“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.
Like the night Andy and Claudia had announced their engagement and their plans for the small, informal wedding that would be taking place in New York City just a couple of weeks from now. Alicia had urged Claudia to go for something bigger, even if it meant waiting, and when she thought back, she realized that MJ’s sister, Scarlett, had probably interpreted that in the worst way.
Alicia knew that at least some members of the McKinley family believed she’d married MJ for his money and status.
Well, they were right, weren’t they?
It was stupid and pointless to regret the rush of their Las Vegas wedding. Would their marriage have been any healthier and happier if they’d started it off with a well-organized splash, months in the planning? Would it have happened at all?
Doubtful.
MJ would have been bound to see sense and realize he could do so much better.
She shivered. It really was cold in the house. She’d tried the heating earlier tonight, but nothing happened when she touched the controls on the electronic thermostat. Apparently Andy hadn’t yet turned on the furnace, although he hadn’t mentioned it during their short phone call. Maybe he shared MJ’s preference for bracing doses of fresh air at a temperature of fifty degrees or less.
She crept upstairs and back to bed, but her churning feelings, her blank sense of the future and her freezing feet wouldn’t let her sleep, and when Abby and Tyler came bouncing into the room at just after six-thirty, she wasn’t sure how she was going to get through the day.
MJ checked out of the cheap motel on the outskirts of Albany at seven in the morning. His colleagues would be surprised to see him in surgery at eleven-thirty, after what he’d said to Raj on the phone last night, but it wasn’t their business.
Later, at his office, he would have to grab Carla, his office manager, and go through his schedule with her. He had to be realistic. If he and Alicia were going to give themselves a chance, then he needed to give them time. Time to talk. Time to compromise. Time to mine down to the depths of what was wrong.
It hit him again as he drove.
He did not want a divorce.
His throat hurt over it. His whole body hurt, knotted with the tension of rebellion and pain and refusal to accept his marriage was over.
He was not getting a divorce. He didn’t damn well believe in it! Not when you had kids. Not when you had a partnership that should have worked.
He accepted that Alicia wasn’t doing this on a shallow whim, and so he was going to have to work at changing her mind, and if she wasn’t expecting a fight from him over this, then