SHE’D followed his thoughts. Or found her own path to the same end. But either way, in that moment they were together. United in the loss that had eviscerated their lives.
He wanted to run. To get away. To lose himself in anything that would blot that decade-old heartache from his memory.
This was what he hadn’t wanted.
Only then, Corbin darted around a small table, hurtling himself at his mother’s knees, chirping about his next painting and how many days was it until the next workshop and what were they having for dinner.
Claire laughed—the sorrow in her eyes miraculously replaced by mirth—and reached out to rub the boy’s head. “Next week. You’re going to be here, right?”
“Uh-huh,” came the vigorous reply, and a nod so big it set him back a pace.
Jane took her son’s hand with a soft chuckle, guiding Corbin out of the studio behind her.
Ryan rubbed a hand across the back of his neck, then crossed his arms, watching Claire. She’d recovered quickly, but he’d seen it. The heartbreak that had been the end of their marriage. The end of who she’d been to him, to herself, and the predecessor to who she’d become. “You want to talk about it?”
She shook her head, busying herself with a pile of Conté crayons. “It was you. Seeing you with that little boy.” Her eyes closed, her head angling a degree, as though she was mentally replaying the moment. “Laughing and carrying on. And then you looked at him. Really looked at him… And I saw it.”
Ryan crossed the room, pulling her into his arms, anyone walking past the studio be damned. She didn’t stiffen or pull away, but leaned into him. Let him hold her and pretend he had some comfort to offer.
As though he wasn’t years too late, and a lifetime together too short.
“You looked at your hands like he was still there. And—” she swallowed, pulling in a shaky breath where her head rested against his chest “—it just caught me off guard.”
“Yeah, me too,” he breathed into her hair, stroking a hand down her back as much to soothe as to keep her in his arms. Keep her close enough that she couldn’t see his face. Read the rough emotion that was tearing at him from the inside out.
Only, somehow she didn’t need to see him to know. “Ryan?”
And right then, he just didn’t have it in him to try to hide the truth that was eating at him. Had been eating at him for nine years. “I didn’t do enough.”
Claire pulled back, shocked by the admission. “What are you talking about? There was nothing we could do. The doctors explained, the cyst ruptured before anyone knew it was there—”
“After that, Claire.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “When you couldn’t heal your heart, and I couldn’t figure out what you needed, I gave up. You might have said the words, but I let you go. Too easily.”
Her heart began a slow pound that seemed to reverberate through every cell in her body. “What are you saying?”
“I saw the opportunity and I wanted it. I wanted out. I wanted to be something other than the guy who’d let his wife down when she needed him to be there for her. Who couldn’t hurt deeply enough to connect anymore. Who worked himself into oblivion so he didn’t have to come home and see the heartbreak scattered around him. I made it easy for you to leave because I’d already found a way to be gone.” Abruptly Ryan turned away, crossed to a worktable, where he braced his arms wide and let his head hang forward. “What kind of husband does that?”
She blinked back the tears she couldn’t afford to shed, relieved in that moment to have Ryan’s back. She knew the answer, but couldn’t voice the words without revealing the depth of hurt they caused.
The kind of husband who’d married his wife for the sake of a child lost before he’d ever had the chance to live.
Yes, they’d been in love. In lust. In everything a couple of kids—and at eighteen and twenty-two that’s what they’d been—could be. But they’d married because she was pregnant. If not for that, chances were their romance would have died out on its own within a year or two. They’d have gone their separate ways. Led their separate lives. And done it without the burden of a past neither wanted to face, tainting every interaction that followed.
Ryan had done the honorable thing, and he’d done it without a moment’s hesitation or a single word of prompting. And after they lost Andrew, yes, he took refuge in his work. But he hadn’t left.
“You did everything I let you. More. You might have felt some relief when I left, but how could you not? The way I treated you…” Her lips pressed together as she sought the strength to say the words she’d owed him for too long. “It wasn’t right. I was angry, Ryan. Angry at the injustice of it all. Angry at my parents for abandoning me when I needed them the most.”
“Your parents were self-absorbed jerks without a clue what love or commitment or responsibility meant. They deserved every bit of your anger.” He bit off each word, his rage sounding as fresh as it had nearly ten years before.
“I know. But those feelings weren’t something I’d ever had to deal with before. I was so spoiled. And if I were just angry at them, it would have been one thing…but I wasn’t.”
“You were angry with me.” He’d known it. Said the words without any trace of condemnation, which made it all the worse.
“Yes.” She nodded, unable to look him in the eyes as she laid open the wound of their past. “For not breaking. For being stronger than I was and being able to go on with your life. Your job…for having something left, when I felt like I had nothing.”
“Nothing,” he echoed with a hollow resignation that pained her all the more.
“All I could see was that you’d married me because I was pregnant. And I’d lost our baby. And—”
“And, what, you thought I was like your parents? That you somehow hadn’t kept up your end of the bargain? I loved you.”
“I ruined our lives! If I couldn’t stop resenting myself, blaming myself, how could you?”
His hands clamped tight around her shoulders as he shook. “What was there to blame?”
“I was terrible to you, Ryan. When you tried to help me, I wouldn’t even talk to you. I wouldn’t look at you. Touch you.”
“Claire, your life went to hell in a matter of months. You were eighteen. Yes, you pushed me away. But I let you. And then I let you go.”
“When I needed you to. You did.”
“God, you make it sound like some kind of a gift instead of a failure.”
“It was a gift. I needed to make my own life and I needed to let you have yours. And because of your support, I was able to.”
He stared hard into her eyes as though he couldn’t believe what she was saying. As if he knew there was something more.
And he was right. But there was only one more part that she could give him.
“I loved you,” she whispered, the old words ragged with emotion and the painful need to be renewed. But that wasn’t what this was about. What was happening between them now, more than the nights in each other’s arms, was closure. “I would have given anything for the life we almost had together, Ryan. I mourned the loss of it, like I mourned Andrew. But some things just aren’t meant to be.”
Ryan’s arms slid around her back, pulling her against him completely. And for once, it felt as though she was lending as much strength as she took.