least he wasn’t putting the burden all on her and if he could be magnanimous, so could she. “To be fair,” she began slowly, “some of your staff had quit and you were trying to take up the slack. You had larger problems than wondering why textbooks had appeared on the table. More gelatin?”
He shook his head, his gaze intent. “Are you working full time?”
“Officially, no. Unofficially, yes, but I’m not reaping the benefits,” she said ruefully. “However, the director of nursing told me yesterday that the next available position will be mine.” She shoved another gelatin cube in his mouth.
He chewed, swallowed, then surprised her with his next question. “How was your cousin’s wedding?”
She froze. “You knew about Angela’s wedding?”
“She sent me an invitation. I would have gone, but I didn’t want to make the day awkward for you. Things will be different, though, for your next family function.”
Different?”Excuse me?”
“I want us to save our marriage, Leah. To fix what went wrong with our relationship.”
At one time those were words she’d dreamt he would say, but too much time had passed. He was asking for the impossible.
“I know you went through a traumatic experience,” she said slowly, “and as a result you want to right the perceived wrongs in your life as part of whatever foxhole conversion you experienced, but what happened to us—to me—can’t be fixed.”
“It can,” he insisted.
“Not if our relationship is tied to my medical history.”
“It isn’t.”
She raised an eyebrow because, to her, it was. “Oh?”
“It never was.”
She eyed him carefully. “Maybe I should have Jeff order a CT scan because I think you suffered a concussion. In case you’ve forgotten, our relationship began its downhill slope when I lost Andrew and any chance for more children.”
“It may have, but we can turn our life around. Children or not, we can make our marriage into whatever we want it to be.”
His fierce determination was almost contagious, but his rhetoric didn’t change one important fact. This man, who should have gone into pediatrics because he loved little people, was destined to remain childless because she refused to risk another adoptive mother changing her mind in the final hour. And he’d made it quite plain over the years that his biggest wish was to fill his house with children—children she couldn’t give him, whether they were his or someone else’s.
Neither did his sincerity change the fact that his work at the foundation was probably far more rewarding than simply coming home to her each night. And, yes, she could join him on his trips as she had when they were first married and she’d rearranged her hospital schedule, but deep down she was a homebody while he was a traveler. Eventually, the difference would become an issue again.
“For what it’s worth, I am glad you’re back,” she said simply, “but now isn’t the time to discuss what went wrong in our life.” She rose to push his bedside table away. “Your only concern should be to give yourself time to heal.”
He frowned, clearly not liking her response. “I can’t believe you’re giving up on us so easily.”
“To you, I’m giving up, but to me, I’m finally putting the past behind me. Which is what you should be doing, too.”
He paused. “How long have you been seeing Jeff?”
She froze, startled by his question. “Jeff? I’m not … We haven’t … We’re just friends,” she finished lamely, wondering how Gabe had drawn that particular conclusion when she’d been so careful to hide her burgeoning interest in the other man.
“But you’d like it to be more.”
“You’re guessing,” she countered, hating it that he could read her so well.
He shrugged. “I saw the way he looked at you. I only want to know what I’m up against.”
She didn’t know why she felt compelled to explain, but she did. “We went for a beer a few times with the rest of the ED crowd on a Friday night, but nothing more than that. You and I may have lived apart, but I still took my wedding vows seriously, which was why I was waiting to pursue a relationship with Jeff until after …”
“After I signed the divorce papers?” he finished.
“Yes.”
“But once you heard my plane had crashed, you didn’t need them. Why didn’t you two take things to the next level right away?”
He sounded more curious than argumentative, so she answered as honestly as she could.
“If you must know, I wanted to wait until after the foundation’s annual fund-raiser. I’d already decided it would be my last one—and it seemed appropriate for our chapter to end there. Now that you’re back, there isn’t any point in waiting, is there?”
He paused. “Is that what you want? For me to sign your papers?”
Was that what she wanted? Perhaps if their differences weren’t irreconcilable, perhaps if they hadn’t grown apart, perhaps if Gabe treated their marriage as a partnership rather than a boss-employee relationship, she could risk giving him another chance, but she couldn’t.
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