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“I have shirts, Michael,” she said, but she lifted her arms, letting me dress her.
I wasn’t one of those guys who got inordinately turned on by a woman wearing my shirt. There was always the chance I wouldn’t get it back, which didn’t make me happy. But seeing Nora in my flannel, all I felt was satisfaction. I wanted her in my shirt. I wanted her to keep it and wear it to bed because she missed me while I was in the White Mountains.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out I didn’t really care about the shirt. What I really wanted was for her to think about me when I was gone, because Lord knew I would be missing her like crazy.
Plus she looked fucking cute in it. The flannel reached almost to her knees, and the collar sagged off one shoulder. She looked small. Delicate and strong all at once.
Apparently I was one of those guys, after all. A bolt of possessive lust went through me, but I pushed it back. There would be time for that later. Instead I pulled her in close, maneuvering us until we were cuddled up together on the couch.
She pulled back slightly and eyed me suspiciously. “What are you doing?”
“What?”
“Well, we’re on the couch, not in my bedroom. So I’m guessing you’re not planning on sex. And the TV remote is way over there, so…what? We’re just going to snuggle? That’s weird.”
I swallowed my laugh. “I thought we could talk.”
“Talk?” she repeated, aghast. She frowned at me. “Why would we do that?”
I threw up my hands, exasperated. “I don’t know, Nora. Maybe because a hell of a lot went down tonight and we should talk about it? Starting with Grant.”
She went rigid in my arms. “What about him?”
“Tell me how it ended.”
“You want to hear about my baggage?”
“I told you about Alison,” I reminded her.
“Ugh.” She grimaced. “This is the least fun game ofI’ll show you mine if you show me yoursever. It’s not even a big deal, really. He cheated on me and then he left me to be with Laurie. And yes, it hurt, and yes, it sucked, but it’s done now and there’s really not much to say about it.”
Well. That would explain her trust issues.
Except no, it didn’t. Becausemisunderstood. That day at Dreamer’s, her issue hadn’t been about Sofia. Not really. It had been about me not being where I had said I would be. And somehow, she had blamed herself for that.
There was more to the story.
“Was it only Laurie?” I asked. I rubbed her neck gently, trying to get her to relax. To open up, just a little. I wanted her to trust me. “Or were there others?”
She hesitated a beat. “I don’t know. I mean, how do you prove something like that? I could tell you now, looking back on a decade of marriage, that he probably had a whole string of women. All the signs were there. But the only one I know for sure is Laurie.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean…” She hesitated again, her forehead wrinkled as she puzzled through her answer. “I could never be sure of anything. Things never quite added up in a way that made sense to me, you know? He would say he was taking a quick trip to the grocery store or whatever, and then he would be gone for hours. There was always a reason. A crazy car accident, or a power outage somewhere. Of course I started getting suspicious. I would find holes in his story, and confront him about it, and he could always explain it away. I misunderstood where he would be, or what road he was driving. He had an answer for everything.”
She rested her elbows on her knees and I rubbed her back. “So many little things. Like the passwords on his phone and laptop. Once, when I was working on my master’s degree, my laptop crashed and I needed to use his to print out a paper that was due that afternoon. I called him at work for the password. He said he didn’t remember. He didn’t remember the password for a laptop he used every goddamn day! Of course it was a lie. I knew that. I’m not stupid. But why was he lying? What was on his laptop that he didn’t want me to see? I had no idea. And if I didn’t know why he was lying, was the lie itself enough to get a divorce? You can’t do something drastic like get a divorce because someone won’t give you a password, right? I couldn’t prove anything.”
Anger roiled in my gut, slowly building with every word she spoke. A decade. He had fucked her over for adecade. “Until Laurie.”
“Well.” She laughed, but it wasn’t her usual happy sound. There was something hard and brittle about it. “That was different because I finally had something I could prove. Grant took care of our finances. Our paychecks went into a shared account, and he paid the bills from there. I never saw a credit card statement. I didn’t particularly want to deal with that anyway, so I let him worry about it. Then one day the credit card company called to ask about suspicious activity. The charges for the last month included hotel stays and fancy dinners. I said it was fraud. It turned out it wasn’t. When I confronted him, he admitted he was having an affair. But by then he was done with me. He already had plans to leave, so it didn’t matter that I knew about it.”
I closed my eyes as my hand involuntarily balled into a fist. I wasn’t a violent man, but if I had suddenly found Grant’s throat between my fingers, I would have squeezed without a second thought.
“I’m sorry, Nora. Nobody deserves that.” I wished I had better words to offer her, something that would magically fix everything.
“It was a relief,” she said flatly. “Finally, something made sense. I didn’t realize how miserable our marriage had truly become until he left. We used to fight all the time about it. I would accuse him of cheating, he would call me jealous and paranoid. And I was. I was constantly trying to find definitive proof that he was either cheating or he wasn’t. Because you can’t blow up a marriage because you’re suspicious, can you? That’s what he used to say to me, when we fought.Are you really going to let your paranoia destroy our marriage?Are you really going to demand a divorce based on false suspicions?That’s what you’re going to tell your mom when she cries about not having grandkids?So when he admitted he was having an affair with Laurie? Yeah, it was a relief.”
She pushed me away and stood abruptly. I let her go, even though it was the last thing I wanted.
