I sit next to her on the bed and stroke her forehead.
“Your mother is a piece of work,” she says pleasantly.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“She wants you and Reina together.”
“I know. I’m sorry for that, too.”
She looks toward the window. “The fig tree is doing well. The peonies, too. I was worried about them after last week’s rain, but they look?—“
“Sweetheart, what did she say to you?”
“She said something about divorce?”
“What about it?”
“Didn’t you hear her?”
She’s being evasive. I should let it be. She’s tired. But….
“I came running when I heard her voice, but I didn’t hear what she precisely said.”
She gives me a measured look.
I kiss her nose.
She looks at her hands. “She said you don’t love me. That you were being kind, given the accident, and she made the divorce sound inevitable, like you want it.” She stops. “She was generous about the settlement. I didn’t pay much attention, but I think it was high six figures. I didn’t know that was in the cards.”
My mother is lucky she isn’t here right now.
“There is no settlement. There’s no divorce.” I lean forward, putting myself in her eyeline. “My mother has never—“ I stop. I choose my words carefully because Lucy, even without her memory, is not a woman you can be imprecise with, and the truth and the lie are sharing very close quarters right now. “My mother has never approved of anything I chose independently. Not once. If I chose it, she found a problem with it.” I hold her gaze. “She has been finding a problem with you since the beginning, because you are mine, and she didn’t select you, and that is her limitation, not yours.”
Lucy regards me thoughtfully.
“She told me you don’t love me,” she repeats as if those words stung her the most.
“My mother doesn’t know what I feel.”
“Do you?” she challenges.
I think about the ICU. I think about the days in that terrible chair. I think about standing in the corridor outside her room, counting the days since I had said the most comprehensively wrong thing of my life, still running out of ways to understand how wrong.
“Yes,” I admit with confidence and honesty. “I know exactly what I feel.”
A shadow passes over her face. “And what isthat?”
“I love you. You are my wife. This is our home. What my mother thinks about any of it has never been relevant and is less so every day.” I hold her gaze. “I’m sorry she upset you.”
Her gaze lingers, assessing. I meet it head-on because I have nothing left that requires hiding—or rather, the thing I’m hiding is something I’d lie about for entirely different reasons, and every other part of me is available to be looked at for as long as she wants to look.
“Reina is very beautiful.”
“Is she?” I don’t look away. “I didn’t notice.”
She looks toward the window again. “You must have loved her very much.”
“I thought I did. I was wrong about that.”
