His First Choice

They were walking along the sand. Them and many others. Joggers. Couples. Kids.

Jem remembered a summer at Myrtle Beach with his family. They’d built some killer sand towns. Not just castles. Modern-day towns.

He wanted to build one with Lacey. Right then.

The rest of the world be damned.

Her question still hung between them. He’d never met a woman who was more about listening than talking.

After Tressa, Jem found solace in the comfortable silences he could share with Lacey.

“We divorced because Tressa called a client and told him that I was screwing his wife. Her word—screwing—not mine.”

“Were you?”

The question was fair. She’d heard Tressa call him a whore. Not that she’d have taken that literally, obviously, but it had implied infidelity.

“The woman was seventy years old. So was the man, but that didn’t preclude him from having a much younger wife I could have been screwing. In Tressa’s mind.”

“Oh.”

Yeah. “When Tressa found out how old the wife was, she told him I was doing it with his daughter.”

Lacey missed a step, held on to his hand tighter and said nothing.

“The couple had their sixteen-year-old granddaughter living with them. She had cerebral palsy and I’d carried her out of the car and into the house one day because the battery on her chair had died. Unbeknownst to me, Tressa had been driving by the place because I’d been spending so much time there. But also, she said, because I smiled a lot when I talked about them.”

“So what happened?”

“I apologized, profusely, for my wife’s paranoia. The man took me aside. He told me about his own indiscretion, back when he’d been serving in the Korean War. How he’d spent the past forty years making it up to his wife. He told me to have patience, to love my wife and to understand that I had to do whatever it took to rebuild trust.”

“Had you been unfaithful?”

The question disappointed him. “What do you think?”

“I doubt it, but I’ve learned recently that I’m not impartial where you’re concerned.”

And just that quickly he was soaring above the waves again. He’d best be careful lest he even begin to resemble his ex-wife with her emotional bursts.

But, again, the question was fair.

“I was never unfaithful to my wife. Not once.”

“So why did she think you were?”

Her question sounded curious. Almost clinical. Not challenging. And he said, “I’ve tried like hell to figure that out. I think, in my wholly unprofessional opinion, that it stems from the way her folks withheld love as a means of discipline. I don’t think Tressa ever really feels like she can trust anyone to care about her. To be true to her.”

“Not a bad analysis.”

He was glad she thought so.

“You were telling me about your divorce.”

“It turned out that Tressa’s phone call was so ludicrous that no one gave it any credence. Except for me. When I thought about what could have happened... What if that girl hadn’t had a disability? Or the wife had been closer to my age? What if she’d seen me talking to a sixteen-year-old in a pool? What if she’d called that girl’s father? Not only could I have lost a lucrative client, but I could have been charged with statutory rape.”

Lacey walked beside him in silence, still holding his hand.

“I couldn’t live like that anymore.” He told her his shame—that he’d left his wife because she’d been abused as a kid and he couldn’t handle the backlash.