Marriage in Jeopardy

She didn’t answer. He hadn’t mentioned his sister. Clara was the one he couldn’t stop trying to save. She’d drowned in the family’s filthy swimming pool while his parents had lain unconscious, too drunk to know they were alive, much less that their daughter had died.

Josh couldn’t forgive his parents or himself, though he’d been at school when it had happened. Now he was compelled to rescue all the poor, defenseless Claras.

“You aren’t like them,” she said. “You’ll never drink the way your parents did. You can stop serving penance.” She wrapped her arms around her waist. “I deserved better and so did our baby.”

“Wait.” He tried to cradle her chin, but she turned her head, and he flinched as if she’d hit him. “Some of my clients are innocent. Even the guilty ones have rights, but I’d have dumped Carter Durance if I’d known this might happen.” Emotion flooded his voice. “I’d never risk our child.”

Her own anguish, reflected in his broken tone, confused her.

He reached for her hand this time, but she couldn’t stand his touch. “Don’t. I only want to feel my baby.” She laid her hand on her stomach, aching to feel the sensation of their unborn son, lazily twisting inside her. “I miss him.”

Josh’s expression went blank again. He folded his hands, white-knuckled, in his lap.

She could end it now, put a stop to the loneliness and fear. Once they’d married, he’d considered their relationship complete, nothing more to worry about. He’d turned his attention to his priorities—his clients. Feeling left out and unneeded, more hurt than she’d ever admitted, she’d tried arguing, explaining, and finally, she’d found poor comfort in her own work. But the baby had made them both try.

“I’m sorry.”

She had two choices. Tear him to shreds or try to save their marriage. Could hurting him ever be revenge enough? And how could she ignore his grief, as harrowing as her own?

“I couldn’t save him, either,” she said, choosing marriage. “Moms are supposed to protect their babies.”

He flexed his hands. “I’d give anything to have him safe and you unhurt.”

His bleakness affected her. Maybe her feelings for Josh had never been sane. Too intense, too much passion at first. Neither of them had fully considered what came after “I do.”

“We can’t bring him back, but we don’t have to keep hurting each other. I know I made mistakes, too.” She couldn’t look at him.

“We can stop making them.”

She might not be ready to give up on her marriage, but total forgiveness didn’t come easily. She couldn’t forget how hard she’d tried to make him care about his home life as much as he cared about work. “What do we have now?” She wiped her cheeks.

Josh held her against him. “You have me.” The strain in his corded arms reminded her of more tender moments when she’d loved him so much she could hardly breathe. “He was my baby, too.” No attempt to explain—no defense, just desolation. His whisper, rich with sorrow, pulled her back to him.

A WEEK AFTER Lydia had awakened, Josh stopped at his wife’s door, feeling as if today was their final connection with their son. She’d lost the baby the day of the attack, and they’d dealt with her D&C and with the police questioning her about her few memories. When they left the hospital, everything about her pregnancy would be over.

He pressed his fist to Lydia’s door, glancing at the busy nurses, the visitors striding up and down the beige-tiled hall. Their lives went on.

And he wanted to hit someone.

“Who’s out there?”

Lydia sounded scared. He shoved the door open. Of course she’d be afraid one of the Durances would come back to finish the job.

“Hi.” He plastered on a smile and held out a cellophane-wrapped bunch of wildflowers he’d picked up in the lobby.

After staring at them as if she didn’t understand, she popped the top off her oversize drinking cup. “Thanks. Want to put them in water?”

“You don’t plan to be thirsty again?”

She shrugged, her distant gaze telling him she was submerged in her own grief. He unwrapped the flowers and pushed the stems into the cup.

“I like them,” she said.

He brushed his lips across her temple and took the cup to the bathroom to add more water. When he set it back on the table, the scrape of plastic across laminate seemed to awaken her.

“Do me a favor?” She turned her breakfast tray toward him.

“Anything,” he said, putting desperation before common sense.

She pointed to the bland scrambled eggs and a bowl of oatmeal. A piece of toast with one bite out of it lay across the plate’s pale green lip. “Finish this. They won’t let me go if I’m not eating, and I can’t force it down.”

She touched her stomach, but quickly dragged her hand away. They both looked anywhere except at each other. Funny the things that reminded you.

“You need nourishment.” Man, he sounded like a granny. He glanced toward the door. “I can’t do something that’s bad for you.”

“If I have to fly through that window, I’m getting out of here today, but I’m too tired for the argument.” She nudged the tray again. “Is it because of your oatmeal thing?”

His “oatmeal thing” was a hatred for the stuff. “It’s my wanting-you-to-be-well thing.”

Her sharp glance suggested he didn’t have the right, but she glossed over the moment. “Eat this stuff for me, and I’ll devour anything else later.”

He dug into the congealed paste—oatmeal—and washed each bite down with cold eggs, stopping only to gag. When Lydia smiled, even oatmeal was worth it.

“What’s it like at home, Josh?”

Empty. Grim.

He looked for something to drink. How much damage could those flowers do to a cup of water? A coffee cup sat empty on the table just beyond her tray.

“What do you mean?” If he told her the truth, would she refuse to come home? A hug and the grief they’d shared the other day hadn’t put them on stable ground.

“Knowing it’s just you and me from now on.”

“I should have taken the nursery apart.” Neither of them needed reminders of how they’d painted and decorated and argued over the right way to assemble the changing table and bed.

“No,” she said. “I want to be the one who puts his things away.”

She blamed him so much she seemed to think he had no rights where his own child was concerned. “We’ll do it together.” He choked down another bite of oatmeal. She didn’t answer. In her eyes, he saw all the unanswered questions between them. “Unless you don’t want us to do anything together.”

She lowered her head.

“No?” he asked. The oatmeal almost came back up.

She shook her hair out of her eyes. “If not for the baby, we’d have split up months ago. I need to be sure you want to go on, too.”

He’d felt this kind of shock three times—when Clara had died, when the hospital had called him about Lydia and now. “You would have left me?”

Her mouth twisted with bitterness that seemed totally out of character for Lydia. “We’d have left each other,” she said. “Who cares who would have packed first?”