Beautiful Secret (Beautiful Bastard 4)

I felt for my phone in my pocket, now desperately wishing I’d called Ruby before coming here.

We sat. Portia passed me the pepper and then set her napkin in her lap. Davey curled up on the floor, resting his head on my feet. Outside, cars drove by, their tires wet on the pavement. Inside, as always, silence reigned supreme at the dining room table.

“How was your day?” she asked finally, looking down with interest at her bowl of pasta.

My day? How about my month, or, better yet, the last eleven years of my life?

“It was . . .” I began and then stopped. The revelation struck me with a nearly physical blow: There was no mystery to be unearthed here. There was no secret to the silent isolation of our marriage. It was, and would forever be, like this between us.

Portia was lonely and having a hard time finding her footing in her new life. It had been true for me, too, in a way. I’d focused on routine, buried my free time in sport. I’d barely looked up long enough to see Ruby watching me, enamored, for months.

And now Portia was watching, waiting for me to finish my thought.

“It was an odd day.”

It was a strange thing to say; the perfect opening for her to ask more. But the quiet returned and I attempted to tuck into my meal. The sound of her chewing was as familiar to me as the smell of the wood from the dining room hutch or the cold stone scent of our kitchen floor.

“How was your day?” I asked in return, attempting some stab at a normal conversation. But it wouldn’t work. The bite of food I’d eaten sat like a lead weight in my stomach, and my head was full of nothing but Ruby. “Portia, I can’t—” I started, but she was already speaking.

She didn’t say at all what I expected: “We were terrible together, weren’t we?”

Finally, a laugh broke through the unease in my thoughts. “The worst.”

“I thought we could . . .” She paused, and for the first time since I arrived I saw a weariness, a vulnerability there. She rubbed a hand over her face. “Honestly, I don’t know what I was thinking, Niall, wanting to have dinner to talk. I wanted to see you. I’ve missed you, you know. Not sure I ever really appreciated you enough to miss you before.”

I lifted my glass of wine to my lips and said nothing. I tried with my eyes to tell her that I understood, that a part of me was glad to see her, as well.

Clearly I’d never been good at false sentiment. I closed my eyes, remembering last night. And in this dining room, that used to be mine, with a wife who also used to be mine, I knew the reason I felt so sick to be here was that I loved Ruby.

I loved her.

“It’s just that,” Portia continued, poking at her dinner, “now you’re here, I’m not sure what to say. Where to start. There’s too much, isn’t there?” She looked up at me. “Too much habit, really, where we don’t say very much at all.”

It was another needle in my thoughts. Ruby spoke of her feelings, her fears, her dreams and adventures. She wanted to hear mine. She took time to make it a habit of ours that we spoke, and I praised her for it. Told her I appreciated her honesty.

I appreciated it, even when it terrified me. Earlier, she’d told me she needed to talk something out with me—that she’d needed me. I’d been unable to get out of my own head long enough to be there for her.

“I don’t even have to ask you what you’re thinking to know your thoughts are elsewhere,” Portia said quietly, pulling me from my revelation. “You’re here out of courtesy.”

I didn’t reply, but my silence was as good an answer as any.

“I appreciate that, I do. I wasn’t always a good wife to you, Niall, I know that now. And I was wrong to think we could go back. I wanted to think we could find something we didn’t have before, but having you here now, looking so wary . . . I see it, too. It’s well and truly done between us.”

“I’m sorry, Portia,” I said, putting down my fork. “I wanted to hear what you had to say because I felt I owed you that. And I owed it to myself, too, to understand what you’d been thinking the whole time we were married. But it’s true: I’ve other things on my mind tonight.”

“I can tell,” she said. “It’s quite a shock to see you looking so . . . upset.”

I apologized again. “It wasn’t fair of me to—”

“Do you know,” she began, cutting me off, “when you moved out, you never once seemed anything but completely sorted? The last thing you said to me when you left was ‘Cheers.’ I’d handed you the folder with your passport and vital documents and you’d smiled kindly and said, ‘Cheers.’ Isn’t that amazing?”