A Marriage Worth Fighting For

She had a complex, sentimental feeling about doctors, dating from Grammie’s illness, when a couple of them had been so good and thoughtful and kind, and yet they hadn’t been able to make Grammie better. That was thirteen years ago now, when she was ten, but it still colored her reactions sometimes. Colored her life always.

“Thank you,” Dr. McKinley said. “It’s nice to hear that.”

And she could tell he had a healthy ego, but there was a sincerity to the words all the same, and the you’re-so-beautiful in his eyes had an extra something to it, a little spark.

And suddenly, right there while she poured his coffee, some instinct told her she needed to nurture and fan that spark more carefully and strategically and hardheadedly than she’d ever nurtured anything in her life.

Because maybe, just maybe, there might be something in it for her.

Chapter Three

She meant it, MJ could tell.

Go back to New York.

Even though Alicia had only whispered the words, they had more force for him than if she’d yelled them and physically pushed him toward the door.

She never fought him. On anything. It drove him crazy sometimes. He wanted to tell her, “I’m not asking for that from you. I don’t need such perfect agreement and acquiescence with everything I say and everything I want. That’s not why I married you. You are allowed to be a person, Alicia. An independent person, not just my wife. Your total obedience was never part of the bargain.”

So why didn’t he say it?

Standing here right now, in the hallway of the rental apartment attached to his younger brother’s house, looking at his beautiful blonde wife, the question reared up at him like a snake and made him paralyzed.

Why didn’t he ever say it?

Because he was scared, he realized. He was bloody terrified that if he pulled their marital bargain out into the bright light of day—or rather the bright light of words—the things they said to each other would shatter any possibility of keeping the life they had.

The life he wanted.

Really, MJ?

Hell, yes, he wanted what he had! Stellar career, beautiful, capable wife, happy children, well-organized home life.

Which brought him back to square one. Out of the blue, Alicia wanted a divorce and was standing in his brother’s hallway in Vermont, telling him to leave.

I’m exhausted.

Another inconvenient and powerful realization. She wanted him to go, and he was tempted to do just that—fling himself angrily out of here and tear back down the highway he’d just driven. But he didn’t think he would be safe on the road for another five-hour stint. He probably hadn’t been particularly safe driving up.

“I’ll check in to a motel,” he told her for the second time tonight.

“Will you find one, at this hour?”

“That’s not your concern, is it?” The words were sour and harsh with anger, and he saw her flinch.

“MJ—”

“There’ll be something. I won’t have to go beyond Albany. I can drive that far, without going off the road.”

She said nothing to this, and he thought it was because they had no precedents to go on. They’d never argued. There was never anything to argue about. She did what he wanted, said what he wanted, kept quiet.

Didn’t see him all that much.

Didn’t see enough of him for the two of them to rub against each other the way a married couple usually did.

That was one of the things she’d said in her note, which he discovered he already knew by heart. You’re never here. What did she want with that? He was one of the most successful orthopedic specialists in Manhattan. The kind that A-list celebrities came to after a skiing accident or when their kid broke an arm in the playground. The kind who put together seriously broken bodies flown in from a radius of hundreds of miles, or fixed limbs made hopelessly dysfunctional through trauma or genetic accident. He worked ninety hours a week.

And she benefited from those ninety hours with every breath she took. The beauty treatments, the shopping trips, the time for charity work that was far more about being seen at $3,000-a-plate fundraiser dinners than it was about the Amazon rain forest or the tigers in Bengal.

He suddenly came upon a bitter place inside himself where crouched this ugly little belief that she liked seeing so little of him. Shoot, it hurt to think that, but he realized he’d thought it for a while.

Thought it but never allowed the thought any space, kept the ugly little thing in a small, murky cave deep inside himself and was too busy and too in-demand as a surgeon to remember it was there, most of the time.

Now it knifed through him with a sharp awareness that almost made him gasp out loud. He controlled himself with the same iron will that helped him survive round-the-clock stints of surgery, and told her, “We both need some time. This has hit me from left field, Alicia.”

“Yes,” she replied briefly, as if she wasn’t surprised.

“Maybe it shouldn’t have. Maybe you’ll say that’s a huge part of the problem. That I didn’t see it coming.

That I didn’t—”

Hell, he couldn’t go on. He was going to break down if he did. The degree of his emotion appalled him. And her blank, distant reaction appalled him more. She was just standing there, as if she was made of marble. As pale as marble, too, almost. But if this was painful to her, it wasn’t the same kind of pain he felt himself.

“I’m sorry.” The words were wrenched out of him as if a mystical hand had just reached inside his throat and pulled. He didn’t know what he was apologizing for, and he didn’t wait to see how she would react, just tore out through the front door, across the porch and down the steps to the car, where the engine still ticked as it cooled in the chilly night.

He knew he’d be back, and soon, but he didn’t know what he would say or do when he came.

Alicia felt shaky and sick as she heard the car drive away into the silent dark of the sleeping street. She’d expected to feel angry.

Oh, it was so strange!

She’d been so completely unsurprised to find him banging on that front door, demanding entrance in the middle of the night, but everything after that hadn’t gone the way she’d thought it would at all.

At some level, she’d wanted all the ego and impatience and one-sided demands. MJ so rarely betrayed any sense of vulnerability. Just those tiny glimpses in his last few words tonight had rocked her and undermined her certainty far more than he could have done with undiluted anger.

And then he’d listened to her.

She’d asked him to go, and he’d done so, and now she was left knowing she wouldn’t sleep tonight. He had talked about the two of them needing time. Writing that note to him this morning, she would have said that time was the last thing she needed. She’d had a ton of that.

She’d been thinking for months about leaving him. Flirting with the idea at first. What if I just took the children and left? Not meaning it, just playing with it. But then the thoughts had grown more serious, the plans more detailed.

She would have to leave the city, she’d decided, so that there was some physical distance between the two of them and so that neither of them had to face pressure from his father.

Who would hate this, she knew, because he expected perfection and order from his children.

She would have to soften the reality for Abby and Tyler, and leaving the city would help, there, too. They were so small; she didn’t want them to witness the ugliness and conflict. She had to find a secure, happy environment for them from the beginning, even if there was a later transition to a different, permanent home. Andy’s rental apartment checked all the boxes.

When she’d reached a concrete decision, there hadn’t been any momentous last straw to make it happen; it was simply a long, gradual accumulation, with a handful of moments that stood out from the rest.