RYAN DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TIME IT WAS. THREE O’CLOCK? Four? There was no clock, and his cell was charging across the room.
The storm continued to rage outside, the rain pounding the roof, the wind whistling through the crevices of the old house.
Everything was quiet in the bed above. Abby had probably been sound asleep for hours, while his brain refused to shut off.
He couldn’t believe she’d talked to him. Really talked to him. And while that realization should’ve buoyed his spirits, it didn’t. Because her question had slayed him.
Did you resent me after I lost the baby?
It was like a punch in the gut. She’d been his wife, his lover, his soul mate. How had he let such a basic thing as his unwavering love go unspoken? He’d spent the last few hours going through every memory he could retrieve, trying to figure out where he’d gone wrong.
He’d thought he’d been affectionate and loving after she’d lost the baby. He’d held her long into the night, knowing she was hurting, wondering why she didn’t cry. Maybe some hurts were too big for tears. She’d snuggle into his side, pressing so close, like she was trying to mesh them into one person.
But as the weeks went on, she pulled away. When he tried to hold her she didn’t curl into him as she did before. She was stiff and unyielding. She wouldn’t talk about it, and he figured losing the baby had somehow made the walls go up again. He resigned himself to tearing them down once more, one brick at a time.
But this time it wasn’t working.
He couldn’t seem to do anything right, and as the months passed, she grew angry. About his working all the time, about Cassidy, about money. The list was endless, and she was always pushing his buttons. She didn’t seem happy unless she was making him angry.
In between the bickering they still made love. Make-up sex during the dark, quiet hours of the night became the new norm. But afterward he’d find they hadn’t made up at all. She was still distant and reluctant to talk about anything that mattered. Until the next fight.
One spring afternoon Abby came into the school to bring some insurance papers they needed on file, and he was in the office with Cassidy when she came in. He’d only been catching up with his friend, but he’d been perched on her desk—a stupid move, he realized later.
Abby dropped the file on the desk and left the room without a word. Later there was no convincing her it had been innocent. Things were tense around the house all week, despite his repeated attempts to set things straight.
That Saturday he woke to find Abby had gone out somewhere. He went about his morning, going for a jog, then grading papers while SportsCenter played on the TV. He wondered where Abby was and when she’d be home. She was always wanting him home, and now that he was, she was gone. They needed to resolve this thing about Cassidy—and the dozen other issues that had crept up over the last year.
The rumble of her car sounded outside, and a few minutes later the front door opened. He looked up from a particularly bad essay, and his red pen froze when he saw her.
Her long beautiful curls were gone. Her hair was chopped off at her chin. She met his eyes, tipping her chin up as she shut the door behind her. She passed him, going into the kitchen.
His breath leaked out. It was just hair, he told himself. Her hair. Just a bunch of dead cells. It would grow back.
But he loved her long hair. And she knew it. He’d told her so a hundred times. He drew his fingers through it while she slept, wrapped it around his fist in moments of passion. It hurt that she’d cut it all off without even warning him.
She wandered back into the living room and stood in front of him, arms crossed. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”
“I can’t believe you cut it.”
Her lips snapped together, and her eyes grew distant. She looked so different without her hair flowing across her shoulders. Harder, somehow.
“I wanted a change,” she said. “I’m sorry you don’t find me attractive anymore.”
He rolled his eyes. “Don’t be stupid, Abby.”
An angry flush bloomed on her cheeks, and her jaw set. “I’m not stupid.”
“I didn’t mean it that way, and you know it. Why did you do this? Is this some point you’re trying to make? Because I can’t read your mind, and I sure can’t figure out all the subliminal messages you send me.”
“Sometimes a haircut is just a haircut.”
He tossed his papers aside and got up, walking away. “Not with you, Abby.”
She grabbed his elbow, stopping him. “Don’t walk away from me. And stop making this more than it is.”
He turned and drilled her with a look. “You did this to hurt me. To get back at me for some perceived relationship with a girl I’m not even interested in.”
“Perceived! You were practically perched on her lap!”
“I was just talking to her! She’s a friend, Abby. Just a friend.”
“I saw the way she was looking at you, and if you can’t see it, you’re blind!”
He blew out his breath and laced his hands behind his neck, his eyes never wavering from his wife’s callous expression.
“What do you want from me, Abby?”
His heart was thumping like he’d just run a 5K. The woman would be the death of him. Sometimes he wanted to grab her and shake some sense into her.
Her eyes were flat, her lips a hard line set in a stubborn jaw. “I don’t want anything from you, Ryan.”
The words hurt, set off a flare of fear that exploded in a flash of anger. “When did you become so cold, Abby?” His voice sounded like it had been raked across a steel grate. “You’ve got a heart of stone, and somehow I’m the last to realize it.”
Something flashed in her eyes, her nose flared. Then she turned and left the room.
She didn’t talk to him for the rest of the weekend, and if he thought about it, their relationship had never recovered from those careless words. They weren’t true. He knew it the second after he’d said them. The hard shell, he’d long suspected, was only a protective barrier for a very soft heart. But he was angry. He’d wanted to hurt her the way she’d hurt him.
As he shifted on the floor for the hundredth time, he thought of her dad and the verbal abuse she’d suffered. She’d never confided in him about the details, but he’d heard enough the morning before to know it must’ve been bad. If he spoke to her that way now, when she was an adult, how had he spoken to her then? And how had those harsh words shaped the woman she’d become?