coconut, and now it’s gone. I just want to know how she’s been spending her days and nights. Is that not reasonable to anyone else? She’s my wife.”
A beat of silence passed wherein he could hear his pulse scraping in his ears.
“Rosie, do you think you can appreciate that this separation has been hard on Dominic?”
“Yes,” she whispered, sounding awed. “I can.”
Dominic couldn’t look at her after sounding like such a train wreck. “Just tell me what you’ve been up to, Rosie.”
He heard her swallow. “I mostly just work and go back to Bethany’s. We had a Just Us League meeting on Saturday night, and I, um . . . I made an appointment to go look at a commercial space. The old diner on Cove.”
That brought Dominic’s head around. She was moving at the speed of light, and his feet were encased in drying concrete while he watched her shoot off into the atmosphere. His focus had been on keeping her happy and content for so long—but he’d done the opposite. Now she was reaching for her goals on her own. Was it selfish of him to want a hand in her getting there? Or would he only hold her back again? He wouldn’t be able to bear the latter. “A commercial space for the restaurant?”
She shrugged a shoulder. “It’s just an appointment.”
Armie cleared his throat. “I take it you want to open your own restaurant, Rosie?” He waited for her nod to continue. “And why is it significant that you made the appointment this week to see the space?”
“I’ve been putting it off,” she said haltingly.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I . . .” She glanced over at Dominic before lowering her gaze. “I just wasn’t confident I could run my own place.”
“Why did that change?”
“I thought it was the club. The women supporting me—and I think that has a lot to do with my boost in confidence—but it wasn’t until I got the letter from Dominic that I felt prepared to take the chance.”
“Earlier you said Dominic’s letter made you feel more like Rosie. The Rosie you want to be, that you felt you used to be.” He went quiet for a moment. “Your success is your own, Rosie. You did something brave. But a marriage is about support. Would you like to acknowledge Dominic’s letter—and support—might have helped push you toward your goal?”
The back of Dominic’s neck tightened. “She doesn’t need to do that.”
“I want to.” She looked down at his hand a moment before covering it with her own. “Your letter helped. Thank you.”
Satisfaction wove around his lungs and it took him a long time to draw a decent breath. “Okay,” he said hoarsely.
“And, Dominic,” Armie continued. “Would you like to acknowledge that Rosie needs words and they are supremely important to her and thus vital when it comes to making this marriage work?”
“Yes,” he rasped.
“Well done, Team Vega.” Armie nodded and all three of them seemed to let out a long breath.
Crazily enough, Dominic felt a change in the air as if something had cleared.
“Time for your next homework assignment.” The therapist winked at them both. “Still no sex. Sorry, folks. But I’m giving you the next best thing.” He clapped once. “Mother Nature.”
Chapter Twelve
Twilight crept in as Rosie and Dominic hiked along the path toward the nature preserve. He thought therapy had hit peak weirdness during their game of Minion-themed Chubby Bunny, but he’d been dead wrong. Today they’d been assigned the task of setting up a campsite—together—as a means of learning to work as a team. And while he definitely didn’t mind spending time with Rosie, he could admit to a growing impatience to have their problems solved. Every moment that passed meant missing her more, and this exercise felt like a damn waste of time when they could be moving her back into their home, where she belonged.
“Now seems like a good time to remind you that you picked the therapist.”
Rosie lifted her chin and shot him a glare from beneath her eyelashes, knitting Dominic’s stomach up tighter than a concrete slab. Back in the day, he used to refer to that look as the Death Laser. It meant she was not in the mood for his shit and he better tread more carefully than a man with size-fifteen feet crossing a field of land mines.
He hadn’t given her a reason to grace him with the Death Laser in a long time and he didn’t like that realization one bit. There should be