She wished she could see Brett’s face. It sounded as though he might be grinning.

And her belly flip-flopped. She’d given him a memory that made him smile.

“I’m not seeing where the anger issue was in all that,” she said. She knew for certain he hadn’t gone after Danny. The guy had passed out minutes later and hadn’t come to until the next day.

“Inside me,” Brett said. “It’s not what I did. It’s what I felt.”

Light flashed behind her eyes. Almost as though the sun had suddenly started shining through the night sky, and then was gone again. Leaving her sitting beneath the canopy in the dark.

“You saw an injustice. You saw me at risk of getting hurt, and you got mad.”

That thing with Danny had been before they’d ever made love. Long before he’d asked her to marry him.

“You’re doing it again.”

Another jolt. Her stomach turned, and nausea was there. “Doing what?”

“Making light of what I’m trying to tell you.”

“I’m not...” Ella replayed his words in her mind. Brett saw himself as someone he wasn’t. His inability to trust himself came from his youth. Her job was to help him see himself as she saw him. Right?

But... “Why do you say that?”

“Ah, El, this isn’t worth going into. You were a great wife. I failed. Can’t we just leave it at that?”

In some ways she really wanted to.

“I don’t think so.” Because his words, if he didn’t explain them, were going to give her sleepless nights she couldn’t afford. She’d already had more than her share. And she told him so.

“In the first couple years of our marriage, during those first fertility treatments, I’d tell you about my fears. You’d basically pat me on the head. You didn’t believe me when I told you I was struggling.”

Well, of course she hadn’t believed him. If he’d told her he was afraid he was going to fly to the moon in the morning, she wouldn’t believe him about that, either. But...

“All you ever told me was that you were afraid of becoming like your father, Brett. You never once told me that you were struggling with anger...”

“I feared being like my father for a reason, El. You should know me well enough to know that.”

“Yeah, the reason was that you grew up in an abusive home and your fear was left over from that...”

“No, I struggled because you brought out the most intense emotion in me. A love that was bigger than I was. More than I could control. And for every good emotion, there’s a shadow side. I came face-to-face with that over the incident in college, but didn’t think much of it at the time. As you say, most guys would have been pissed enough to get violent in that situation.”

Understanding teased at her in a horrifying sort of way. She had made light of Brett’s fears. Because to do otherwise would have given them a weight they didn’t deserve. She’d been trying to help him.

But in the end, would it have made any difference? Whether the fears were based in reality, or simply imagined, they’d still come between them.

“The longer we tried and failed to get pregnant, the more tense I grew,” he was saying. “Not because of my need to have a child. Exactly the opposite. Each time, I’d feel more relieved. But you...you got more and more depressed, took longer to bounce back each time. I was losing you to your need to have a child. At the same time, I was growing more and more certain that I wasn’t meant to be a father. But I loved you so much and didn’t want to be without you. I just kept hoping the treatments wouldn’t work, and you’d eventually see that we could be happy just the two of us. But that wasn’t right, either, because I knew, deep down, that you needed more than I’d ever be able to give you. Before I could figure out what to do about any of it, you got pregnant...I felt like I was being crushed between steel walls with no way out. I saw the attorney because I had to be prepared in case I got to the point where I couldn’t handle things. And then later, after you lost the baby...”

That was the one that hurt too much for her to handle alone. She’d needed someone who could share her grief, not someone who’d made it clear that having their baby wasn’t what he’d wanted. When she’d started bleeding after her eighth week, she’d called Chloe long distance in Palm Desert, not Brett, who’d been forty-five minutes away. And then she’d called an ambulance to take her to the hospital in Santa Barbara.

“When I got the call...when I got to the hospital...”

It had been too late. He’d been in LA, at a board meeting. By the time he’d made it up the coast, she’d already lost the baby.

Brett had come to her room. She’d woken long enough to see him sitting there. And remembered hurting because he’d been in a chair along the wall, watching her. Not close. Not holding her hand.

She’d needed so badly to feel his touch. To know that he was hurting for their lost child. To know that he felt anything at all for her. And hadn’t been able to ask him anything before losing consciousness again.

She found out later that they’d given her high doses of sedative that first day because she’d been so inconsolable.

“I couldn’t help you,” Brett said. “You knew by that point that I hadn’t wanted us to get pregnant. I blamed myself, like I’d somehow tempted fate by not appreciating the gift we’d been given...”

Sad thing was, she understood. Brett couldn’t help how he felt. Any more than she could help how she felt. Her heart ached for him.

She tried to stay on that road again, now, with Brett. He was finally talking to her. But she couldn’t travel with him. He’d arrived too late. Living in the moment was how she’d learned to cope.

“I left before the love you felt for me turned to hate.”

His words called her back.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

BRETT SAW ELLA slide forward on her chair—to reach out to him? Or go in?—and panicked.

He blurted what was on the tip of his tongue before she did, either. “If you wanted so much more than I had to give, why did you stick with me all through college?”

He was curious. And curiosity killed the cat. Much better to have understanding and move on.

“I don’t know.” She gave the nothing answer, but she sat back again. So he waited.

“You exude.” She’d gone back to sipping from her beer. And he was glad.

“There’s an energy about you, Brett. A goodness that permeates the air around you.”

He should have asked the question long ago.

“And, as we’ve already said, before we were married, and for the first year or two afterward, you shared more. You used to talk to me.”

They used to discuss the world’s problems. And find solutions for a lot of them, too. He remembered the conversations. Missed them.

“I never quit talking to you,” he said. But he had, of course. In the way she meant.

Until the last horrible few months of their marriage they’d had great discussions about anything and everything that didn’t pertain to intimate, personal emotions.

And they were back where they’d started. He was a man who could be a potential domestic abuser. As his dad had been.

“My dad was a great guy once. I told you that.” The boat swayed, and he shifted. Unbuttoned the top of his shirt as he started to sweat in the cool night air.

“Yeah.” The man was a first-class dick, and Ella knew it. She also knew that discussion of him was off-limits. Even in college, he’d refused to talk to her about his old man. What she knew, she’d learned from Jeff, and he had it on good authority that Jeff had told her very little.

His beer was more than half gone, and he wasn’t tired.

But maybe he could talk himself to sleep. Maybe he owed Ella this—understanding. A way to set her free.

“He and my mom, they were high school sweethearts.” He’d never told her that, either, though he knew that Jeff had done so.