a thirty-five zone.” So we were told. So my attorney argued.
“Try seventy,” Edward said. “I stood there with the forensics team. I watched them re-calculate. The figure in the initial report was vague, but forensics are more exact, really a science now—and, sorry, but I didn’t think that a van going forty-five would have killed a child who was sitting in the equivalent of a personal tank. If the thing had burst into flames and burned her up, I could’ve bought it. But kids are loose enough to survive a roll, so it had to be his front end hitting my child at a huge speed.”
I tucked my hands in my lap, watched them clasp each other on the slick of my parka.
“He had a history of speeding. Someone pulled strings to cover it up. The AG didn’t want anything polluting her case.”
My fingers were freezing, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to pull gloves from my pocket. Defeated, I said, “It doesn’t matter, Edward. I ran a STOP sign. I was responsible. I could see it in your eyes every time you looked at me.”
“Really?” He paused, like he was trying to figure that out. “Was it really there?”
“Does it matter? If I felt it, isn’t that the same thing?”
He considered for a minute, then let it go, but the defiance was back. “So you shut down, refused to talk, agreed to a divorce, and left town.”
“Whoa,” I said. I had enough to blame myself for without taking sole responsibility there, too. “You shut down, you refused to talk, you agreed to a divorce.”
“Fine,” he conceded, moving a finger—long, lean, no more ring—back and forth over his denimed thigh. “So you came up here and became someone else. It sounds good, but what the hell does Jay Harrington know about bone-deep grief? What does he know about a woman who used to be able to bare her soul—who needed to bare her soul—to a life partner? New town, new job, new friends? How’s that working for you?”
The Edward I’d loved had never aimed sarcasm at me—at other people maybe, but not at me.
Defiant in the face of his, I upped my enthusiasm. “It’s working well! I like my work and I like my friends. I have a place of my own—my—own—and I have pets.”
“But no soulmate. Not even a lover. Those two guys at One-on-Tap—”
“They’re friends. They’re caring and kind. They watch out for me.”
“But intimacy with them can only go so far. Is that the appeal?”
“The appeal is their kindness and loyalty. It’s their sensitivity. Their being gay is a bonus.”
Going quiet, Edward gazed out at the woods. Spikes of hair on his brow, dark jaw, straight nose, lean lips—all were the same as moments before, but his profile was suddenly less stony. “I do want a wife,” he finally said.
“Awesome. Go get one. No one’s stopping you. You’re totally free.”
“Wrong,” he said and met my eyes with a bleakness I hadn’t seen before. “Oh, I tried, believe me, I did, and they were really cool women, smart and sexy, but no dice. Nothing worked. My personal life is stalled. I’m stuck in the past. I need to go back to the place where it went wrong.”
“Then last night was an exercise?” I asked. “Something therapeutic?”
Another man might have grinned a sly grin or quipped something smug. But Edward had never been a chauvinist. Of all the things I didn’t know about this new man, that hadn’t changed. But then, if he wanted to take me back to the time when things went wrong, what better way than to do what he did—to smile a sweet Edward smile, the kind I had always felt was our secret, his and mine? I hadn’t seen anything like it since before the accident. It made my heart ache.
“I really did not plan that,” he said and looked down, actually seeming self-conscious. “I was thinking we were just going to talk, but then it was dark driving there, so I couldn’t see where I was and what I was supposed to be doing, and by the time we got inside … well, you know.” He paused and looked at me with something akin to hope. “But I wouldn’t mind a repeat. It felt good, Mackenzie. It always did.”
“Maggie,” I corrected again, but sadly, because he was right. “So maybe that’s all there ever was? Maybe that’s why everything fell apart at the first sign of trouble, because there was nothing more than