when we stopped for gas, but Megan says they’re full. Some holiday event going on at Caine Tech and they’ve booked the whole place.”
No room at the inn. How appropriate for this time of year.
“I don’t mind. This will be fine,” she answered. Did he really think she would rather stay at a hotel instead of with their children?
“There’s not much here,” he said, an odd sort of warning in his voice. He unlocked the door and walked inside. As soon as she followed, she knew exactly what he meant.
The place was empty.
No pictures on the walls, no knickknacks, no furniture except an old sofa.
The house where she and Luke had started their marriage with so many high hopes was now a hollow shell.
“I don’t...I don’t understand. Where are...Cassie and Bridger?”
He set her suitcase down with a thump beside the front door. “In school until I pick them up. Then they’ll be at home. My home.”
“Oh. I thought...” Her words trailed off as she only now realized how stupid and shortsighted she had been.
“You thought I would let you see them? Talk to them? Hell no, Elizabeth.”
Of course he wouldn’t let her see the children. She should never have been foolish enough to expect otherwise. Disappointment rolled over her like a snowplow, with sharp, fierce intensity.
“You...won’t?”
“You lost any rights where Bridger and Cassie are concerned when you walked away from us. I won’t let you break their hearts again.”
She could feel herself sway, her legs unsteady. For one horrible moment she was afraid she would fall to her knees. She reached behind her for the wall, hoping he didn’t notice the gesture.
“I would never hurt them,” she said, her voice small.
“What do you think you have been doing for the past seven years?”
She had hated his silence during the drive but this bitterness was far worse. Elizabeth closed her eyes, the pain and loss and loneliness almost more than she could bear.
He would never agree, but everything she had done had been in her misguided effort to protect her children. They were the entire reason she had left in the first place.
“I...see.”
“You created this situation, Elizabeth. Because of you, I have been their sole caregiver. I’m the only one who gets to decide what’s right for them. You gave me that responsibility when you left—before then, actually, when you checked out emotionally after Bridger came along.”
She drew in an unsteady breath, hating his reminder of what a terrible state she had been in, lost and depressed and overwhelmed.
She had suffered severe postpartum depression made worse by the clinical depression. She hadn’t asked for it, had she? Hadn’t wanted it. He made it sound as if she had chosen to be depressed instead of fighting it with everything she had. She had tried prescription medicine, therapy, everything the doctors recommended. The next step would have been an inpatient program, which in retrospect had probably been exactly what she had needed.
That was the past. Hadn’t she paid the price all these years?
She found it hideously ironic that the only good thing to come out of the severe brain injury she suffered in the accident had been that the cloud of soul-stealing depression had lifted.
She had traded one problem for about two dozen more.
Luke stood beside the door, unyielding and rigid as one of the oak trees growing outside. She wanted to yell at him, to fight and argue and pound her fist against his chest until he let her see her children. She couldn’t. The harsh truth was, he was exactly right. She had lost any right to even call herself a mother.
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