Anna Adams - Marriage in Jeopardy

A WEEK AFTER Lydia had awakened, Josh stopped at his wife’s door, feeling as if today was their final connection with their son. She’d lost the baby the day of the attack, and they’d dealt with her D&C and with the police questioning her about her few memories. When they left the hospital, everything about her pregnancy would be over.

He pressed his fist to Lydia’s door, glancing at the busy nurses, the visitors striding up and down the beige-tiled hall. Their lives went on.

And he wanted to hit someone.

“Who’s out there?”

Lydia sounded scared. He shoved the door open. Of course she’d be afraid one of the Durances would come back to finish the job.

“Hi.” He plastered on a smile and held out a cellophane-wrapped bunch of wildflowers he’d picked up in the lobby.

After staring at them as if she didn’t understand, she popped the top off her oversize drinking cup. “Thanks. Want to put them in water?”

“You don’t plan to be thirsty again?”

She shrugged, her distant gaze telling him she was submerged in her own grief. He unwrapped the flowers and pushed the stems into the cup.

“I like them,” she said.

He brushed his lips across her temple and took the cup to the bathroom to add more water. When he set it back on the table, the scrape of plastic across laminate seemed to awaken her.

“Do me a favor?” She turned her breakfast tray toward him.

“Anything,” he said, putting desperation before common sense.

She pointed to the bland scrambled eggs and a bowl of oatmeal. A piece of toast with one bite out of it lay across the plate’s pale green lip. “Finish this. They won’t let me go if I’m not eating, and I can’t force it down.”

She touched her stomach, but quickly dragged her hand away. They both looked anywhere except at each other. Funny the things that reminded you.

“You need nourishment.” Man, he sounded like a granny. He glanced toward the door. “I can’t do something that’s bad for you.”

“If I have to fly through that window, I’m getting out of here today, but I’m too tired for the argument.” She nudged the tray again. “Is it because of your oatmeal thing?”

His “oatmeal thing” was a hatred for the stuff. “It’s my wanting-you-to-be-well thing.”

Her sharp glance suggested he didn’t have the right, but she glossed over the moment. “Eat this stuff for me, and I’ll devour anything else later.”

He dug into the congealed paste—oatmeal—and washed each bite down with cold eggs, stopping only to gag. When Lydia smiled, even oatmeal was worth it.

“What’s it like at home, Josh?”

Empty. Grim.

He looked for something to drink. How much damage could those flowers do to a cup of water? A coffee cup sat empty on the table just beyond her tray.

“What do you mean?” If he told her the truth, would she refuse to come home? A hug and the grief they’d shared the other day hadn’t put them on stable ground.

“Knowing it’s just you and me from now on.”

“I should have taken the nursery apart.” Neither of them needed reminders of how they’d painted and decorated and argued over the right way to assemble the changing table and bed.

“No,” she said. “I want to be the one who puts his things away.”

She blamed him so much she seemed to think he had no rights where his own child was concerned. “We’ll do it together.” He choked down another bite of oatmeal. She didn’t answer. In her eyes, he saw all the unanswered questions between them. “Unless you don’t want us to do anything together.”

She lowered her head.

“No?” he asked. The oatmeal almost came back up.

She shook her hair out of her eyes. “If not for the baby, we’d have split up months ago. I need to be sure you want to go on, too.”

He’d felt this kind of shock three times—when Clara had died, when the hospital had called him about Lydia and now. “You would have left me?”

Her mouth twisted with bitterness that seemed totally out of character for Lydia. “We’d have left each other,” she said. “Who cares who would have packed first?”

She must be out of her— “Are you crazy? I married you for better or worse. I’m not leaving you.”

“Why?” With no makeup and no pretense, she looked naked. “You don’t love me anymore.”

“Not love you? Have we been sharing the same bed?”

“I’m not talking about sex,” she said—loudly enough to make him glance toward the door.

“You’re the one who changed. You can’t—” How could he put his humiliation into words? “Can’t stand to let me hold you. Can’t let me touch you. Can’t let me kiss you.”

“I can’t stand the silence,” she said. “It was bad enough before, but all I want now is the baby.”

He didn’t pretend he’d been happy with their relationship, either. “It was getting better,” he said. “I thought we seemed closer again.”

“You mean we spoke once or twice at night if you got home before I went to bed, or if I called you from my office? We shared a chaste kiss before the lights went out and sex on the weekend if you found time away from the law library.”

How many times had she rolled away from him? “You didn’t want—”

“Yeah—right.” Her sarcasm left him cold. “And I just couldn’t tear myself away from work, either.”

“I thought you were excited about your projects.” Not always, he realized now. He’d wondered….

She stared at him, a hard, emotionless woman he’d never met and couldn’t hope to know. “Are you that insensitive?”

“I must be. Are you saying you want a divorce?”

She pulled her knees all the way to her chest, grimacing. Hunched over, she looked defeated. “I thought I could go on the other day, when I woke up, but now, I don’t know.”

He wanted to grab her so she couldn’t push him away. “I don’t even like going home now,” he said. She shot him another accusing glance, as if, like her, he missed only the baby. He shook his head. “I miss you, Lydia. I want you back.”

A frown lined her forehead.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were that unhappy?”

She linked her fingers at her ankles. “You stopped caring. I tried to tell you, but you never heard. Your job makes you happy, and I don’t.”

She’d left him room to fight. “I like my job, but you’re my wife. Just talk to me when you’re worried about something as crazy as my not caring.”

“Why should I have to tell you? A woman shouldn’t have to ask her husband—I shouldn’t have had to beg you to notice me.”

Defensive—and upset—he apparently didn’t know how to fight after all. “What do you need?”

She stretched out her legs and smoothed the sheet across her breasts. “I was serious about the third time being the charm. Three threats in five years shouldn’t seem so frightening, but that woman killed our family. I won’t ever forget.”

“You want me to quit?”

“Would you?”

“I don’t think I can.” He’d had one goal since college—to make people who’d grown up the way he had see that they could choose something cleaner, safer. He worked like hell to keep them out of jail and show them they didn’t have to repeat their parents’ mistakes. They didn’t have to give their children dangerous lives. They could keep their families out of the system that had let him down. He cared about those people who were as faceless and nameless as he’d been when his parents had gone to prison for neglecting his sister.

“Lydia, I can’t stop. What would I do?”

Tears filled her eyes. She fingered them away. “I’m afraid that if you can’t change, I will. I’ve thought about this all night. We’re about to go home, and I’m not sure there’s a reason to go together.”