relief was short-lived. “A horrible ailment,” she decided. “Are you dying?”
“No. Angie, just let me speak. Please.”
“I’m trapped on a boat. What choice do I have?” How could she have been so dumb? How could she have declared her love for him? Now, he had to make excuses. She braced herself for it. She could imagine what was coming. He didn’t love her. He was going to try and let her down gently. I like you very much. I hope we can remain friends.
“Are you listening?” he asked.
“No, I’m contemplating jumping off the boat. Unfortunately, the weight of the dress, wet, would probably drown me.”
“As if I would ever let you drown,” he said, annoyed.
That made her look at him. There was a protective fury in his voice. And there was something tortured in the way he was looking at her.
“Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath, “I’m listening.”
“Those people, who you so correctly pointed out love me, are trying to help me. They were so insistent I come tonight, because they are trying to bring me back to their world. But I feel their love is with an illusion, because they have no idea who I really am.”
She stared at him. He was standing at the back of the boat, his weight rocking easily from foot to foot with the boat’s motion. How could he believe people had no idea who he was when he radiated who he was?
All that quiet confidence and strength.
“Everybody is trying to make me feel better about what happened that night with Hailey. They’re trying to make me feel better, they want me to get on with my life. But I would have to absolve myself, and I can’t.”
“Absolve yourself?” she whispered.
“Here’s the truth no one knows,” he said harshly. “Here’s the truth you need to know before you make your declaration of love.
“We fought that night. That’s what sent her out onto those terrible roads. We had had a terrible fight. And I was so mad, I didn’t go after her. I knew she didn’t know those roads. I failed her. I failed to protect her. Isn’t that what I swore I would do, when I said those vows to her?”
“Jefferson, what happened?”
He looked out over the lake, pensive. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet. Angie had to strain to hear it.
“I could not believe my ears when Hailey said she wanted to build a house on the land I’d inherited from my grandparents. My grandparents’ house had already burned down by the time I met her, so our trips to the property were not exactly successes. We tried camping once. That was a disaster. We stayed at the hotel in Anslow twice, and that didn’t meet her standards.
“That’s nothing against her—she was a big-city girl, with a high-powered career that was just reaching its pinnacle. I knew that when I married her.
“I was fine with our life. I loved my wife. We had a swanky apartment in downtown Vancouver. Both of us traveled a lot with our careers. When we were together it was fancy dinners and theater and entertaining friends. I was content with all of that.
“Until she said she wanted to build a house here, on my land, on Kootenay Lake. And then I knew how much I had missed it and how much I wanted to come home. Then, I knew I harbored other dreams beyond the amazing success I was enjoying. Of having a family, and of campfires on summer nights and long days on the boat.
“We started building in the spring. It was a huge undertaking. Summer was the best part of the whole project. We lived in a holiday trailer, but everything seemed exciting—things were happening, the house was taking shape. We’d work all day, then swim and sit around a little campfire roasting hot dogs.
“But, right from the start, there were disagreements. She picked an impractical location for the house because it would “showcase” her skills. The whole project very quickly seemed to become about showcasing her skills. Budget went out the window with the building of the road to the house site, and it went downhill from there.
“Double ovens in the kitchen? She didn’t even cook. A craft room? You could not meet a person less interested in being crafty than Hailey.
“Then the build went into the fall. It was wet and grim. By the time we finished and moved in, Hailey hated it here. It’s cold that close to the water. It’s foggy. Because of where she chose to put the house, it was incredibly difficult to get in and out of it.
“But, finally, we were nearing completion. That’s when she started picking furniture. Every single thing seemed to be about how it looked instead of how it felt.
“And that night when we fought, she was placing furniture and it slipped out that she was staging the house. Staging. That’s what you do to manipulate people’s impressions of a space—it’s like you’re creating a fantasy they can walk into. It’s not what you do if you’re planning on living there.
“So, I pressed her on that, what she meant by staging, and she admitted all of it had really been with an eye to a future sale. The property, by itself, is probably worth millions. With the house on it?
“She figured with the proceeds of this sale we could buy a piece of property in any big city in the world that we wanted, and she could build our real house there. Our real house, the house for the busy professional couple, with no children. She actually laughed when I asked her where our kids fit into the picture.
“I’m not proud of what happened next. I lost my mind. I started smashing all her little staging items—her expensive vases and her pictures that didn’t mean anything to anybody. I’m not sure I have ever been so angry.
“And she left. She left in the middle of a snowstorm and drove away. And I didn’t go after her.
“No, I sat and brooded over the mistake I’d made, and asked myself how I couldn’t have seen sooner what was coming. I didn’t think—not once—about all the things I loved about her. The way she laughed, and how smart she was, and how she liked to play jokes on me. I didn’t think about all the good years we’d had before we started to build that house, or all the things we had in common. No, I got rip-roaring drunk, and I passed out on the couch.
“I woke up to a knock at the door. It was the police. She’d made it up our road to the highway. But she had tried to take a corner too fast. It was slippery. She’d gone off the road. She died on impact, when the car hit the water.”
Angie could feel the tears streaming down her face. She got up from where she had been sitting and stood behind him. She wrapped her arms around him and leaned her head into his back.
He jerked away from her. He spun and looked at her. His eyes were dark with a fury that made her take a step back from him, even though it was obvious the fury was directed at himself.
“That’s the me that nobody knows,” he said grimly. “I killed her. She had nowhere to go when I got mad like that. I might as well have put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.”
Angie gasped at that, but he wasn’t done.
“You were right. Those people love me. They’ve loved me since I was a six-year-old
