looked at her and began to smile. “What do you think Brad wants? He always wants more than his share. And he usually gets it.”
She shook her head, surprised, then laughed softly. “You do know him well, don’t you?”
Connor’s smile faded. He glanced around the kitchen, looking uncomfortable. “Does he have visitation rights to the boys? Does he come up here to see them or does he...?”
“No,” she said quickly. “He’s never seen them.”
For once, she’d shocked him. His face showed it clearly. “Never seen his own kids? Why? Do you have a court injunction or...?”
The pain of it all would bring her down if she let it. She couldn’t do that. She held her head high and met his gaze directly.
“He doesn’t want to see them. Don’t you know that? Didn’t he ever tell you why he wanted the divorce?”
Connor shook his head slowly. “Tell me,” he said softly.
She took a deep breath. “When Brad asked me to marry him, he told me he wanted a partner. He was going to start his own business and he wanted someone as committed to it as he was, someone who would stand by him and help him succeed. I entered into that project joyfully.”
Connor nodded. He remembered that as well. He’d been there. He’d worked right along with them. They’d spent hours together brainstorming ideas, trying out options, failing and trying again. They’d camped out in sleeping bags when they first opened their office. They’d been so young and so naive. They thought they could change the world—or at least their little corner of it. They’d invented new ways of doing things and found a way to make it pay. It had been a lot of hard work, but they’d had a lot of fun along the way. That time seemed a million miles away now.
“I knew Brad didn’t want children, but I brushed that aside. I was so sure he would change his mind as time went by. We worked very, very hard and we did really well together. The business was a huge success. Then I got pregnant.”
She saw the question in his eyes and she shook her head. “No, it was purely and simply an accident.”
She bit her lip and looked toward the window for a moment, steadying her voice.
“But I never dreamed Brad would reject it so totally. He just wouldn’t accept it.” She looked back into his eyes, searching for understanding. “I thought we could work things out. After all, we loved each other. These things happen in life. You deal with them. You make adjustments. You move on.”
“Not Brad,” he guessed.
“No. Not Brad.” She shrugged. “He said, get rid of them.”
He drew in a sharp breath. It was almost a gasp. She could hear it in the silence of the kitchen, and she winced.
“And you said?”
She shrugged again. “I’d rather die.”
Connor nodded. He knew her well enough to know that was the truth. What the hell was Brad thinking?
“Suddenly he was like a stranger to me. He just shut the door. He went down to Portland to open up a branch office for our business. I thought he would think it over and come back and...” She gave him a significant look. “But he never came back. He began to make the branch office his headquarters. Then you showed up and told me he wanted a divorce.”
Connor nodded. His voice was low and gruff as he asked her, “Do you want him back?”
She had to think about that one. If she was honest, she would have to admit there was a part of her—a part she wasn’t very proud of—that would do almost anything to get him back. Anything but the one thing he asked for.
She stared at him and wondered how much she should tell him. He was obviously surprised to know about how little Brad cared about his sons. A normal man would care. So Brad had turned out to be not very normal. That was her mistake. She should have realized that and never married him in the first place.
She also had to live with the fact that he was getting worse and worse about paying child support. There were so many promises—and then so many excuses. What there wasn’t a lot of was money.
The business was floundering, he said. He was trying as hard as he could, but the profits weren’t rolling in like they used to in the old days—when she was doing half the work. Of course, he didn’t mention that. He didn’t want her anywhere near the business anymore.
She knew he resented having to give her anything. After all, he’d given her the house—not that it was paid off. Still, it had been what she wanted, what she felt she had to have to keep a stable environment for the boys.
But now she was having a hard time making the mortgage payments. She had to make a go of her cake business, or else she would have to go back to work and leave the boys with a babysitter. She was running out of time.
Time to build her business up to where it could pay for itself. Time to stabilize the mortgage situation before the bank came down on her. Time to get the boys old enough so that when she did have to go for a real, paying job, it wouldn’t break her heart to leave them with strangers.
So, yes. What Brad wanted now mattered. Had he gone through a transformation? Had he come up with second thoughts and decided to become a friend to the family? Or was it all more excuses about what he couldn’t do instead of what he could? Women with husbands in a stable situation didn’t realize how lucky they were.
Funny. Sometimes it almost seemed as though Brad had screwed up her marriage and now he wanted to screw up her single life as well.
She shook her head slowly. “I want my life back,” she admitted. “I want the life I had when I had a loving husband. I want my babies to have their father. But I don’t see how that can ever happen.”
Her eyes stung and she blinked quickly to make sure no tears dared show up.
“Unless...” She looked up into Connor’s eyes. “Unless you have a message from Brad that he wants it to happen, too.”
Whistling in the wind. She knew how useless that was. She gave Connor a shaky smile, basically absolving him of all guilt in the matter. She saw the look in his eyes. He felt sorry for her. She cringed inside. She didn’t want pity.
“Don’t worry. I don’t expect that. But I do want to know what he sent you for.”
Connor shook his head. Obviously he had nothing to give her. So Brad must have sent him on a scouting expedition, right? To see if she was surviving. To see if she was ready to hoist the white flag and admit he was right and she was wrong. She couldn’t make it on her own after all. She should have listened to him. And now, she should knuckle under and take his advice and give it all up.
She bit her lip. She wasn’t disappointed, exactly. She knew the score. But she was bummed out and it didn’t help her outlook on the day.
A timer went off and she hopped up to check on her cakes. This was where she belonged, this was where she knew what she was doing. The realm of human emotions was too treacherous. She would take her chances with the baked goods.
* * *
Connor
