A Man for All Seasons

“So he calls off the wedding and then what?” he prompted while he fiddled with the control panel, figuring out which buttons controlled the head elevation and the lights.

“He told me to keep his half of the down payment on the townhouse to cover the deposits I’d lose by canceling the wedding.” Marlie thought of what she went through and got mad all over again. “Like that even began to make up for it. We were within sixty days of the date. The invitations hadn’t been mailed, but they’d been printed. My dress had already been altered. The bridesmaids’ dresses couldn’t be returned and I couldn’t make my friends pay for those, so I reimbursed them. Everybody had bought their plane tickets—”

“Focus,” Ty cut her off. “What else did he say?”

“He just said ‘sorry’ and got back on the elevator.”

“I mean, later. After that.”

“There was no later,” Marlie told him. “I haven’t seen or talked to him since. No text, no email. Nothing.”

“That was it?” Ty stopped playing with the buttons and stared at her. “You’re kidding.”

“No,” she whispered, her throat tight. That was probably the most difficult aspect for her to accept—that Eric could walk away as though their life together had never existed.

“Jerk.” Ty looked outraged. “What about his stuff?”

She swallowed past the tightness. “The movers told me he packed his car. He knew I had a couple of appointments that morning before I was to meet him at the title company and he must have come back after I left.”

“So the coward planned it all in advance.” Ty was gratifyingly incensed on her behalf. It helped.

“I thought it was stress. I thought he was having a meltdown and he’d get over it in a few hours. I mean, it happens. Even I— Anyway, they called me in for the appointment and what was I supposed to do? We had to vacate the apartment. The movers were already loading the truck. I had nowhere else to go. This was supposed to be our home. So I bought it. I went in and signed the papers and I bought it. Not that moment, because the papers had to be redone, but I moved in and paid the bank rent for a few days.” Marlie breathed deeply, just as she had after walking into the room and indenturing herself to a mortgage.

“I would have done the same thing.” Ty leaned over the side of the bed. “I’m going to drink your water.” He opened the fridge, took the bottle she’d forgotten was in there, and twisted the cap.

Marlie smiled as he drank while the door clicked shut. He looked good in the bed. Very much at home. Nice broad shoulders, the kind she could rest her head on after he’d thrown an arm around her while they watched a movie.

Marlie thought all kinds of warm, fuzzy thoughts until the rational part of her pointed out that she was fantasizing about Tyler Burton.

It’s only because he’s here and he’s male, she told herself. You do not want Tyler Burton in particular; you want a man in general.

Ty lowered the bottle. “How long did it take you to figure out he wasn’t coming back?”

“A couple of days. He wouldn’t answer his cell phone and I had visions of him lying in the hospital in a coma. I went by his work and they told me that he’d quit to take a job overseas.” Yeah. His coworkers had to tell her. An echo of the humiliation she’d felt reverberated through her. “Overseas? Like any country would do as long as it was on a different continent than the one I was on?”

“Marlie.” Ty leveled a look at her. “Drama free.”

No coddling from Ty, which was probably the only reason she was able to get through her story without crying. “I just couldn’t believe it. He’d never said anything about wanting to live in another country. Why didn’t he ask me? I would have been up for it.”

“Do I really have to answer that?” Ty asked. “Do I really have to tell you it was because he didn’t want you to go with him?”

“That’s cold.”

“Marlie!” He looked pained. “This cannot be news to you. Forget about it. You went to his office—he wasn’t there, then what?”

Marlie skipped the part about crying for hours after discovering he’d put her name on the “block personal information” list at his new company. As if she was a stalker. “I called his mom, who, by the way, was under the impression that Eric had bought me this house as a lovely parting gift. I set her straight on that, as well as what it was going to cost to cancel the wedding.”

“Details I don’t need.”

Marlie exhaled in frustration before continuing, “She expressed her opinion. I expressed mine.”

Ty gave her a thumbs up.

“And she refused to tell me where he was. Not even what country he was in.”

“You’re not looking too good here,” Ty said.

Marlie’s jaw dropped. “I’m not?”

“You’re the one who fell in love with that turkey.”

“I didn’t know he was a turkey.”

“We’ll work on your turkey-detecting skills after I fix this problem,” he said.

“Other than a really large mortgage and a really small income, I don’t have a problem.”

“Yes, you do.” Ty sipped more water. “You’re not over him yet.”

“Oh, I’m over him. But I don’t know how I missed the signs that something was wrong.”

“Hey. Listen to me.” Ty leaned forward, holding her gaze intently. “There weren’t any signs. He made sure of it because he wanted out. Confronting you in public, breaking your heart, and taking away your dream home was calculated to make you hate him.”

Marlie believed him. She didn’t want to, but she knew Ty was giving her the unvarnished truth. “But why?” It was the question she’d asked herself way too many times. If Ty could answer it, he was a genius.

“Because then you wouldn’t want him back. No hoping you could ‘work things out.’ It would be a clean break and you both could move on. Like ripping off a bandage. It stings, but it doesn’t hurt for as long.”

“It was a lot more than a sting.”

“For you, yes. But he’d been planning his move for a while. He’d already checked out of the relationship. You don’t do what he did to somebody you love.”

Unvarnished truth hurt. “You’re saying he’d fallen out of love with me?”

Ty nodded.

“But he, but we still—”

“That would be him hiding the signs.”

“Did he have to hide them twice just the night before?”

“He was being thorough,” Ty said implacably.

Details from their last night together flooded her memory. “We talked about our future that night. We talked about having children.” Marlie swallowed. “I feel sick.”

“Now, if you had a bed pan in here, we’d be all set.”

She stared at Ty. “You are unbelievable. How can you say such a thing? He broke my heart and you act like it was nothing more than a broken date. Don’t you have any empathy at all?”