On Mystic Lake

“I don’t know. ”

It was an opening, something at least. “You have to give me—give us another chance. When you asked for one, I agreed, and I thought about where we’d gone wrong and here I am. You owe me the same consideration, Annie. You owe it to our family. ”

“Oh, good. A lecture on family values from you. ” She pulled a compact from her purse and flipped the mirror open. “Perfect. I look like the Pillsbury Dough Girl. ”

“You look beautiful. ”

She looked up at him sharply. “But my hair will grow out. ”

“I shouldn’t have said that. ”

She clicked the compact shut. “No, you shouldn’t have. ”

Her gaze was uncomfortably direct, and he was reminded that in some ways, after almost twenty years of marriage, he didn’t know the woman sitting across from him at all. “On June fourteenth, I’ll meet you at the house. We can discuss . . . this . . . then. ” She got to her feet, and he saw that she was a little unsteady. She was obviously holding herself together with incredible effort.

He took hope from that. “I won’t give up, Annie. I’ll do whatever it takes to get you back. ”

She sighed. “Winning was always very important to you, Blake. ” On that final, cutting remark, she turned and walked out of the diner.

Chapter 22

Nick waited for Annie to return. For the first hour, he told himself he was being an idiot. He knew she couldn’t possibly meet with her husband and be back here in less than two hours.

But then two hours had stretched into three, and then four, and then five.

Forcing a smile, he’d made a big production out of dinner, for Izzy’s sake. He’d stumbled through one of Annie’s recipes: chicken breasts breaded with cornflakes and potato chips. He’d forgotten to start the rice in time, and so he served the oven-fried chicken with sliced bananas and chunks of cheese. He’d tried his best to keep a conversation going, but he and Izzy were both keenly aware of the empty chair at the table.

Everything had gone well enough until Izzy had looked at him, her upper lip mustachioed with a thin band of milk. “Daddy, she’s comin’ back, isn’t she, Daddy?”

Nick’s fork had hit the edge of his plate with a ping. He hadn’t known how in the hell to answer, and so he’d fallen back on standard parenting. Avoidance. “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” he’d said, looking quickly away.

By the time they’d done the dishes and he’d given Izzy her bath and put her to bed, he was as jittery as a bird. He couldn’t even concentrate enough to read her a bedtime story. Instead, he’d kissed her forehead and run from the room.

Blake had been exactly what Nick had expected—and precisely what he’d feared. When he’d seen the handsome, confident, obviously successful man in his expensive black suit, Nick had felt as if he were nothing. He saw his own flaws in sharp relief: the cheap, small-town jeans that needed hemming, the T-shirt that had once been blue but after countless washings had been rendered a dull and lifeless gray, the ripped belt loop he’d never bothered to sew. And he didn’t even want to think about his looks—the deeply etched lines around his eyes that were Kathy’s legacy, and the unnatural color of his hair.

Blake was everything that Nick could never be.

He wished he could push his worry aside, think about something else—anything else. But the more he tried to clear his thoughts, the more she was there, inside him. Annie held his heart and soul in the palm of her hand, and she didn’t even know it.

He’d never felt as much a part of a family as he did now.

With another man’s wife.

Annie saw him standing out at the lake. She got out of her Mustang and eased the door shut quietly, walking slowly across the grass.

Wordlessly, she came up beside him. She waited for him to touch her, move close enough that she could feel the comforting heat of his presence, but he didn’t. Instead, he stood stiffly in place. “How did it go?”

There was no point in lying to him. “He made a terrible mistake and he loves me. ”

“He did make a terrible mistake. ”

There was a crack in his voice, and in it, she heard his pain.

“What are you going to do?” he asked softly.

“I don’t know. I spent two and a half months trying to fall out of love with him, and now when I’ve almost succeeded, he wants to take it all back. I can’t adapt this quickly. ”

He fell silent, and she realized what she’d said. Almost succeeded. Almost fallen out of love with her husband. She wanted to place a Band-Aid on the wound of her words, but almost was the sad truth of her feelings for Blake. Anything else would be a lie.