you’d tell me if it was important.”
“Hmm.” She turned away and ran her hand over the white upholstered settee along the wall in front of him. “Did you ever do anything stupid you wished you could go back and undo?”
“Are you talking about regret?” When she didn’t immediately answer, he shrugged. “Sure. Everyone has things they wish they’d done differently.” He wished he’d had a stronger relationship with his father, had been a better role model for Billy, had caught his mother’s symptoms sooner. He had a lifetime of things he wished he could change.
“Regret’s a pretty mild word,” she said, looking out the window. “I regret not going after the Furies sooner, not that it would have made a difference. But I’m talking about the really big stuff. The things that change your life.”
He didn’t know how to answer, and he couldn’t quite read her mood, so he waited and hoped she’d go on.
She picked up a pen on the small side table. “Doug was fixated on the Furies long before I met him. He had a theory. Being an art-history major, I’m sure you’ve heard it before.”
“Is this the one about the Spartan queen commissioning Kalamis in the fifth century B.C. to create the Furies, thinking they would protect the Spartans in battle and ensure their victory over the Athenians? Yeah, I’ve heard it. Pretty farfetched.”
One side of Lisa’s mouth curved. “Doug didn’t think so. He was convinced the Athenians stole the reliefs from Sparta, and that their disappearance was a major, albeit overlooked, contributor to the Peloponnesian War.”
Rafe lifted his brows.
She smiled a little more at his expression. “Yeah. That’s the same thing most scholars thought of his ideas. Mostly because no one believed the Furies actually existed. But there are some historical annals that support his theory. Doug thought finding the Furies would ultimately prove him right and would thereby solidify his status in the world of academia once and for all.”
Rafe thought back to Maria’s warning. He didn’t care all that much about the academic repercussions finding the Furies would have in the world, but Lisa obviously did. He looked down at the table top. “How did you meet him?”
She sighed and glanced at the pen in her hand. “He taught a class I took one spring semester when I was in grad school. At the time, I thought his theory had some validity. I wanted to know more. But he never noticed me.”
She shifted away, set the pen down and touched the smooth walls as she wandered around the room. “I applied for a dig he was heading up in Ecuador over the summer, and once I was there, made sure he took notice of me. It was a good summer.”
Jealousy twisted like a knife in his chest at the softness he heard in her voice.
“Didn’t last though,” she said, turning back and glancing his way. Something unsettling passed over her eyes, but it disappeared as she continued to move around the room. “When we got back to Chicago, he didn’t want anyone to know about us. Even though I wasn’t taking any of his classes, he thought it wouldn’t look good. I was twenty-three, he was thirty-six. The university frowned big-time on student-teacher relationships.”
“I bet.” What else was he going to say? That knife was scraping away at his insides at just the thought of her with someone else. A childish reaction, considering his ex-wife was yards away in the house.
“Anyway,” she went on, fiddling with the port blinds over the settee as if it hurt to stand still, “I was pretty stupid. Went along with what he wanted, even though I didn’t like it. In public I acted like nothing was happening, but in private it was a completely different story. Until I wound up pregnant.”
She finally looked his direction with big, green, unreadable eyes.
And he didn’t know what to say.
“I’m guessing by your reaction, that’s not a surprise.”
He pulled open the top drawer of the chart table and handed her the photo he’d swiped.
She glanced from the picture to his face. “Where’d you get this?”
“Your parents’ attic.”
He waited for her to lay into him for taking it, but she only bit her lip and looked down at the picture, her expression guarded. “Look at that long hair. Used to drive me nuts. It was always getting in my way.”
“I like it.”
There was disbelief in those shimmering emeralds when she looked up. She handed him the photo. “Doug didn’t.”
Doug was a prick.