marriage back together. Come to the eventual conclusion that it would be best for Tommy, that maybe J.D. really would have changed this time. But not now. Now she was someone different from the woman he’d married, a young, starstruck, I’ll-make-him-happy wife who’d beaten her head against the wall of a doomed-from-the-start marriage until she’d come to see the resulting bruises as just part of her normal complexion.
A person didn’t have to live that way. Shouldn’t live that way. She hadn’t been a perfect wife. There was no such thing, she was sure, and she certainly would never have nominated herself for the title. But she had tried. Tried a thousand different ways to make J.D. see her as enough. Enough of a wife that maybe respect alone would keep him from straying. But he did. Always. And she knew now, if she had never accepted it before, that he always would.
Something else she knew now, too, though. This wasn’t her fault. She was enough for someone. Not J.D., maybe. But the reason for that she no longer laid at her own doorstep.
So maybe that was the reason Jack had been put in her path. To show her a reflection of herself she had not allowed herself to see before. She liked who she was with him. A woman who laughed and made laughter. A woman who flirted and was flirted with.
So what did all of this mean?
It meant that J.D. no longer had power over her. The only reason he ever had was that she had given it to him. Had allowed him to treat her as someone unworthy of respect and fidelity. The thought was freeing in that it was completely within her control to never allow it to happen again. Why was it that something so seemingly simple had remained elusive to her for the duration of her marriage?
The reason was simple. Because she had not wanted to see it. Had wanted, instead, to believe herself unworthy of those things.
She was a different woman now. Had proved to herself that she did not need J.D. to exist. That she was perfectly capable of making a life for Tommy and her that was full and fulfilling.
This time she would not bend. She was not giving up her son. Would fight J.D. like a tigress whose cub was being threatened. And she was not going to allow him to bully his way back into her life.
He had waged this particular battle with the advantage of surprise. Much as he had the end of their marriage. And while it was tempting to march down the hall, order him out of the house and out of her life, this was not a war she intended to lose, and for that she would need strategy. Strategy did not allow for the luxury of indignation.
The first thing she had to do was set things right with her sister. Now, like so many other times in her life, she was going to need her.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
JACK COULD NOT SLEEP. Sleep had never been a problem for him. He could close his eyes in any airport, on any train, and be out in two minutes.
But not tonight.
Tonight, he couldn’t get his mind off Annie.
Restlessness paced through him, its footsteps too loud to ignore. So he got up and tried outpacing it, roaming room to room in the big old house. But it followed, and he finally ended up in his father’s study, with its now subtle clues of Joshua Corbin’s once-daily presence: the pipe he’d smoked in the evenings with its cherry-flavored tobacco, the shelves of books on one wall, the spines still bookstore-new, but the pages within dog-eared and well-read.
Jack reached up, pulled a book from the shelf, glanced at the title on the cover. It wasn’t something he’d ever heard of, but his father’s taste in books had run toward the adventuresome, tales of pioneer treks across unforgiving mountain ranges and the hurdles to be cleared before making a home on the other side.
He sat down in the leather chair by the window, flicked on the floor lamp beside it. He opened the book, met in the first paragraph the story’s young heroine, but his thoughts strayed, unfaithful, to another woman.
Annie.
He let the book drop forward and find a resting spot against his chest. He closed his eyes and replayed the night. Saw the two of them traipsing through the woods, Annie on his back, legs and arms wrapped around him as if he