Love Proof (Laws of Attraction) - By Elizabeth Ruston Page 0,74

it, even though he’d always done well in the class. He planned to take the test, then immediately head home for the winter break. The two of them had kissed goodbye that morning, and Sarah wished him good luck with everything. He promised to call her later.

He never did. And it was the last kiss they shared for six years, until Sarah passed out and woke up in the medical clinic at Snowbird.

“What was so important about that class?” Joe asked her, a new look of pain settling onto his face. “Can you tell me? You were there. Why did I think it was so important to stay? What was wrong with me?”

Sarah shook her head. She was afraid to answer. Because suddenly she remembered something on her own.

When she didn’t hear from Joe for days, and then a whole week, she finally did some investigation. She had her suspicions about what had happened, so she searched the public record.

“It wasn’t that day was it?” she asked, her voice choking on the question.

He nodded.

“Oh, Joe . . . ”

“I was four hours too late,” he said. “She died before I got home.”

The look of anguish on his face was too much. Sarah got up and went to him. She bent down and wrapped her arms around him and held him hard.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.

“Because of this,” he said. “Because of exactly what you’re doing right now. You would have tried to comfort me.”

“Of course I would!”

“No. You would have said it was okay,” Joe told her. “And it wasn’t. I screwed up, Sarah. I wasn’t there. I never saw her again.”

Sarah couldn’t stand it another minute. Couldn’t stand hearing him talk like that, knowing he’d carried it with him all alone for all these years. She crawled onto his lap and wrapped her arms around him and held him the way she wished she could have back then, the way she knew he must have wanted, but he hadn’t let her, and that hurt her more than she could bear.

“Joe, you should have told me,” she said, tears spilling down her cheeks. “I loved you. I would have helped you. You know I would.”

“I couldn’t think,” he said, his voice thick. “It was so . . . . And then it went on from there: the funeral, her ashes, Nate and dad and I spreading them in her garden—”

A sound escaped his lips, but he covered it with a cough. Sarah could feel his body tighten. He gently pulled away from her, reached for his beer, and drank it to the bottom. Then he patted her on the rear and told her she could go sit down again.

Sarah returned to the couch, but it wasn’t where she wanted to be. Joe might not need the comfort right now, but she did. A pain was spreading from the center of her chest outward, and she needed to hold on to him more than he seemed to need her.

But she wrapped herself in the blanket and waited to hear whatever else he wanted to say.

“So then there was you,” he said.

Sarah swallowed hard.

“I really did love you,” Joe said, looking at her with a different kind of anguish in his eyes. “But it was too much. I couldn’t be happy right then—it would have been wrong. I felt so . . . ” He looked upward as if searching for the word. “ . . . ‘guilty’ doesn’t even cover it. I was a total, unmitigated asshole for not being at my mother’s side. Why didn’t I go home once I knew how close she was? Why did I think any of my finals or my grades were so damn important?”

“Joe, you didn’t know . . . ”

“See?” he said, laughing in a way she supposed was meant to disguise his pain. “That’s how you would have been. You would have tried to make me feel better. You would have been so loving and supportive—”

“Of course I would,” Sarah said. “I loved you. I wanted to marry you.” She hadn’t meant to say that last part, but the two truths were tied together. She thought she was part of his life back then—soon to be part of his family. But instead he had kept all of this from her.

“So I did what I had to,” he went on, his voice losing its steam. “I came back and I made sure you’d never try to console me. Made sure you’d