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“You sound surprised.” And that pisses me off even more. “I had no intention of sneaking around on her.”
“Jules must mean a lot to you.”
I settle onto the couch again and fall quiet for a few moments. My relationship with Jules is still new. It’s precarious—especially after what happened tonight because I don’t even know if my wife is dead or alive.
“I’m in love with her.”
“Sometimes you can’t help who you love.” His words cut through me in a way I don’t like, pricking at my anger all over again. I push it back to deal with later.
“I don’t know how I got here.” Slumping forward, I rest my elbows on my knees. “I loved Monica in the beginning, or I thought I did.”
“I think you needed to believe it was love.”
What he left unspoken bounces around my head. The attraction was there, a seed on the cusp of budding into something that could have been real.
Except for the man standing between us that I’d known nothing about.
If only our parents hadn’t pressured us into marrying for the sake of the merger, maybe things could have been different. By giving in, we’d doomed ourselves from the beginning. Maybe I knew it all along. Maybe I even knew it before I said my vows.
Maybe she did too.
I don’t know what sent her on a downward spiral, but it’s painfully clear that Monica and I have no business being together.
“Dad said she left a note?” Kaden’s words are spoken with a gruffness I’m not used to hearing from him, and in my mind’s eye, I see the note with brutal clarity.
Forgive me for what I’ve done. I can’t go on like this anymore.
I relay Monica’s scrawled words, and silence stretches between us, the air thick with the possible meanings behind her note. The grandfather clock in the hall announces the late hour, fracturing the uneasy quiet, and our father comes through the French doors.
And the night stretches endlessly before me.
