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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?”
She must be out of her— “Are you crazy? I married you for better or worse. I’m not leaving you.”
“Why?” With no makeup and no pretense, she looked naked. “You don’t love me anymore.”
“Not love you? Have we been sharing the same bed?”
“I’m not talking about sex,” she said—loudly enough to make him glance toward the door.
“You’re the one who changed. You can’t—” How could he put his humiliation into words? “Can’t stand to let me hold you. Can’t let me touch you. Can’t let me kiss you.”
“I can’t stand the silence,” she said. “It was bad enough before, but all I want now is the baby.”
He didn’t pretend he’d been happy with their relationship, either. “It was getting better,” he said. “I thought we seemed closer again.”
“You mean we spoke once or twice at night if you got home before I went to bed, or if I called you from my office? We shared a chaste kiss before the lights went out and sex on the weekend if you found time away from the law library.”
How many times had she rolled away from him? “You didn’t want—”
“Yeah—right.” Her sarcasm left him cold. “And I just couldn’t tear myself away from work, either.”
“I thought you were excited about your projects.” Not always, he realized now. He’d wondered….
She stared at him, a hard, emotionless woman he’d never met and couldn’t hope to know. “Are you that insensitive?”
“I must be. Are you saying you want a divorce?”
She pulled her knees all the way to her chest, grimacing. Hunched over, she looked defeated. “I thought I could go on the other day, when I woke up, but now, I don’t know.”
He wanted to grab her so she couldn’t push him away. “I don’t even like going home now,” he said. She shot him another accusing glance, as if, like her, he missed only the baby. He shook his head. “I miss you, Lydia. I want you back.”
A frown lined her forehead.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were that unhappy?”
She linked her fingers at her ankles. “You stopped caring. I tried to tell you, but you never heard. Your job makes you happy, and I don’t.”
She’d left him room to fight. “I like my job, but you’re my wife. Just talk to me when you’re worried about something as crazy as my not caring.”
“Why should I have to tell you? A woman shouldn’t have to ask her husband—I shouldn’t have had to beg you to notice me.”
Defensive—and upset—he apparently didn’t know how to fight after all. “What do you need?”
She stretched out her legs and smoothed the sheet across her breasts. “I was serious about the third time being the charm. Three threats in five years shouldn’t seem so frightening, but that woman killed our family. I won’t ever forget.”
“You want me to quit?”
“Would you?”
“I don’t think I can.” He’d had one goal since college—to make people who’d grown up the way he had see that they could choose something cleaner, safer. He worked like hell to keep them out of jail and show them they didn’t have to repeat their parents’ mistakes. They didn’t have to give their children dangerous lives. They could keep their families out of the system that had let him down. He cared about those people who were as faceless and nameless as he’d been when his parents had gone to prison for neglecting his sister.
“Lydia, I can’t stop. What would I do?”
Tears filled her eyes. She fingered them away. “I’m afraid that if you can’t change, I will. I’ve thought about this all night. We’re about to go home, and I’m not sure there’s a reason to go together.”
“Nothing like this will happen again. It was an aberration.”
“It won’t ever happen to me again.”
CHAPTER TWO
“MR. QUINCY, if you’ll bring your car to the front entrance, we’ll take Lydia down.” Patty, Lydia’s nurse, took her bag of belongings and passed it, along with the cup of flowers, to Josh. “We’ll meet you at the doors.”
Josh looked at Lydia, longing in his eyes. They’d finished a wary morning. He’d gathered her things, talked about dinner tonight, assumed they were going home together.
“Are you all right?” he asked, but she knew he was asking if she’d rather call a cab.
She hesitated. She couldn’t turn back again. This time, it was give up or give in. “I’m fine.”
After he turned the corner, Patty put on her reading glasses and peered through several sheets of paper. “Let me see.” She ran her index finger down the print. “Watch for a rise in temperature and extra sensitivity in your abdominal region that might indicate internal bleeding. No sexual relations for six weeks.”
“No—” She’d almost said “no problem,” but stopped just in time to avoid flinging her dirty laundry at Patty’s feet.
“These are the numbers for the nurse’s desk and for Dr. Sprague. Call if you have any questions.” Patty took off her specs. “I’m working Monday, Wednesday and Friday from eight until eight.”
Unexpectedly warmed by an almost-stranger’s concern, Lydia smiled.
“I’d like to hear how you’re getting along.”
“I’ll call.”
“Okay.” Patty looked up as an orderly pushed a squeaking wheelchair into the room. “Shall we?”
Lydia sat and folded her hands to hide their shaking. The town house hadn’t felt like home since she’d first begun to think about leaving Josh, but if she was starting over she had to go home.
The trip in the small blue-gray elevator went too quickly. As the doors opened, a cool gust of air blew in. Lydia breathed deep. The orderly pushed her past a long row of wide windows and delivered her to the sidewalk as Josh pulled up in their car.
“Thanks,” Lydia said to the man behind her, though she avoided his helping hands as she stood.
“You’re welcome,” he said. “Best of luck.” He nodded to Josh and went back inside.
“Are you in pain?” Josh opened the passenger’s door.
She shook her head and let her hair blow across her face. She assumed his tenderness, as he eased her into the seat, was for the baby they weren’t taking home. He pulled her seat belt out, but she fastened it herself. “Thanks,” she said.
“I’ll take it easy.”
The bumps in the road didn’t matter. Neither did the stab of pain in her belly when Josh had to slam on the brakes for a VW bug whose driver sped through a red light.
“Damn it!” His ferocity had nothing to do with the bug’s driver.
