For the Girls' Sake - By Janice Kay Johnson Page 0,78
to feel so insecure. Not daring to move, he stared into the darkness and knew that something was missing for him in this marriage. He didn’t like discovering that he wanted her to love him. The words and everything that went with them counted, after all.
What kind of jerk did that make him, considering he didn’t, couldn’t, return her love?
Did she wonder if he closed his eyes and imagined he was with Jennifer? The idea unexpectedly jolted him. Was that what was wrong?
The possibility was particularly ironic considering his own guilt because he so seldom did think about Jennifer anymore. She was slipping away from him, Lynn’s vivid presence routing the ghost. He had trouble seeing Jenny’s face anymore, hearing her laugh; she no longer visited his dreams. He sure didn’t imagine her when he was holding Lynn.
That guilt crushed him suddenly in its grip. He’d lied to himself, he thought in despair. He’d never intended to hold Jennifer close to his heart once he had remarried. His promises on their wedding day, the vows he’d sworn beside her deathbed, all meant nothing. Out of sight, out of mind.
Muscles rigid, Adam wasn’t sure he could keep lying here in this bed next to his too-still wife. He needed to be away from her. Able to pace. Bang his head against a wall. He needed to find Jennifer again, if she was here at all.
Or maybe, just maybe, he needed to find a way to say goodbye. Lynn deserved better than their farce of a marriage. Could he give it to this shy, gentle woman with guts, brains and a heart?
Before he lost her?
Her breathing was regular, soft. His gaze sought the numbers on the clock. He’d been lying here for twenty minutes now. She must be asleep.
Making slow movements only, he edged his legs over the side of the bed and sat up, then, careful not to tug at the covers, stood. He kept a bathrobe on a hook inside the bathroom door. He’d earlier turned down the thermostat, so he shrugged into the bathrobe. Lynn hadn’t moved. She had to be asleep. She wouldn’t even notice he was gone.
He didn’t turn on a light until he reached his home office downstairs. There, Adam ignored the computer. It was the leather album he reached for, the one he kept on a low shelf so Rose could look at photos of her mother whenever she chose.
He sat in the large leather armchair and opened the album in his lap. On the first page were pictures taken while they were engaged. She looked young, was his first thought. Not so different from Shelly. A girl. She sparkled, Jenny did, even in a photograph. He traced the lines of her pixie face, alight with laughter, and remembered the first time they met, when she’d chattered so fast he didn’t know half of what she said. She was beautiful, but in a different way with her eyes slanted like a cat’s, her high cheekbones and pointy chin. She’d worn her brown hair short, increasing the elfin effect. Next to her, he had always felt stolid, slow moving. Even his thoughts couldn’t jump from idea to idea with the lightning speed of hers. He had fallen in love with Jenny McCloskey immediately, and loved her until the day she died. Loved her even afterward, when he had been left to raise their daughter alone.
Slowly he turned the pages and watched her mature from that laughing girl to a stylish, sophisticated woman who never quite lost the mischief in her eyes. In the last photos, Jenny was pregnant, her face slightly rounder, her stomach ripe with their child. Not Rose, but Shelly.
Ah, Jenny, Adam thought, are you really gone? Is it time to say goodbye?
"You still miss her."
His head shot up so fast he bit his tongue. Lynn had sneaked up on him. She stood in the doorway, looking small and vulnerable in the thick chenille robe that had been a Christmas gift from her mother. Her eyes were fixed not on him, but on the open album.
Adam resisted the temptation to close it. He swallowed. "No. Most of the time, I don’t think about her." Because of you. But he didn’t say that. It sounded too much like an accusation.
"May I see?"
Wordlessly he turned the photo album and held it out. Lynn took it from him and gazed down at his first wife, pregnant with the child she had raised as her own.