Danielle Steel: Lone eagle

She tried talking to him, but he was sick of hearing it, and being made to feel guilty, and she was tired of his being gone. She loved him more than she ever had, but the last couple of years had taken a toll on both of them. Her accident the year before had ripped them apart, and they'd found their way back to each other again, but the same spark wasn't there anymore. She was thirty-three years old, living with a man she never saw. And he was forty-five, at the height of his career. She knew she had another twenty years of it, and it would get worse, maybe even a lot worse, before it got better. He had opened up new vistas in aviation, and was adding more routes, designing even more extraordinary planes, and he seemed to have less and less time for her. She didn't want to complain about it anymore, but three weeks in six months didn't give them enough time. No matter how good his reasons were, and they were most of the time, he just wasn't there.

“I want to be with you, Joe,” she said sadly when he came home for a few days in June. It was an all too familiar refrain. She wanted to find a compromise so they could be together more, but Joe had too much on his mind to discuss it with her. He was more involved in his business than ever, rather than less, and he liked it that way. He was on his way to London the next day. He didn't tell her that for the rest of the year, he would be traveling even more. The fight seemed to have gone out of both of them.

It wasn't about doing battle, but accepting what they had. And other than the feelings they'd had for each other for sixteen years, they never had enough time together anymore to enjoy each other, or build anything. He had long since stopped trying to push her into traveling with him. The kids were still small, and needed her, and she hated leaving them. Reed was six, and Stephanie was almost four, and Joe knew that for another fifteen years or so, she was going to have a hard time leaving them. From what he could see, as he looked ahead, they were going to be pulled apart a thousand ways for another fifteen or twenty years. Their lives were going separate ways, and no matter how hard she swam to keep up with him, or how much he cared, they were so far apart most of the time, they couldn't even see each other anymore.

She came to California to see him in July, and she brought the kids. She took them to Disneyland, and Joe took all of them up in a fabulous new plane that had just been built. But halfway through their trip, Joe had to leave for Hong Kong for an emergency. He flew straight to London from there, and Kate took the children to the Cape. Joe didn't come to Cape Cod at all that summer. He couldn't stand her mother anymore, and told Kate bluntly that he wasn't going there again. And they came home earlier than usual that summer, because her father got very sick.

Joe seemed to be on the go constantly, and it was mid-September before their paths crossed again, and he actually came home to spend three weeks in New York. But when she saw him this time, she knew something had changed. At first, she thought it was another woman, but after the first week he'd been home, she realized it was something far worse. Joe just couldn't do it anymore. He couldn't have the career he wanted and worry about her. In the end, he had chosen to escape. The price of loving her, or anyone, was simply too great.

He had been swept away by the tides of his career, the airplanes he had built had taken over the industry all over the world. The airline he had started eleven years before was the biggest and most successful of its kind. Joe had created a monster that had devoured both of them. He knew he had a choice at that point, the world he had created for himself, or her. And the moment she knew that, and looked in his eyes, she felt an icy chill in the air. The worst of it was that she knew he still loved her, and she still felt everything she ever had for him, but he had flown so far away from her that there was no way for her to reach him again. If he wanted her, he had to find a way to bring her with him. And he had figured out several months before that it wasn't possible. No matter how much he loved her, he just couldn't do it anymore. He felt too guilty leaving her all the time, seldom seeing her, explaining it, apologizing, and never being there for her kids. It was why, he realized, instinctively he had never wanted children of his own, and was actually relieved when she lost the twins. He couldn't have it all, he had discovered, and more than that, he couldn't give Kate what she needed or what she deserved.

He had been thinking about it all summer, and when he saw her in New York, it nearly tore his heart out, but he knew he was sure. The answer had been a long time coming because the questions were too hard. If she had asked him if he still loved her, he would have had to say he did. But her mother had called it correctly from the beginning. And so had he. In the end, Joe's first love was his planes. And what he had wanted from Kate, and to share with her, had been an impossible dream.

It took him days to say it to her, but finally he did. The night before he left for London, to acquire a small airline there, he saw Kate lying next to him in their bed, and knew he could never come back to her again. He would rather have shot her than say the words to her, but if for no other reason than that he loved her, he knew he had to free himself, and her.

“Kate.” She turned to him as he said her name, and it was as though she knew before he spoke. She had seen something terrifying in his eyes for three weeks, and had done everything she could not to provoke him this time. She had tried to stay small and stay away from him, and not anger him. They hadn't had a fight in months. But it had nothing to do with fighting, or not loving her. It had to do with him. He wanted more in his life than he was willing to share with her. He had nothing left to give. In sixteen years of loving her, he had given what he had, or could. The rest of what was left he wanted for himself. And he no longer wanted to apologize or explain or have to comfort her. He knew how abandoned she felt when he was gone, but he no longer cared. Meeting her needs and his own was just too much work for him.

Kate turned to look at him without saying a word. She looked like a deer that was about to be killed.

He took a breath and plunged. It was never going to be better saying it to her some other time. It could only get worse. There would be Thanksgiving and Christmas, and their anniversary, and holidays he didn't even know or care about, and then the summer and Cape Cod again. He had been married to her for three and a half years, and as it turned out, it was all he wanted from her, and all he wanted to give. He had been right from the first, he didn't want to be married or have kids, even hers, much as he had come to love them. But he didn't love any of them enough to stay with them. All he really needed and wanted in his life were planes. It was easier and safer for him. With only planes in his life, he would never get hurt. His own fears were greater than his need for her.

“I'm leaving you, Kate,” he said so softly that she didn't hear him at first. She just stared at him, thinking she had misheard the words. She had felt something coming for days, and she thought it was something like a long trip he was afraid to tell her about, but she had never expected this.

“What did you just say?” She felt crazy for a minute, as though the whole world had spun out of control. He couldn't possibly have said what she thought she just heard. But he had.

“I said I'm leaving you,” he couldn't look at her as he said it, and she stared at him. “I can't do this anymore, Kate.” As he said it, he looked back at her again, and he almost cringed when he saw the look in her eyes. It was the same look he had seen in the hospital in Connecticut when she discovered her babies had died. And probably the look on her face as a child when her father committed suicide. It was a look of total devastation, and the ultimate abandonment. And he felt wracked with guilt again doing that to her. But rather than making him feel closer to her, his own guilt drove them further apart.