“You’ve given thought to my goals?” Becca asked softly.
“No.” He shook his head. “And that’s the point.”
He debated telling her something and decided to do it. “Sari called the other night after you were asleep,” he said.
“Which night?”
“The day she found out about the baby.”
“Oh. You should have woken me.”
“She called to talk to me, Becca. She told me why you wanted the abortion, about being afraid of loving and losing.”
Becca stared down at her desk. “I’d rather she hadn’t done that.”
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Being a coward is definitely worthy of shame,” she told him, her voice tinged with disgust.
“You didn’t do it, honey.”
Becca made no response. Will had the feeling she wasn’t being easy on herself.
“What’s happened to us, Bec? I had no idea you were afraid of anything. I’d have said, if anyone could handle this, it was you.”
“I don’t know what happened.” She shook her head. “Maybe we got lazy.”
He nodded, picking up a pen only to throw it down again. “The relationship I thought was so close was merely drifting along, existing out of habit?”
Had the love he’d felt for her all these years been merely a habit, too? Something he was supposed to feel, programmed to feel? An emotion that lacked depth, maybe wasn’t quite real?
“I thought we were close, too,” she said, her voice low, defeated. “But it was all just going along with the flow, doing what was expected of us, wasn’t it? We didn’t really know each other at all.”
No! His mind immediately dismissed her words. Yet weren’t they exactly what he’d been wondering himself?
“So where do we go from here?” he asked.
Becca pushed away the files she’d been sorting through. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess we have to figure out why this happened. Do we just not care enough? Or were we too comfortable, taking each other for granted?”
He nodded, thinking she made good sense. He just wasn’t sure where to find those answers. “Maybe it goes deeper than that,” he offered, thinking out loud. “Maybe we first need to decide, individually, what it is we want out of life.”
She looked across at him, her features reflecting her pain. “I guess we do.”
Which left them right back where they’d started. Traveling through a rocky relationship with no clear destination in mind.
WILL WASN’T BIG on celebrations, especially the day-long-and-into-the-night kind. Maybe if he’d been able to melt into the crowd, to be anonymous, affairs like this wouldn’t be so bad—but he didn’t think so. Crowds and endless hours of making merry exhausted him. They always had.
But this year, accompanying Becca to Shelter Valley’s Fourth of July festivities, he discovered that the day wasn’t as bad as usual. In the first place, he was taking a long hard look at the town he’d always si
mply accepted and finding many things he liked. And in his spare time, he was too busy keeping an eye on his wife to be bothered by all the people scurrying around him.
Dressed in deference to her position, she was wearing one of her dark-colored maternity dresses and pumps. He’d done his darnedest to get her to dress more comfortably. Was even wearing shorts and sandals himself to help her out, but she’d have none of it. At least the dress was sleeveless. And the pumps were low-heeled.
Watching her with her constituents, smiling, finding something nice to say to everyone—and knowing that she meant everything she said—made him proud of her. Her presence seemed to be magic as she smoothed away worried frowns, solved problems at booths that weren’t set up according to plan, found ice when a delivery wasn’t made, designed a makeshift table skirt out of a table runner when one went missing, filled in when a worker didn’t show up. Witnessing it all, running errands for her, filling in at the balloon booth when the helium tank was delivered late, he found it hard to recognize this woman as the one he’d discussed with Sari a couple of weeks before. The woman who considered herself a coward.
The woman who was afraid to love in case she lost.
This Becca, the one who could handle anything and make it look easy, was the woman he’d always known. The one he’d always thought he loved.