Except Neil choked over the words, and when he raised his glass, he couldn’t seem to gulp the champagne fast enough.
A few people clapped. Rodney rescued the microphone and handed it to the DJ, who prodded the happy couple to do some kissy-kissy before they got to their first dance.
Neil stumbled around the table toward the door.
Anna scrambled after him, forcing smiles at her coworkers, making herself stay upright and moving forward so they wouldn’t know the champagne was roiling in her stomach like grade-A wedding poison. With his long stride and frantic pace, he was gone when she stepped out of the ballroom.
The door at the end of the hallway clicked shut.
She tripped over her heels dashing after him. Her feet moved in time to the rapid firing of her heart. Her strappy sandals cut into her feet, and her legs had all the flexibility of a freeze-dried Twinkie, but she kept moving as if her existence depended on it.
Because she had a horrible, ants-marching-over-her-grave suspicion it did.
She burst through the exit into the late spring evening and found him hunched over next to a garbage can at the edge of the parking lot. She wanted to reach out to him, but the distant wariness in his gaze held her back.
She slowly licked her lips and tried to keep her voice steady. “Neil? Are you okay?”
He swiped his forearm over his brow, still staring at the concrete. “It’s over, Anna.”
“What’s over?” She barely recognized her own voice. Her arms hung like wet dishrags at her sides, and a roaring she didn’t recognize crashed through her head.
“Us. We’re over. I want a divorce.”
A giganticNo!welled up in her throat, but it got stuck somewhere between her tongue and her ears. There wasnopossible way she’d heard him right.
He didn’t mean it.
He couldn’t mean it.
“I got orders to San Antonio. Leave in two weeks.” He looked at her then, the truth of every word written in the crooked dip of his mouth. “I’ve been trying to tell you.”
Her teeth chattered in the sudden chill of the evening. “No.” She’d put all the strength she had into the word, but it was barely loud enough to get past her mouth. “No. You haven’t.”
He tugged at his cuffs. A faint scent of cigarette ash wafted from the trash can, and the fading evening light made it difficult to catch all the nuances of his expression. “I was working up to it.”
Her legs suddenly wobbled like a meringue that hadn’t been beaten enough. She opened her mouth again but it took too much brain power to understand his words and form her own in response.
She’d been busy lately, but she would’ve known if there were a problem.
Wouldn’t she?
“Why?” Her voice wavered, the single syllable stretching between them.
“We were too young,” he finally said. He rolled his neck, then looked past her shoulder. “I got love and lust confused, and now that one’s faded, I’ve realized the other one was never really there. We’re just not right, Anna.”
She tried to take a breath, but she was pretty sure there wasn’t enough oxygen to fill the black hole sucking her heart out. “We’ll go see a counselor.”
He hung his head again. His breathing was ragged, completely out of sync with hers. “I’ll treat you fair, okay?” he said. “Send you home if you want.”
“No.”
“You want to stay here?”
Stay here? Was he kidding? They were still married, and they would stay married. She’d PCS with him, go to San Antonio. They could work this out. “No. You love me. I know you do. Even if you don’t know it, I know you do. And I love you. I do, Neil. I love you. I love you enough to see us through this.”
He treated her to the same saggy-jowled look Brad’s mother had worn minutes ago. “It’s over, Anna.”
“No, it’s not.”
