Want You Back - River Laurent Page 0,75

that his father and Dr. Mueller were friends and Chaz had an appointment to see him on Monday.

“Sweet,” I said to Sam. “I owe you man!”

That settled, I grabbed my two suitcases when a switch suddenly turned on in my mind. A thought so clear and so shocking that I dropped them and sat back down on the bed.

My chest rose up and down as I stared straight ahead unseeing him. Kayden. He was my son. Thoughts jumbled in my brain. Memories. Snippets of conversations. Amy’s words.

Charlotte must have had another reason. She loved you.

Even her sister, who had not known Charlotte for long, had insisted that there must have been another reason why Charlotte left and not the one she said.

I searched my memory for another instance that was significant. I searched and sieved until I found it. Charlotte losing her balance a lot and walking into things in the last few months before she left.

The first time I’d seen it had been when she tripped over the ledge outside our old house and fell. Amy and I had been puzzled. The ledge was big enough to see and it had been from the beginning.

Pieces of the jigsaw fell into place. She must have gone to see an eye doctor after that. Guilt gripped me by the throat. What sort of husband had I been that I had not noticed my wife’s failing eyesight?

Chaz must have made the difficult decision to leave me when she was told that her vision would deteriorate. I was the bastard who had left her when she was given the sad news. I had never bothered to even come looking for her.

Emotion overwhelmed me and I covered my face with my hands. What was wrong with me that she could not tell me about her illness? Was I such a perfectionist that she thought I would not want her if she wasn’t perfect?

Charlotte had said earlier that day that she had called me. It didn’t take a genius to work that out why she called me, it was about her pregnancy. I punched into my other hand.

My mother had unknowingly kept me away from my son but I couldn’t really blame her. Charlotte had not tried very hard. If you wanted to tell your ex that you were expecting his child, you would find a way to.

She had not tried very hard. Or even at all. That made me sad and angry. I understood that she was dealing with a difficult situation with her eye illness but there was no excuse to keep a father and son apart.

The fact that she was ill made it even worse. Charlotte was not in touch with any of her relatives or anyone from her past. What would have happened to our son if God forbid, something happened to her? He would have been taken into foster care, and all because Charlotte had been too proud to look for me. I was not mad. I was seething.

Charlotte

“Is something the matter?” I asked Alex, ten minutes into the drive to Cleveland.

He had been different since the previous day when he returned home after checking out of the B&B. I’d hoped that we would spend the night together, making love, but he’d been silent and brooding. At bedtime, he had said good night and gone to the guest room.

I’d stood outside his door contemplating whether to go in or not. Courage had failed me and I’d spent a long, sleepless, horny night alone. Alex’s sour mood had continued in the morning, which led me to believe that he did not want to be in the same house with me.

“No,” he said.

“You know, it’s okay if you want to continue staying in the B&B,” I said.

He glanced at me. “It’s not that.”

“So there’s something.”

“Drop it, okay?”

I swallowed my hurt. In the years we had been married, nothing had been off-limits to talk about.

“We’ll talk about it after your nappointment,” he said.

I fiddled with the radio and searched for a station with soothing music because clearly, we would not be conversing. I gave up on trying to figure out what was bugging him.

As we got closer to Cleveland, my thoughts shifted to the appointment with the ophthalmologist. I didn’t want to get my hopes up and then have them crushed. But a tiny seed of hope had grown. Maybe in the last two and a half years, a new treatment had been found.

With the wisdom that comes from hindsight. I should have