again? What do you mean?” she asked.
“Having a baby. I know you said before that you were finished hoping but I’ve been thinking about that, too. The doctor might have been wrong. We could consult another specialist.”
“Please, Alex,” she said, staring into his eyes. “This is all too much. An hour ago I thought I’d never see you again. There are things we need to discuss.” She smiled and added, “That’s a real understatement.”
There was a sudden knock on the front door and they both turned their heads and stared into the living room as though expecting an invasion.
“I think our time before the blitz is about up,” he said as the doorbell chimed. He could hear voices coming from outside and more knocks seemed to rattle the windows. “Continue with what you were saying,” he urged.
“Not now, not like this,” she said with a shake of her head. She pushed a few strands of hair away from her face and smiled. “Later, okay? I’ll go stick these clothes in the bedroom. Will you answer the door?”
“Might as well get it over with,” he said as he got to his feet. But for a second he stood there watching Jessica hurry into the kitchen with the basket on her hip. He knew she would take the back stairs up to their bedroom.
What he didn’t know was what she was trying to tell him.
Chapter Two
Jessica’s laptop sat on her desk. With barely a pause, she set the laundry basket aside and opened the computer. Within a few seconds, she was at her Facebook page where she spent several minutes deleting a post she’d made almost two months earlier and which she hoped and prayed Alex would never know existed.
What she’d written had seemed reasonable at the time, like turning over every rock, but now in light of what she knew, it seemed the very essence of double-crossing on her part.
She deleted all pertinent comments from friends and family and closed the laptop, able to really take a breath for the first time in an hour. Then she moved to the window and pulled aside the drape. From this vantage point, she could see all the media trucks parked outside. Several neighbors had wandered over, apparently curious about what was going on. Alex, a lone, weathered-looking figure, stood on the front lawn facing the crowd, his back to Jessica. After months of solitude, what must this day be like for him?
She hurried down the stairs, pausing to take a deep breath before going outside. They’d been a team once upon a time, like right after their marriage when no life-altering disappointments had pushed them apart. Could they be a team again?
Well, one thing was for sure. There was far too much at stake not to at least try. It was time to join Alex.
She stood to the side as he skirted questions, explaining how he’d survived and how he’d finally been able to get home. But reporters asking him about his plane and what went wrong got vague answers and he flatly refused to comment on the possibility of sabotage. He said it was too soon to talk like that, he needed more information.
Jessica was proud of the way he handled himself but not surprised. He could be a very articulate and commanding man when he wanted to be. Those qualities had drawn her to him in the first place and as she listened to him now, she once again wondered how they had grown so far apart.
When he saw her standing near, he extended his arm to welcome her to stand beside him and she did. Flashbulbs popped at the reunited, happy couple and she smiled as best she could.
Much later that night, she woke up in the middle of a dream whose details vanished upon opening her eyes. She reached across the sheets as she had done so many times before, knowing this time, finally, she would find Alex. When her fingers met nothing but rumpled sheets and blanket, she sat up and switched on the light.
For one blinding moment, she thought she’d dreamed Alex coming home. No, there on the chair was the corduroy shirt he’d borrowed from Duke Booker.
She got out of bed and shrugged on her robe, then went looking for him. The house was dark and silent and though she switched on enough lights to see where she was going, she couldn’t find him anywhere. The garage still held his truck, which had been sitting in the same spot since she’d reclaimed it from the airport parking lot a few days after he vanished. That left only one place she could think of.
She didn’t turn on the outside light. Closing the glass patio door behind her, she called his name into the dark and he responded at once. “Over here,” he said, his voice coming from way back in the yard where it was deeply shadowed despite the moon overhead. However, she’d spent the past several restless weeks wandering around the garden at all times of the day and night and had no trouble finding her way.
Moonlight shone off the white roses that had just started to bloom. Some of the lilacs were still in flower, as well, and they added a deep, rich perfume to the night air.
Even though it was late May, temperatures dropped at night in Blunt Falls, and Jessica shivered in her thin robe. She used his voice as a guide until her vision adjusted to the dark, and then she could see him sitting on the rock wall that surrounded the pond where every spring, mallards raised their families.
“What are you doing out here at 3:00 a.m.?” she asked, but she knew. All evening she’d watched him pace the living room, turning away from his image on the television news, perusing the bookcase without touching a book, staring out the windows like a trapped animal. He’d taken a long walk after a supper he barely touched and, though he hadn’t asked her not to come, she could tell he wanted to be alone. She’d determined to come clean with him right after the news conference, but his remote demeanor had kept her lips sealed.
She knew all the revelations she’d had to tell him in such a hurry weighed heavily on his mind, especially when he hadn’t been able to reach Nate. But what else could she do? He had to know what had happened in his absence and it wasn’t as if the rest of the world would give him a chance to recover from his ordeal before telling him all the gory details. After switching the phone back on, their evening had consisted of one call after the other until they finally turned it off again.
She’d gone to bed before him, worn-out from the day and exhausted trying to figure out where they went from here. He’d changed so much over the years and the horrible thing was that she wasn’t sure exactly when it had happened. It was easy to blame their problems on not being able to have a child, but plenty of marriages thrived through much worse.
She knew things had gone downhill after the mall shooting in Shatterhorn where he and Nate had been involved in trying to stop a teenage gunman. He’d come home shaken to the core but he wouldn’t talk to her about it. She’d seen the pictures in the newspaper, though—the broken glass, the blood spatters, the candlelight vigils.... No one came away from something like that without scars. But it had hurt her that he couldn’t trust her with his feelings. Impatient with him, she’d allowed him to retreat even further into his work and his world.
But maybe it was even before that, even before the fertility doctors had told them to set their sights on something besides a big family unless they were open to adoption. Alex had refused to even entertain the thought of adoption and that had cut her as deep as her body’s inability to conceive a child.
With nothing to say to one another and with each nursing their own disappointments, it had been easier to let go than hold on. There had been times while he was missing that she felt almost at peace with things and that now shamed her down to her
