I sink onto the bed. “I don’t understand.”
“That makes two of us,” Brian murmurs.
He sits down beside me. I glance at his dark hair, the raw knuckles of his hands, the slope of his shoulders, and wonder when I last really, truly, looked at Brian; when I sawhim,instead of just seeing who I needed him to be.
“Are you going to leave me?” Brian asks.
“No,” I say immediately, but it’s just a reflex, like when the doctor taps your knee with a hammer and you can’t do anything but watch it jump.
“Why were you looking him up, then?”
“Because finding Win’s ex made me wonder what Wyatt is doing now.” I try Win’s question on him. “Isn’t there someone in your life you thought you’d wind up with?”
“No,” he says. “But by some miracle, I did anyway.”
“I am a thousand percent sure Wyatt doesn’t even know I’m alive.”
“Why would you say that? He could be in a pyramid or God knows what looking you up, too.”
“I didn’t realize you even knew his name.”
He hesitates. “He sent you letters that I found in your mother’s bin of junk mail. I should have given them to you. But by then, I loved you. And you seemed to love me.” He looks up. “I’m a physicist, Dawn. I know what makes things move. You came here for your mother—but no one rockets that hard and that fast unless there’s a force driving them away.”
I would do anything to erase the anguish threaded through his voice. “I wantedyou. I choseyou.”
“Back then,” he says. “And now?”
I bite back my response:You decided you didn’t want me first. But this is not a game of one-upsmanship. This is not an eye for an eye. This is two people, peeling back veneer, to discover that the wall they expected to find underneath is disintegrating.
“Don’t you think we have a happy marriage?”
He considers this. “Can you have a happy marriage if your spouse doesn’t think so?”
I wonder if he is talking about me, or himself. “I obviously had a life before I met you,” I tell Brian. “I wasn’t trying to hide it.”
“I never asked you to. But my wife told me recently that not talking about something can be just as bad as flaunting it.”
My cheeks burn. “After fifteen years, do you really think I don’t love you?”
Brian is silent for a long moment. I can see pieces moving in his mind. “After fifteen years, love isn’t just a feeling,” he says. “It’s a choice.”
—
AFTER A SLEEPLESSnight, I take the coward’s way out, and drive to Win’s before Brian even wakes. When Felix opens the front door, he looks just as exhausted as I am.
“Rough night?” I ask.
“She couldn’t get comfortable. No matter what I tried.”
“Let me see what I can do,” I offer.
Win is tossing and turning on the rented hospital bed when I enter, her legs kicking at the light cotton blanket. Her eyes open when she hears me.
“I’m still here,” she says.
“I noticed.”
“Dawn.” Her voice is small, boxed, neatly folded. “I didn’t think it would be this hard.”
