of nowhere does not make me the guilty party here.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Jared agreed. “I should never have pressed you to come with me to Guatemala in the first place, and it should have been my first priority to make sure you were settling in. And I know Nancy was a mistake. But at any time in those early weeks, you could have told me how you felt. You could have said you were having reservations about the whole thing—about us. Instead, I had to read it in that f*cking letter. You called me self-absorbed. A self-absorbed hypocrite you barely recognized. Do you really think there was any way we could have ended that relationship on a happy note after that? Was there anything I could have done or said that would have made it all okay?”
It was a good thing she wasn’t holding a fork any longer, or she might have thrown it at his head. How dare he put this on her? How dare he rip open a wound that was only recently beginning to heal?
“You want to know how long you have to keep slaving away in jungles and deserts before I forgive you?” she said. “Twelve more years. No—make it twenty. And no matter how many women you send my way with visions of double Ds in their heads, your sentence remains intact.”
He let her leave, clutching her purse with two-fisted ferocity and marching toward the door with such purpose she almost missed the slight, blondish woman sitting at a table near the door. Almost, but not quite. No amount of rage could erase that face from her memory.
“Laura?” She did a double take, twisting to get another look.
“Oh, hey, Whitney.” Laura bobbed her head in greeting. “I saw you having dinner earlier but didn’t want to interrupt.”
What was this place, the broken relationship graveyard? She cast a look over Laura, making a quick note of her appearance. Yes, she looked thinner. And yes, there were bags under the woman’s eyes that could hold a bowling ball. But unless she was very much mistaken... She peered closer.
“That’s quite a rash you’ve got spreading up your neck there, Laura.”
Laura’s hand inadvertently went to her jawline. “Oh, that. It’s nothing.”
It didn’t look like nothing. The red, blotchy dots seemed painful to the touch. “I’m curious—do you also have them on the roof of your mouth?”
Laura’s eyes flew open, and she brushed her hair to cover the redness. Nervously, she gestured across the table. “This is Luke.”
Luke, a slight, balding man who seemed to ooze insurance salesman out his pores, started to get up, but he took one look at Whitney’s face and sat back down.
“Oh, nice. You’re on a date.” This was called anger transference—it was Psychology 101. Whitney recognized it but didn’t give one-tenth of a damn. “How lovely for you. It’s okay for you to move on with your life, but God forbid Matt try to do anything for himself.” She adjusted her posture so that she addressed Luke. “Hello. I’m your date’s ex-husband’s new girlfriend. Tell me, have you been married before?”
Luke swallowed heavily. “Um...no.”
“Serious relationship?”
“A few.” He glanced nervously at Laura. “Why?”
“How many years?”
“Almost two.”
“Perfect.” Whitney pulled up an empty chair and dropped onto it, slamming her purse on the table. Something inside it cracked. Great. Now it matched the rest of her. “After you broke up with this serious two-year love, did you ever go over to her house to hang out?”
“Well, I went once to get my CDs.”
“Look, Whitney,” Laura interrupted. “I don’t think—”
Whitney ignored her, placing both hands on the table and blazing forward. “And when you picked up said CDs, did she ask you to help her paint a room? Solve a complicated work situation? Guilt trip you into paying her credit card bill?”
“Well, Anne wasn’t there. She was on vacation at the time.”
Luke sure didn’t have much in the way of imagination, did he? “But if Anne had been there?” she prodded. “Would she have asked?”
“Anne doesn’t have any credit cards. She doesn’t believe in incurring debt.”
“Oh, for crying out loud.” Whitney gave up. “I hope you two will be very happy together.” She yanked her purse off the table, the contents spilling across the red-checkered tablecloth. She shoved it all back in, groaning only a little over the shattered phone case as she stormed out the door. Things were replaceable.
This evening was not.
* * *
Matt hated to walk through the front door of his old house without knocking first. He had the key and he knew how to jiggle the handle to get it to open on the first try, and few things had changed since he’d left almost a year and a half ago. The same tidy wreath—with its appropriately seasonal decorations—greeted him from the door. The same muted colors smiled blandly down from the foyer. It even smelled the same, a mixture of simmering potatoes and the pungent vinegar they’d always used in place of chemical cleaners.
It had once been home. But in the past few months, he’d come to realize just how little this place had ever felt like his.
“Laura?” he asked, hesitating in the doorway.
While he’d never begrudge Laura his friendship, he hated being here like this. Sneaking. Lying, if he was being honest. He’d come straight from work, hoping to duck in and immediately back out, Whitney none the wiser.
Cowardly it might be, but when it came to things like negotiating dissolved relationships, Whitney’s blinders were pitch black and sewed over her eyes.
“Are you here?” he asked again, louder this time.
“In the living room,” a feeble voice called. “Don’t turn on the lights, please. I’m resting.”
Even though his sensible, no-slip loafers made barely a scuffle as they crossed the looped carpet, Matt tiptoed. All the blinds had been drawn tight against the cheerful spring sun, and the entire room thrummed with the heavy kind of stillness that had always made him feel like a stranger in his own house.
“Thank you for coming.” Laura’s voice was weak where she rested on the couch, and Matt couldn’t help a surge of pity from flooding him. Always a slight woman, Laura had lost a good twenty pounds in the past month. Still, she smiled to see him.
His chest clenched. How could two people who once shared so much have come to this? Laura, alone and clearly unwell. Matt, wanting desperately to do something to ease her pain, but no longer able to muster anything in her presence but guilt-stricken indifference.
“Of course.” He forced himself to appear cheerful. “Can I get you something? Water? A cup of tea?”
“No, I’m fine. Sit.” She patted the couch next to her and struggled to sit up, her blanket falling away. Matt let it fall and chose the seat farthest from her, a stiff, overstuffed armchair in a floral pattern he’d always hated.
Laura noticed his distance and smiled sadly. “I saw your girlfriend the other night. Whitney. The doctor.”
“Did you?” Matt felt a surge of irritation at the way Laura’s mouth formed the sounds of Whitney’s name, as if they were discussing an imaginary friend from Matt’s childhood. Whitney was real and incredible and his. And he didn’t care to talk about her with Laura.
“At Pizzaro’s. She was there with some guy. So was I.”
Ah, the infamous dinner with the good doctor who broke Whitney’s heart. When she’d come home that night, she’d been smoldering with fury at whatever dirty laundry had needed airing between the two of them. After asking once if she was okay, they’d tacitly decided not to discuss that particular evening—just jumped into bed like they hadn’t felt the touch of another human being for years. It had been desperate, needy sex, the pair of them clinging to one another as if their lifeboat was damn near running out of air.
They hadn’t talked about it since—and he wasn’t eager to break the heavy, lingering silence surrounding the topic with Laura, of all people.
“I hope you had a nice time,” he said blandly.
“I did. His name is Luke, by the way.”
He waited. What was the appropriate response when one’s ex-wife started seeing someone? What are his intentions? Has he found your ticklish spot yet? Is he handy with a hedge trimmer?
“I think we’ve done a good job, don’t you?”
Matt glanced around the room, looking for clues.
Laura laughed, the same short, semi-forced chuckle that she’d always had. At least some things couldn’t be eradicated with a grim diagnosis. “I meant with us. Look at how well we’ve handled things. Our one year divorciversary is coming up and we’re doing fine. Both of us dating again. No screaming fits. It’s as though we’ve always been the best of friends.”
“A divorciversary?” Matt relaxed into a smile. “I didn’t know that was something people celebrated.”
“I made it up. Pretty clever, huh?” She didn’t wait for him to acknowledge it. “But that’s sort of why I asked you here today.”
“Because we’re responsible adults?” For some reason, that realization didn’t make him feel particularly proud. No one would accuse Whitney of being a responsible adult. Sure, she had all the trappings, but inside, she was a whirlwind of emotions and sensations and opinions on the world. An irresponsible adult. He liked the sound of that.
“Yes. Because what I’m about to ask you is something that only responsible adults—like us—could even contemplate.”
He leaned forward, scooting to the edge of his chair. “Has something happened? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing like that.” She busied herself tucking the blanket more firmly around her. “It’s just...what would you say to moving back in? Only for a little while? Until I’m feeling...you know. Better.”
Matt had moved so far to the edge of the chair he could have been knocked off with a feather or a poke or even a slight breeze. But of course none of those things existed in this house. “Move back in? Here?”
This time, Laura’s smile was sad and a little wan, her already pale features growing more slight. “I know it’s crazy. But I can’t. I just can’t. Take care of things, of this place, of myself. I’m overwhelmed by this house every single day.” Then, more quietly, “I have been since you left. I know that’s my own fault, after what I did to you. I was just strong enough to handle it all before my illness. I’m nowhere near strong enough now.”
Matt gave up the pretense of sitting and moved to the mantle, to where the urn that contained Laura’s mother’s ashes rested, a reminder of just how close to the other side they were. He ran his finger over the stainless-steel surface, the engraving confirming the dates of the woman’s short life. “I’ll hire you a nurse. Live-in help if you need it. A whole fleet of housekeepers.”
“Matt, you can’t afford that.” Forcefully, she added, “Look at me, please.”
He turned, albeit begrudgingly. “What about the new guy? Luke?”
Laura laughed again. When had she become the calm in the middle of all this? “I don’t think one blind date is quite enough for a man to be saddled with all this, do you?”
“But I’m seeing someone,” he protested. Someone, he didn’t have to say, who had offered to throw Laura into the river on more than one occasion. Someone, he didn’t want to say, who made him feel a thousand things more than Laura ever had. “We’re not who we used to be.”
“That’s just it!” Laura sat up straighter. “You’ve moved on with your life, found someone new to love—you’re happy. I could never have asked otherwise.”
Happy. That’s what this was. Bumps and speed bumps and meddling exes aside, Whitney made him happy.
“I’m sorry. I don’t think I can do it.”
“Please. I don’t have anyone else.” Her voice cracked. “I need you.”
There were those words again.
He closed his eyes, but the oppression in the room lingered, pressing at him from all sides. He should have taken Hilly’s advice and moved to a new city the moment he found out Laura cheated. He should have taken Lincoln’s advice and taken Laura to court so he could sell this goddamn house and wipe away the memories of the two of them once and for all.
He should take Whitney’s advice and tell Laura to go to hell.
A long, slow breath escaped him. It was too late now. The damage was done, the disease already taken hold. “I have to talk to Whitney first.”
“Of course you do,” Laura said, clearly pleased. “Oh, and Matt?”
He forced his shoulders to remain up, but couldn’t yet bring himself to open his eyes. “Yeah?”
“I’d love that cup of tea now.”