“What do you want to know?”
“You got married pretty quick. Why?”
She didn’t say anything for the better part of a mile. He knew because he was counting the markers, waiting for her to speak.
“I thought it was the right thing to do.”
The right thing to do? “Were you pregnant or something?”
She sighed heavily. “No. You were gone. I was living in my father’s house. Things were worse than they’d ever been. David was nice to me.”
“So what, you just married him? Like hey, boom, want to get hitched?”
“Stop it. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Goddamn, he was frustrated, and he would have punched the steering wheel with his hand if it wouldn’t have woken Fiona. He wanted answers, and all she wasn’t telling him was what he really wanted to know. “Did you love him?”
His hands were sweaty on the wheel, his heart racing. This mattered to him more than it should, but he couldn’t back away from the conversation any more than he could stop a freight train with his hands. “Because just a few weeks before that, you were supposedly in love with me, remember?”
“I remember we broke up. I remember you didn’t want to be with me.”
“I was a kid, Jo. I was scared to get married before the ink dried on my high school diploma. That didn’t erase two years together. It didn’t make my feelings for you go away. But a hot minute after that, you hitched your apple cart to the next guy in line.”
He couldn’t stop, couldn’t hold back the words that demanded to be said. “Tell me you loved him. Tell me you fell madly, crazy, deeply in love with him like you’d never felt for me, and that’s why you married the bastard. Because maybe then I wouldn’t hate you so much for doing it.”
“Why did you hate me? Why did you even care?”
“Because I was in love with you, damn it!” He lowered his voice on the expletive. “And you married somebody else!”
“I wanted to marry you, remember?”
He ran a hand through his hair. “Jesus Christ. This is ridiculous. No, this is maddening. Do you know that? You are maddening. Forget I asked. Forget I said anything.”
According to his GPS, they had an hour to go before arriving at the campground. When they got there, he’d take a long walk. Put some distance between himself and this Griswald family vacation. If he was lucky, Joanne would be asleep when he returned, and he might actually get some quiet time alone.
She cleared her throat. “No.”
“No, what?”
“I didn’t love him. I was desperate. My dad’s stepbrother moved back in with us—”
“Uncle Bobby?”Fuck.He was a hardcore drunk who grabbed Jo’s ass and talked about her tits like he was discussing the weather. He’d damn near raped her when she was fifteen, and her dad didn’t even care, which was when Jo started sleeping over at Sloan’s house nearly every night.
Her uncle moving back in was the worst possible thing that could have happened to Jo, and he hated himself for not being there to help her. “Jesus, Jo. I’m so sorry.”
“I moved out. I found a roommate and a place that wasn’t too bad up over a bar on Main Street, and I was doing okay for a little while. I had to drop out of school because I needed to work, but then the diner burned down and I lost my job, anyway.”
If he’d known for one second what she was going through, he would have been there in an instant, and he cursed his own stupidity for leaving her alone. But he needed to hear all of it, the entire story. “Go on.”
“David was nice to me. He used to come into the diner, then when that burned down, he showed up at my house. He brought me flowers. He stood there in his chinos and button-down shirt, talking to my drunk-ass father like it was a totally normal conversation.
“I was so damn sad,” she said quietly. “David was there for me. He was going to college in Chicago and wanted me to come with him. He wanted to marry me. I wanted a new life, Sloan. One where I wasn’t the poor kid from the wrong side of town, I wasn’t just a high school dropout, alone. I saw the chance for a fresh start with a man who loved me, and I took it.”
He could hear the tears in her voice, feel the mirrored tension in his own tight throat, and he swallowed against it. “I came back for you.”
“What?”
Why was he telling her this now? Nothing good could come of it. The past was the past. It couldn’t be changed. But it was clear to him he’d been holding on to it, refusing to let go of the woman who’d given up on him so easily.
