divorce was a nasty one.”
No. It had been very civilized. Probably because she’d insisted the two of them only communicate through their respective attorneys. Once the house had been sold, they’d split the proceeds and that had been the end of it. Very, very civilized. A perfect divorce, really.
“Look,” she said, turning partway back but not quite enough to meet his eyes. “It’s nice of you to offer to stay for a few days. But I’m sure it’s hard to get the time off. I’ll be fine, really. I just need to be a little more careful until they catch the person responsible for this.”
“I’m staying,” he said.
“No.”
He shook his head. “Last time I checked, you weren’t in charge of who gets to vacation in Texas.”
She pressed her lips together. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m looking forward to visiting Elsa and her family. They built a new house about forty miles north of San Antonio.”
“They finally did it, huh?” she asked before she could think better of it. His sister Elsa had been the sister that Meg had never had. And always wanted. Her husband had been transferred from Chicago to Texas a few years after Meg and Cruz had married. “You know, I thought about calling your sister after I moved here. But I wasn’t sure anybody in your family wanted to hear from me,” she admitted.
Cruz shrugged. “The two of you were friends. Just because we’re no longer married, that doesn’t have to change.”
He was wrong. Everything changed when you got divorced. Family banded together and friends had to pick sides. At least she hadn’t stayed in the same town. Their friends hadn’t had to choose whether it would be him or her that got invited to the next dinner party.
She wondered how many invitations he’d accepted. He was too good-looking, too nice, to be alone for long.
“Really, Cruz,” she said, her voice sounding loud in the small car. “I insist. It’s too much for me to ask. You should go home.”
“I’m staying,” he repeated.
He’s staying. Part of her wanted to get down and kiss the hard, sunbaked ground. Cruz was a good cop. Even when he’d been young and fresh out of the academy and his friends were still idiots on Friday nights, he’d taken his responsibilities to serve and protect seriously.
Don’t you dare lie to me. His buddies on the force used to tease him after a few beers. It was well-known that whenever Cruz interrogated a witness or a suspect and hissed those words, that he was dead serious. The man hated being lied to. And given that her entire life was one big lie, she was the absolute worst person for him to fall in love with.
She’d loved him since their third date. He’d taken her to Wrigley Field, bought her hot dogs and cold beer, and broken the third finger on his left hand protecting her face from a fly ball. They spent an hour in the emergency room and another twelve in his bed. She’d married him that Christmas and six years later they were still on the road to happily ever after. She’d actually begun to believe that her past didn’t matter, that maybe it was possible to put it all behind her.
He didn’t want children. She’d assumed it had something to do with growing up poor and having had the responsibility of helping raise his younger brothers and sisters. He told her on their second date that he’d changed all the dirty diapers he intended to ever change. No procreation for him.
It was perfect. And it stayed that way for a long time.
Then his brother’s wife had gotten pregnant. Then his sister. Another sister-in-law. It was an avalanche of babies. And he’d suddenly started hinting around that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if they had a little Montoya of their own.
She’d had no alternative but to leave. She couldn’t tell him the truth. She’d spent a lifetime weaving a series of lies so tight that no one would have ever guessed the havoc she’d wreaked. It had been a wide path of destruction. Broken marriages, families fleeing their houses in the dark of the night and a thing so horrible she never said the words out loud.
If he knew the truth, he’d have never trusted her with any child and definitely not his child.
“What are you going to do about clothes?” he asked, whipping her back to the present. “I don’t think there was much in your closet that wasn’t sprayed