She pushed herself to her feet. Even though her legs trembled beneath her, she sifted through the shock that near paralyzed her to find something to say.
“Didn’t you do exactly the same thing? Wipe Parker from our lives when you walked out that door, when you walked away from me?”
“I left you because I couldn’t pretend that the past had never happened, like you did. It happened. I know it did, and I’ve regretted that day every conscious moment of my life since. You seemed to find it so easy to just pick up and carry on. As if Parker had never been born,” he accused.
“I couldn’t hold on to the past.” Olivia clutched at her blouse as if doing so could ease the tightness deep in her chest. “It was killing me, Xander. But you couldn’t see that. Holding on to Parker’s memories, seeing the reminders of his life every single day? It was killing me inside, destroying me. I had to move forward or die. I had to put everything away, or I knew I’d end up being buried with him.”
“Even at the price of our marriage? At the expense of us?” Xander shook his head. “And you say I did the same thing as you? I didn’t. I couldn’t. I loved our son with every breath in my body.”
“So did I!” she shouted at him. “And I loved you. I still love you. That’s why I did what I did. I brought you home, and I hoped against hope that you wouldn’t remember because then we could forget the past and the hurt and the awful things we said to each other back then. We could be together, like we’re meant to be. The way we have been. But you, you’re running away again, just like you did last time. Why stand and face our problems when you can just walk away, right?”
The bitterness in her words stained the air between them.
“You have the gall to accuse me of running away? You didn’t want me anymore. You made that patently clear when Parker died. Sometimes I wonder if you ever loved me or if I just conveniently fit into the plan you had for your future. You certainly didn’t need me. It makes me wonder why you even bothered to lie to me all this time.”
Her throat choked up—just like it had the last time he left her. Her words, her fears, all knotted into a tangled ball that lodged somewhere between her heart and her voice and made her too afraid to tell him how she really felt.
Her words, when they came, were nothing but a stifled whisper. “I did it for us. For our marriage. It, no, we deserved a second chance, but you wouldn’t listen when I said the past didn’t matter. That it was our future that was important.”
“I wouldn’t listen? You shut me out, Olivia. You shut me out from the truth. From our son’s memory, from our past. No!” He waved his hand in a short cutting motion in front of him. “You don’t get to do this again. You don’t get to make my decisions for me.”
“What about our decisions, Xander? The decisions we should be making for us?” she pleaded.
“Us? There is no us.”
Outside, she heard a car pull up and the driver toot the horn. Xander bent and reached down for the bag she hadn’t seen standing there before. She recognized the suitcase immediately—after all, it hadn’t been that long ago she’d packed it herself.
“Goodbye, Olivia. You’ll be hearing from my lawyer—and this time the divorce is going through.”
He started to walk toward the door, and she followed him, her movements jerky as if she were some marionette being played by a demented puppet master.
“Xander, please, don’t go. Don’t leave me,” she implored. “We’ve been happy together. Things have been good again since you’ve been home, and this is our home.”
He kept walking. Olivia put on a burst of speed, passing him and getting to the door before him. She pressed her back to the solid wooden surface, barring him from dragging it open and walking away from her.
“Think about how well we worked together with your rehab and how close we’ve become again. This is our chance to rebuild our lives. We made mistakes before—I know that. But we can work past them. Please don’t throw away this chance for us to make it all right again. To rebuild our marriage.”
He put his hands on her shoulders and physically steered her away from the door. She lacked the strength to fight him and just watched as he turned the brass knob and opened the door wide.
“You’re good at this, you know,” she murmured, using the only weapon she had left. “Walking away. You blame me for lying, for withholding the truth from you, but you’re equally to blame for the way things fell apart. You always walk away instead of accepting or asking for help. You’re prepared to share your body, but you’ve never shared your deepest feelings or your thoughts with me. Ever.