Hunter (Stud Ranch 2)

“What? Oh my God, Hunter. The night we met, you just said she left, so I assumed…” she trailed off and Hunter ran a hand through his hair.

“Yeah. I haven’t been so great at being able to talk about it. Or deal with it. At all. I even kept on paying her cell phone bill so I could call and hear her voice. It’s only just recently that I’ve been able to…” Hunter paused as a middle-aged woman walked past with a big dog on a leash. The sun had just set and while there weren’t a lot of people around, there were still some.

“Want to take a walk?” He held out his hand to her.

She nodded and took it. As soon as he felt her small hand in his, he felt calmer. Like maybe he could tell the story after all. For the first time since giving his statement to the police that night.

“She hated living in a small town. Almost from the first day we moved in.” He explained a little about how things had gotten worse and worse toward the end.

“It was one of those nights after we’d, well,” he looked away, “been intimate. But then right afterwards, she left to go sleep on the couch. I got pissed. I followed her and we started fighting.”

Hunter remembered every detail of that night. Janine had been wearing his ratty old Purdue shirt to sleep in. She was beautiful but he hadn’t been able to see it. He was so tired of the rut they’d fallen into.

“What do you want from me?” he’d demanded.

She accused him of not loving her.

“Not love you?” he scoffed. “You think I’d put up with all this bullshit if I didn’t love you?”

Her eyes flashed with fury and she got right up in his face. “You don’t even know me! If you knew me at all, you’d know I could never be happy out here in the bu-fuck middle of nowhere, living with all these uncultured hicks. I want to talk to someone who’s read this week’s New Yorker. I want to go to the theater. I want to go to poetry readings and wine tastings and then I want to put on a skimpy sequin dress and go clubbing and then in the morning I want to go eat a bagel and lox at Benny’s on the corner of Broadway and Bleecker.”

“So, what?” Hunter threw up his hands. “You want to just up and move back to Soho?”

It was a rhetorical question but Janine shoved her hands on the table and shouted, “Yes! That’s exactly what I want.”

And then she’d gone to the bedroom and started packing.

“What?” Hunter had scoffed. “You’re just leaving? Right now?”

“Right now.”

“But it’s the middle of the night.”

“Well I can’t stand spending another minute in this house.”

Hunter took several steps back from the bedroom at her words. That was when he’d gotten it. She meant it. She was actually leaving him. It had come to this. How had it come to this?

His wife. His beautiful, neurotic, infuriating wife, was about to walk out the front door and out of his life.

And that was when he knew none of the rest of it mattered. Not the mortgage on the house. Not the veterinary practice he was in the process of taking over from Dr. Roberts. Not even his parents.

Janine was his wife. She was his first priority. And he’d failed her. He could deny it all he wanted her, but he’d known she was unhappy.

Hunter looked over at Isobel. They’d stopped walking right by the little city park along main street. Her eyebrows were drawn in compassion as she listened to him talk.

“Just a little more time, I kept telling myself.” He shook his head at how stupid he’d been. “Just a little more time and she’ll adjust.”

“But if you realized that… Before she left, I mean,” Isobel said, confused.

Hunter shook his head again. “It was too late. I tried to talk to her. I said that okay, we’d move to Manhattan. That I wanted to go with her. That I was sorry. That she was the most important thing to me.”

But Janine had pulled away from him and grabbed her suitcase. She said she needed some time by herself. She said she had to think.

“And then she got into her car and drove off.” Hunter’s voice was bleak and Isobel reached out and took both of his hands.

“What happened?”

“Car accident,” Hunter whispered. “It was winter. The roads were icy. Her car slid on a curve and she ran into a tree. Died on impact.”