“I’m sorry,” he said. “I am so sorry.”
This reminded me of years earlier, when Carter and I had passed Jack on the dock, when Jack’s shock at my Emerson-pregnant belly had unwittingly told Carter that Jack was Caroline and Sloane’s father. Carter had been so angry at me, and I had been the one, like Jack, on my knees, begging for forgiveness.
So I said what Carter had said to me all those years ago. “Get up. You’re too beautiful for the floor.”
Jack swept me up in his arms and kissed me, and it felt so right that I couldn’t imagine that only a few minutes earlier, I had even momentarily entertained the idea that he could choose someone else.
He carried me up the stairs, and though I never wanted to think about Lauren again, I knew why she loved him. I knew why she wanted him back. He was a passionate man who seemed almost immortal. To be loved by him, truly loved, was more than a woman could wish for, as I was remembering now.
Lying beside him later, in the silence, I asked, “Jack, did you ever think about me?”
“What?” he asked, lazily trailing his fingers up and down my arm.
“All those years we were apart, when you were married to Lauren, when our lives were going in different directions, did you think about me?”
He laughed and rolled over onto his side. I pulled the covers up over my chest, and he pulled them back down. “Ansley, you have been my every thought, my only thought,thethought, for most of my life.”
I rolled over, facing him. “So why didn’t you at least call me? Why didn’t you tell me you were getting married?”
“You were very clear about my role in your life. You made it plain that I was to leave you and your family alone and that I was never to contact you again.”
“But that’s when the girls were young,” I whispered. “When Carter was alive. You scared me so badly, Jack. You have to understand that.”
“And you have to understand, my beautiful Ansley,” he said, as he pushed a strand of hair out of my face and tucked it behind my ear, “that your being afraid of me broke me. Not just a little bit of me. All of me.”
I nodded. Of course it had. I understood that. It had broken me, too. I knew the way I acted would make Jack stay away from me, from the girls he wanted to know. I had to get him out of our lives in order to keep our secret. I didn’t want to hurt Jack then, and I didn’t want to hurt him now. But if I had to do it over again, I would do that same thing.
“So that’s why you didn’t find me before you got married?” I asked. “Because I had hurt you?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Because I was happy—or as happy as I believed I could be without you. And I knew if I even so much as heard the sound of your voice, that would be over.”
I smiled and kissed him softly. He pulled me close to him, and I laid my head on his chest.
“Did you really think that I would even for a minute consider going back to her?”
I propped myself up on my elbow and looked at him. “I mean, I won’t lie. If Ryan Gosling walked in right now and declared his everlasting love for me, I would still choose you, but it would give me pause.”
“It would not,” he said, laughing.
“Yeah. You’re right. It wouldn’t.”
“When can we get married?” he whispered.
I thought,When things are right with the girls, but I didn’t want to spoil the moment.
So, instead, I said, “I love you.”
“I love you more.”
Sometimes there isn’t any more to say.
TWENTY-FOUR
emerson: a nice tie
You never think of your mother as a real person. I mean, obviously, you know she’s aperson. But it’s hard to think of your mother as a human being who has a life and interactions that don’t involve the orbit she has always taken around you.
So when Caroline told me about Lauren before our walk that morning—and everything she had heard from eavesdropping on their conversation—it was a bit of a shock to me. It was hard enough to wrap my mind around the fact that my mother could actually be in love with and marrying a man who wasn’t my father. To wrap my mind around the idea that she was involved in some sort of seedy love triangle was almost more than I could take.
