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But she was crying, and his heart sank.
Another thing Betsy had once told him was how God didn't answer prayers that asked for the wrong things, and maybe...
Just maybe, it was time for him to accept that he was wrong with her, and if he really loved her, then he had to have the strength to let her go.
Betsy could only cry harder as she watched her husband stride towards her.
"I'm sorry," Lukas said rawly. "I'm so damn sorry. I should have told you the truth from the beginning."
"Yes," she sobbed. "You should have. So why didn't you?"
"I thought you knew about my agreement with Charlotte. By the time it became obvious you had no clue at all, I didn't know how to tell you the truth. I didn't want to risk hurting you."
He waited for her to say something, but all his wife did was stare at him as her tears flowed endlessly down her cheeks.
"When you kept talking about your future husband, and I knew that you didn't know I was that man, I ended up being jealous of myself," Lukas revealed unsteadily. "I wanted you to choose me and not him, and so I found myself still unable to tell you the truth."
"I s-see..."
He tried to reach for her hands, but the way she stumbled back to avoid his touch filled him with desperation.
"Betsy—-"
"I'm s-sorry," she said brokenly. "I'm just...I d-don't know w-what to think. And I c-can't seem to s-stop crying."
Every word she choked out slashed at him, and when he saw his wife fall to her knees as she broke down in sobs—-
It was over.
And he, too, slowly fell to his knees.
If he truly loved her, he had to stop hurting her.
Betsy couldn't remember hurting this much in all of her life. She wasn't angry, not even with Charlotte, whose contracts had explicitly stated that the other woman had the right to withhold certain information as she saw fit.
But Charlotte was Charlotte, and she knew the other woman meant well.
Her husband, though...
It just hurt, to know that he had first wanted someone else. It tempted her to wallow in self-pity and lash out in her desire to hurt him back. But even with all of these emotions destroying her from within, none of it was enough to make Betsy blind to her husband's own pain.
He looked as if he had lost everything that mattered, and he was looking at her as if she was already dead.
"Why are you looking at me like that?" she asked jerkily.
"It doesn't matter."
But the way he said it made her realize that it did matter.
"Tell me," she heard herself say. "Please."
A part of him wanted to say 'no'. What good would it do to say anything at this point? But because he loved her, and he knew he had hurt her too damn much to deny her anything—-
"It's because I know," Lukas said hollowly.
"Know w-what?"
"That this is likely the last time I'll be looking at you as my wife."
