“Both of them products of abusive homes.”

He drank. “Time out of time,” she’d called their weekend. He damned sure hoped she was right. That he’d be himself when he got home the next day.

Himself with one hell of a headache—not from three beers, but from the tension climbing up the back of his neck.

“That’s what brought them together.” He wasn’t as careful about his word choice as usual. “The dark secret they shared. The shame.”

Shame. Brett could feel it, even now, descending upon him. Like humidity from the air, it clung to him. Making him sticky. Heavy.

“They promised each other that they’d never have an angry word in their home. Because they both knew the cost, the pain, they trusted each other like neither of them would ever have trusted anyone else, to keep the violence away.”

He heard an intake of breath. And knew that he was giving Ella something she’d deserved long ago.

“It worked right up until I was ten years old.”

There were so many ways that it had worked right. Little League. Summers at the beach. Dinners at Uncle Bob’s. His father had taught him how to in-line skate. And let him ride behind him on the back of his motorcycle...

“What happened when you were ten?”

He knew she already knew the answer to that question.

But he didn’t want her to go up to the cabin. To leave him out there all alone.

He did, of course. But he didn’t.

“My little sister was diagnosed with leukemia. And because my dad was spending so much time with Mom and us, while they figured everything out, he lost his job.”

“What about the Family Medical Leave Act?”

He forgot. He was talking to a nurse.

“It had just been signed into law a couple years prior to that, and I don’t know what happened. I was only ten.

“The story’s a classic from there,” he said. “Dear old Dad started drinking, and anytime he found out Mom had another bill to pay or Livia needed another test, he’d hit something. Started out with the wall. Then Mom.”

And eventually him.

But never Livia. That was the only hope the old man had of ever meeting up with a saving grace. He’d always been good to Livia.

“I thought he just started getting physically violent when you were in high school.”

He’d forgotten that she just knew basic facts.

“After a couple years of tests and treatments, Livia went into remission. And Dad found another job. A guy we met, whose kid was going through the same treatment as Livia, offered him a job. It lasted as long as her remission did.”

And the second time around, life had been pure hell. For all of them. Ending with Livia’s death. His mother’s unbearable grief. Her anger. His father a drunk who eventually ended up in jail.

An imploded family.

* * *

ELLA COULDN’T SPEAK. Her throat was choked up with an effort not to cry, even as her eyes filled with tears.

“Without help, boys who witness domestic violence in their homes growing up are far more likely to become abusers.” Brett’s quote was uttered without inflection of any kind.

That’s when she found her voice. “You had help.”

She wasn’t ready for his fountain of words to dry up. Not by a long shot. He owed her a good ten years’ worth of them. At the very least, another ten minutes.

“So what you’re saying, then, is that every boy who grows up in an abusive home is destined to live life alone, or become an abuser?”

“Of course not.” She heard the disdain that time.

“So why are you putting that on yourself?”

He didn’t respond. Typical. But disappointment filled her anyway.

Along with a load of compassion she couldn’t afford to carry.

If Brett had talked to her about this even a little bit years ago, so many things would have been different.

Not everything, but maybe the process of splitting up wouldn’t have been as hard.

Maybe she’d still be married, or married again, instead of on her way to spinsterhood.

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to live with the fact that your husband didn’t trust you enough to be completely open with you?”

The pain that filled the darkness scared her. She hadn’t known there was so much of it left.

“Do you think I wanted to hurt you? That I felt good about it?” Brett sat forward. Lifted his beer and set it back down again without drinking.

She wanted to drink. Seemed to be the way of dealing with the darkness. Which was why she put her bottle in a cup holder on the next chair.

“I saw what I was doing to you, and the sadness in your eyes ate away at me until I couldn’t stand to live with myself anymore. I had to do something...”

His hands were inches from her knees. She stared at them. With very little effort, even a rocking of the boat, she could be touching him.

“You could at least have told me before you talked to a divorce attorney.”

“You’re right, of course.” Not the answer she’d been expecting.

“So why didn’t you?” Not a question she should have asked.

“Because you would have understood and loved me anyway,” he said, his voice raw with honesty. “I couldn’t trust myself not to be as selfish as my old man and let you talk me into staying.”

She’d asked. Maybe forgetting that nothing with him had been easy.

“You knew I loved you enough to do that, and then turned your back anyway. Why throw it all away when there was as much chance that it would be good as that it could go bad?”

“Because it was already bad, El. I had a knot in my stomach every single morning. I couldn’t be the man you wanted me to be and the more I tried, the more tense I got. And with the baby coming... It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time an abusive situation started when a pregnancy was thrown into the mix.”

She’d read about triggers. Some men with control issues—and out-of-control jealousy issues—sometimes felt threatened by the introduction of a child into the relationship. This could trigger the start of a domestic-violence situation. And didn’t describe Brett or their relationship at all.

“The tenser I got, the more chance there was that the tension would get the better of me someday,” Brett was saying.

“If you’d talked about it, we might have been able to work through it. Loving’s not easy.”

“No, and it’s not a guarantee of happy-ever-after, either.”

Had he just said what she thought he had? That he did love her? At least that he had?

Was it possible that someplace, locked away in that heart of his, he’d loved her the way that she’d once believed he had?

He’d asked her why she’d stuck with him through college.

A better question might have been why had she married him?

She knew the answer to that.

Ella had tied her life to Brett’s because his life was the only one that felt as though it was the other half of hers. She’d married him because she’d believed he loved her as much as she loved him.

It had taken years to crush that belief. Even after his initial rejection of their child. He’d been unprepared when he’d come home from work one day as usual to find her there, gushing happy tears, holding a home pregnancy kit result out to him. He’d seen her tears, not understanding they were happy tears at first, and then, in the confusion of her explanation, had been unable to mask the look of horror on his face. Still, she’d told herself that it was just the shock. That it was normal for a man to be nervous about being a father. It wasn’t until he’d told her he’d seen a divorce attorney, that he’d lost her.

Up until then, she’d believed that, deep down, her injured warrior needed her to believe in him.

You’d have thought that moment, the one when her husband had so backhandedly told her he wanted a divorce, would have been the one to sever all her faith in him.

But no, it had taken another couple years for that to happen.