expected to feel angry.
Oh, it was so strange!
She’d been so completely unsurprised to find him banging on that front door, demanding entrance in the middle of the night, but everything after that hadn’t gone the way she’d thought it would at all.
At some level, she’d wanted all the ego and impatience and one-sided demands. MJ so rarely betrayed any sense of vulnerability. Just those tiny glimpses in his last few words tonight had rocked her and undermined her certainty far more than he could have done with undiluted anger.
And then he’d listened to her.
She’d asked him to go, and he’d done so, and now she was left knowing she wouldn’t sleep tonight. He had talked about the two of them needing time. Writing that note to him this morning, she would have said that time was the last thing she needed. She’d had a ton of that.
She’d been thinking for months about leaving him. Flirting with the idea at first. What if I just took the children and left? Not meaning it, just playing with it. But then the thoughts had grown more serious, the plans more detailed.
She would have to leave the city, she’d decided, so that there was some physical distance between the two of them and so that neither of them had to face pressure from his father.
Who would hate this, she knew, because he expected perfection and order from his children.
She would have to soften the reality for Abby and Tyler, and leaving the city would help, there, too. They were so small; she didn’t want them to witness the ugliness and conflict. She had to find a secure, happy environment for them from the beginning, even if there was a later transition to a different, permanent home. Andy’s rental apartment checked all the boxes.
When she’d reached a concrete decision, there hadn’t been any momentous last straw to make it happen; it was simply a long, gradual accumulation, with a handful of moments that stood out from the rest.
Like the night Andy and Claudia had announced their engagement and their plans for the small, informal wedding that would be taking place in New York City just a couple of weeks from now. Alicia had urged Claudia to go for something bigger, even if it meant waiting, and when she thought back, she realized that MJ’s sister, Scarlett, had probably interpreted that in the worst way.
Alicia knew that at least some members of the McKinley family believed she’d married MJ for his money and status.
Well, they were right, weren’t they?
It was stupid and pointless to regret the rush of their Las Vegas wedding. Would their marriage have been any healthier and happier if they’d started it off with a well-organized splash, months in the planning? Would it have happened at all?
Doubtful.
MJ would have been bound to see sense and realize he could do so much better.
She shivered. It really was cold in the house. She’d tried the heating earlier tonight, but nothing happened when she touched the controls on the electronic thermostat. Apparently Andy hadn’t yet turned on the furnace, although he hadn’t mentioned it during their short phone call. Maybe he shared MJ’s preference for bracing doses of fresh air at a temperature of fifty degrees or less.
She crept upstairs and back to bed, but her churning feelings, her blank sense of the future and her freezing feet wouldn’t let her sleep, and when Abby and Tyler came bouncing into the room at just after six-thirty, she wasn’t sure how she was going to get through the day.
MJ checked out of the cheap motel on the outskirts of Albany at seven in the morning. His colleagues would be surprised to see him in surgery at eleven-thirty, after what he’d said to Raj on the phone last night, but it wasn’t their business.
Later, at his office, he would have to grab Carla, his office manager, and go through his schedule with her. He had to be realistic. If he and Alicia were going to give themselves a chance, then he needed to give them time. Time to talk. Time to compromise. Time to mine down to the depths of what was wrong.
It hit him again as he drove.
He did not want a divorce.
His throat hurt over it. His whole body hurt, knotted with the tension of rebellion and pain and refusal to accept his marriage was over.
He was not getting a divorce. He didn’t damn well believe in it! Not when you had kids. Not when you had a partnership that should have worked.
He accepted that Alicia wasn’t doing this on a shallow whim, and so he was going to have to work at changing her mind, and if she wasn’t expecting a fight from him over this, then she didn’t know him very well.
Did she know him well?
The question struck him suddenly, as if he had a passenger sitting beside him, grilling him on the issue. Did he know her?
Well, of course they knew each other! They each knew what the other ate for breakfast. They knew the sounds each other made in bed. He knew she liked diamonds and sapphires but not emeralds. She knew he detested reality TV.
Did any of that count as real knowledge?
They’d rushed into their marriage. He recognized that. He’d even recognized it at the time. He hadn’t thought it mattered, because in the moment he’d felt so incredibly, exhilaratingly sure. He’d had this all-seeing, all-knowing confidence—arrogance, let’s face it—that he could see the whole picture and that he understood what would make their marriage work better than anyone else.
How wrong had he been?
Chapter Four
Seven years earlier …
“Want to dress up tonight?”
Alicia gave MJ a questioning look and tucked the fluffy white hotel towel a little tighter between her breasts, and he thought that the gesture was an unconscious betrayal.
Of her increasingly urgent inner questions about where this relationship was going. Of the fact that the variety in her wardrobe was getting thin.
“I want to go someplace really special,” he added, so that she’d know he had plans.
“I’d love that,” she said, then warned him with a slow and almost cheeky smile. “But you’ve seen the dress before.”
“That’s okay. Gives me confidence. You’ve never yet worn anything I didn’t like.”
He suspected that most of her wardrobe came from charity stores, because even he, with no interest in fashion, could see that her carefully put-together outfits weren’t at the forefront of style. But she wore them with the aura of an Oscar-winning actress on the red carpet, as if she knew that she looked stunning, and as if she was wearing fifteen thousand dollars worth of fabric and design on her upper body alone.
He admired the bravado of the performance, and that she was successful at it. She was an astute shopper, and you had to really look closely to see that she wasn’t wearing a designer label after all, or that if it was, it was “vintage,” aka secondhand, rather than new.
