they hadn’t moved in the same cliques. Savannah had been on the honor roll and sang in the choir and was heavily involved with the school paper and the Beta Club for high achievers.
He’d been the captain of the football team, the popular kid, who happened to be going steady with Kerri Mahoney, the head of the cheerleading squad. He could barely remember seeing her in the halls at school when, as a junior at Montana University conducting research for a bachelor’s thesis, Savannah came out to Sugar Creek Ranch looking to study the grazing patterns of their cows. He would never forget how she looked that day—so serious with her round-rimmed glasses, loaded down with an overstuffed computer bag, and the ivory skin of her face devoid of makeup. Savannah hadn’t been the least bit interested in him. All of her focus was on his cattle. It had been a rare blow to his ego.
“Let’s get you out of this room. Go for a walk.”
With one hand, Savannah held on to the rolling stand that held her IV drip, and with the other hand, she held on to his arm. He had to cut his stride in half to make sure that he didn’t push her to go faster than her body could handle.
“I feel a breeze on my left butt cheek,” Savannah told him. “Take a peek back there for me, will you, and make sure my altogether is altogether covered.”
Bruce smiled as he ducked his head back to check out her posterior parts. “You’re good.”
Halfway down the hall, the pallor of Savannah’s oval face turned pasty-white. She swayed against him, and he wrapped his arm around her shoulders.
“Whoa—we’ve gone far enough for today.”
She didn’t put up a fight when he helped her make a U-turn so he could take her back to her room. He didn’t want to wear her out completely; he still needed to have a serious talk with Savannah. Her doctors were ready to discharge her, and she was ready to leave. If she still wanted to go home to Sugar Creek after he told her the truth about the divorce, he was willing to take her back to the ranch with him. But she had to know the truth. It was her right to know.
He’d already discussed the best way to tell Savannah about the divorce with her doctors and her family. They all agreed that he could tell her privately, but that Carol and John would be on standby in case Savannah needed their emotional support. Bruce had never dreaded a conversation like he dreaded the one he was about to have with his wife. He didn’t want to hurt her—even when he had been at his angriest with her, he’d never wanted to hurt her.
After he got her settled back in bed, and the nurses had taken her vital signs and administered medication, Bruce pulled a chair up next to Savannah. He took her hand in his, and it surprised him how easy it was to fall right back into the habit of holding her hand.
“What’s bothering you?” Savannah asked him.
Bruce ran his finger over the diamond encrusted platinum wedding band that he had just recently slipped back onto her finger. Savannah didn’t remember the day she had taken that ring off and put it on the kitchen counter before she left their home for good. That memory was burned into his brain. He only wished he could erase it. After she’d left, he’d held that ring in his hand for hours, plotting its demise. He thought to throw it away, crush it in the garbage disposal, flush it, melt it down or pawn it. But in the end, he’d thrown it into a dresser drawer, mostly forgotten, until the early-morning hour when Savannah asked about it.
“You’ve lost a lot of time, Savannah.” Bruce started in the only way he knew how.
Fear, fleeting but undeniable, swept over her face. She was scared—scared about the memories she’d lost—and scared that they weren’t going to come back.
“Once I get back to my own home, surrounded by all of the things that I love, I really think that it’ll all come back.” Savannah had an expectant look on her face. “Don’t you?”
He wanted to reassure her, but he wasn’t as optimistic. She’d lost so much in the accident—it was hard for him to believe that Savannah would ever be exactly as she once was.
“I’d like to think.” Bruce tried to take the long way around.
“I just need to go home,” she restated. “That’s all. I just need to go home.”
Still holding on to her hand, Bruce cleared his throat. “Well—that’s what I’d like to talk to you about.”
With her head resting on the pillow, her dark brown hair fanned out around her face, her eyes intent on him, Savannah waited for him to continue.
“There’s a lot that’s gone on between us, Savannah. A lot that you don’t remember.”
Savannah’s fingers tightened around his fingers, that look of fear and discomfort back in her eyes. “You’re scaring me.”
He didn’t want to scare her—and he told her as much.
“Just tell me what’s on your mind, Bruce.”
Her entreaty was faint and laced with uneasiness. Savannah had always been a “pull the Band-Aid off quick” kind of person. She didn’t like to draw things out.
Bruce had spent the last two years fighting like cats and dogs with this woman, and now all he wanted to do was protect her from the pain they had willingly caused each other. He dropped his head for a moment and shook it. The only way out was forward.
“For the last couple of years, we’ve been going through a divorce,” Bruce finally mustered the guts to tell her. The sound of her sharp intake of breath brought his eyes back to hers. The look in her eyes could only be described as stunned.
Savannah looked down at their hands, at their wedding rings. She swallowed several times, her eyes filling with unshed tears, before she asked, “You weren’t wearing your ring. When I first saw you. You weren’t wearing it. Are we even...married?”
He held on to her hand even though it seemed as if she were already trying to pull it away. How many times had he wished for a second chance with Savannah? He hadn’t wanted it this way—never this way—but he would be a fool to let her slip away from him a second time without putting up one heck of a fight.
“We’re still married,” he reassured her. It wasn’t important, right at this moment, for Savannah to know just how close they had come to ending their marriage.
“I don’t remember...” Savannah stopped midsentence, tears slipping unchecked onto her cheeks.
“It’s going to be okay, Savannah.” He felt impotent to console her. There weren’t words that could make this right for her.
Savannah stared at him hard, with a look of distrust in her eyes. “How can you say that? We’ve split up, but it’s going to be fine? Why would you want a divorce? What happened to us?”
When he didn’t answer right away, she tugged her fingers loose from his hold.
“Tell me why.”
How could he explain the last several years of their marriage in a sentence or two? There were things that they had all agreed that Savannah didn’t need to know right now.
“I didn’t file for divorce, Savannah. You did.”
Bewildered, she stared
