Down deep the shot registered, but he pushed it aside. He was good at that. All the things in front of him were organized, clear. His work. His job. Even his marriage to Mia. All neatly labeled and properly shelved.
But all those emotions that he pushed to the side, the guilt and worry and pain and anger. The memories of his parents and his past that he refused to deal with were a jumbled mess on the outskirts of his life, but they were beginning to blind his periphery.
“Mia, that’s no way to plan.”
“I don’t have any other answer, Jack. Because I am not selling this ranch.”
“What about the divorce?” He waited for her answer, unsure of her answer. Unsure of when he started to care about her answer.
She chewed her lip. “Forget it,” she said.
He laughed, his pride prickling. “You’ll stay married to me in order to keep this place?”
“It’s my home!” she snapped, her eyes catching fire. “And I get that you don’t understand how I feel—”
“Of course I do,” he snapped back. “It’s why I married you in the first place. So you could keep your home. So you could have the life you told me you always wanted. But that life isn’t worth this.”
“You don’t get to decide that, Jack! You don’t get to waltz in here again and make these sweeping decisions on my behalf.”
“I’m not.”
“Oh, Jack, you don’t even see it. That’s what you do. You walk into a world, change it and then leave before the dust settles. You don’t stick around to see what you’ve done.”
He blinked and took a step back. Another. His stomach ached, the truth like stones rattling around inside of him.
“Are you talking about Africa?” he asked. She’d ripped the blankets off his head, and the world she’d revealed was different than the one he knew.
He wasn’t always the hero. Africa was complicated and he’d treated his work there like it was simple. A problem to solve.
It’s how he treated everything. Because it was simpler.
She paused, her lips parted. “Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know. I just know what you did to me five years ago.”
“Five years ago you needed me. Just like you need me now. This isn’t emotional, Mia. It’s reality.”
She stepped up close, so close he smelled the coffee on her breath. “You want the reality?” The word slashed and burned between them, changing everything, and the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. “I didn’t need you then, Jack. And I don’t need you now.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Five years ago, I had a job offer from Jeremiah’s sister, Annie. She needed a foreman and I could have just moved over there.”
”But your mom? Lucy?”
“They’d already decided to move to Los Angeles. Mom wanted to go, wanted to leave behind the drama of this ranch. Start someplace fresh.”
Jack tried to add it all up but things still didn’t make sense.
Nothing made sense.
“Then why did you marry me?” he asked.
Mia couldn’t run from this question. Had, in fact, driven them to this point. And she found, facing down this truth, that she wanted to get rid of this burden. This load she’d carried for so long, all by herself.
She was so tired. Tired of carrying it. Tired of pretending.
Her body went still. Her mind quiet.
This would end everything. He’d leave, she had no doubt. She’d file for the divorce and he’d sign. Perhaps they’d never see each other again and that hurt. It hurt so much she pushed the thought away.
But the truth was, he wasn’t equipped to deal with the truth, standing there talking about emotion and reality as if he had any idea what her life truly was like.
She took a deep breath of the barn, the straw and feed. The horses. She’d put down roots here, roots that went all the way to the bedrock of the mountains behind her, and Jack, no matter what he thought or what she felt about him, couldn’t change that.
This was going to sting a little, no doubt about it, but in the end she’d be okay. Because she had these roots.
“I married you because I loved you,” she said carefully, and it was like a weight, heavy and tiresome, fell from her tongue into a silence so deep it made her dizzy.
It took a moment for her words to register, but when they did his jaw dropped.
She’d have laughed if it didn’t hurt so damn much. “I have loved you my whole life, and when you said you’d marry me I said yes because I wanted to be your wife.”
“Mia,” he breathed, and stupidly, she was holding her breath. Despite all her brave talk, she was scared. She was hopeful.
A girl in front of the boy she loved, with her heart shivering in the open air.