“We bloody well are. Why?”
She looked at him finally. His cheeks were pink, his eyes were hard, and he looked stubborn as a mule. “Because you were a mistake,” she said, hoping to wound him as badly as he’d wounded her. “You promised me you wouldn’t be, but you are. I only fell in love with you because you’re a mistake. Maybe your brother’s little recitation didn’t make it clear. That’s what I do. I screw things up. It’s my specialty. And you— You only think you love me because it pisses your family off. You want somebody totally inappropriate so you can rebel without rebelling. In a nutshell, love, I’m a screwup, and you’re a coward.”
“That’s what you think? That’s your assessment of the situation?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re angry with me because you think I made you come here as part of some sick game I play with my family?”
“Essentially, yes.”
“Christ.”
He picked up a big stick off the side of the road and threw it as far out into the woods behind the hedgerow as he could. It went a really long way. It was the angriest thing she’d ever seen him do, and it dawned on her that Nev was well and truly pissed off.
First time for everything, apparently.
“You were married.” He flung the words at her.
“Yep.”
“You might have told me.”
“Would it have made any difference?”
“Yes, of course it would have made a difference!”
“How?”
“I would have bloody known, wouldn’t I? I wouldn’t have had to sit there and listen to my brother drop bombshells about you. I could’ve said something, because I would’ve had some information, some actual solid bloody knowledge about you, to offer to the conversation.”
“I don’t get it. What difference does it make if you know I committed arson? What would you tell them, It was only minor arson? She wasn’t convicted, so no worries?”
“How the hell should I know what I’d have said? I didn’t have the choice, because you never told me the first thing about yourself. I was good enough to shag, but not good enough to confide in, isn’t that about right?”
Damn it, she had been confiding in him. More than anyone else in her life. The things she’d told him, she’d only ever told him. She’d been getting there.
But there was no “there” to get to. No way to save this mess they’d constructed together. All they could do was walk away from it.
They reached the end of the road, both of them gleaming with sweat and breathing hard, and Cath turned left. Nev grabbed her hand again, and she wrenched it out of his grasp for a second time. “Where on earth do you think you’re going?” he asked.
She pointed a hundred yards down the road to the bus stop. “I’m taking a bus.”
“What bloody bus?”
“Any bloody bus.”
“Oh, for the love of— Stop acting like a child. Come back to the house and talk to me.”
“We’re finished, Nev. Over. Done with. Kaput. Get it through your head.”
She saw a bus pulling up to the stop, but she was too far away to reach it. She started to jog anyway. The bus left the curb before she got there.
Nev came up beside her, grabbed her by the shoulder, and spun her around. He brought his other hand up too, bracing her between his palms at arm’s length. She shifted, but he had a tight grip. Someone gasped, and she realized that to the four people waiting for the bus under the shelter, what Nev was doing probably looked uncomfortably like assault. He would never hurt her, though. Not physically.
“Tell me now,” he said.
“Tell you what?”