They’d still been in the emergency room. Pushed to one side while the doctors and nurses had worked frantically to save Parker’s life. Until they accepted that nothing they did made any difference. Until the frenetic busyness fell silent and Olivia had turned to him and said it was all his fault. He hadn’t wanted Parker and now her precious child was gone. Oh, she’d apologized afterward, but once spoken, the words couldn’t be unsaid. Their hurt had spread in him like a voracious disease. Eating away at him until he had nothing left to give.
She’d blamed him for their son’s death, but no more than he’d blamed himself. It had driven a wedge between them, creating a void that might possibly have been repaired had he needed her less and she’d needed him more. And he had needed her. The depth of his grief terrified him, made him afraid he would sink into the abyss of misery that had claimed his father. So he’d made a tactical withdrawal from his emotions, and, along with that decision, Xander had pulled away from his wife. And she’d done nothing to pull him back again—not until she’d shown up at his hospital room with a smile and a lie.
Xander picked his clothes up from the floor and bundled them up into a ball. They stank of his fear for what he’d discovered upstairs in the attic and of his grief and anger. He never wanted to see them again. He grabbed clean clothes from the bureau and the wardrobe, then yanked everything else he owned off its hanger and from its drawer and piled it all onto the bed.
Rummaging in the hall cupboard unearthed a suitcase that looked both new and familiar. He remembered buying it before a trip to Japan last year. Olivia must have brought his things from his apartment in it. He squeezed his clothing into the case and zipped it closed. Then he picked it and the bundle of clothes he’d discarded up and carried them downstairs. The case he left just inside the sitting room. The other things he shoved in the trash bin outside the back door.
He should just go, he thought. Leave now before she came back. But some perverse masochistic impulse urged him to stay. To face Olivia and to ask her what the hell she’d been thinking. Masochistic? No, it wasn’t masochism to want answers. He deserved the truth from her, at last. No more subterfuge, no more lies or half truths. Everything.
* * *
Olivia was on a high when she pulled her car into the drive. The exhibition had been an enormous success. The gallery owner had been thrilled not only with the commissions they’d earned but also with the requests for more of her work in the future. There was international interest in her work, too. Sure, she knew better than to think her success from this point out was guaranteed, but tonight the world was her oyster. She couldn’t wait to share the news with Xander.
She looked up at the house as she rolled to a stop outside the garage. It hadn’t been dark long, but no lights were on inside. At least not at the front of the house. Maybe he was around the back or even in his office in the cottage.
Grabbing her bag and the bottle of champagne the gallery owner had given her before she’d left the exhibition, she got out of the car, quickly walked up the front path and let herself inside.
“Xander?” she called, clicking on the hall light.
A sound in the sitting room made her halt in her tracks and change direction.
“Xander? Are you okay?” she asked, turning on the overhead light in the room as she entered it. “I hope you’re up to celebrating. The exhibition was fab—”
Her voice broke off as she took in the appearance of the man sitting in one of the armchairs, dressed in what she thought of as his “new life” clothes and with an expression on his face that sent a spear of alarm straight to her heart.
His voice was cold. “How long did you plan to keep the truth about Parker from me?”
She sank into a chair behind her, her legs suddenly unable to hold her upright a second longer. “I...I didn’t plan to keep it from you. I just couldn’t talk about it. I didn’t know where to begin, what to say...I still don’t.”
He cocked one eyebrow. “Seriously? Even now you can lie to me, Olivia? Yesterday didn’t give you ample opportunity to fill me in? Hell, any time in the last nearly two months wasn’t enough time for you?”
He stood, and she fought to find the words she should have said anytime before now. “Xander, please. Don’t go.”
“A little too late to be saying that, don’t you think?” he replied, his voice as sharp as one of the chef’s knives in her kitchen.
“I tried, Xander. Honestly, I wanted to tell you.”
“But you didn’t. You packed our son’s entire life into boxes and shoved them in a dark corner. You already wiped Parker’s existence from our home and our lives once before—why wouldn’t you continue to do that given the opportunity? I don’t know you anymore, Olivia. Maybe I never did.”