Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Evan looked down at their joined hands as if the answer might be written between them. The swelling across his knuckles had deepened, and a narrow split in the skin shone beneath the gas-station lights.
“We get through tonight,” he said as he lifted his eyes to hers. “Tomorrow can wait until morning. And then we get through tomorrow. And then the next day.”
Abby tried to breathe around the pressure in her chest. Tomorrow contained too many decisions—where she would live, how she would cancel a wedding, what she was supposed to tell their families, whether every person she knew would soon be discussing the most humiliating night of her life.
“I can’t go home,” she said as her fingers tightened around Evan’s. “I know Hudson isn’t there, but I can’t walk into that apartment and see his things.”
“You don’t have to.” Evan glanced toward the car, then back at her. “Do you want to go to Sadie?”
The suggestion brought a fresh sting to Abby’s eyes. Sadie would answer the door without asking why she had come, but calling her would make the disaster exist outside the four people who had created it.
“She’ll want to kill him,” Abby said as she wiped rain from her face with the back of her hand. “She never liked the way he talked to me when he was angry.”
“She may have had a point.” Evan spoke carefully, leaving the judgment where Abby could accept or reject it. “Do you want me to call her?”
Abby shook her head and reached for her phone. The screen brightened with fourteen missed calls, and Hudson’s name filled most of the list.
Three voicemails waited beneath the calls. His messages had begun arriving while she stood in Evan’s arms.
The first read, Come back to the hotel. We need to discuss this without an audience.
The next arrived two minutes later. Evan assaulted me. If you leave with him after what you witnessed, I can’t be responsible for what happens.
The newest message appeared while she watched. I love you, Abby. Don’t destroy nine years because you’re upset.
Her thumb hovered over the screen. Hudson had compressed the affair into her emotional reaction to it, as though eighteen months of deception weighed less than the hour she had spent knowing.
“He thinks I’m destroying us.” Abby handed Evan the phone because she could no longer bear to hold it. “He’s talking as if I did something to him.”
Evan read the messages without opening anything else. His mouth hardened when he reached the threat, but he returned the phone without commenting on it.
“Do you think he’ll call the police?” Abby asked as she looked at Evan’s injured hand. “You hit him because he was reaching for me.”
“I hit him because I lost control.” Evan flexed his fingers, then tucked the hand against his coat. “He shoved me first, and the hotel will have cameras in the hallway. If the police contact me, I’ll tell them exactly what happened.”
“He could hurt your company.” The thought pulled her briefly beyond her own panic. “He said he would contact your investors.”
“Hudson says a great deal when he wants someone frightened.” Evan’s expression remained calm, though a muscle moved near his jaw. “I’ll deal with it if he follows through. But no, I don’t think he will. It would be more embarrassing for him than it would be for me.”
Abby knew how much getting the company off the ground had cost Evan.
Makayla had complained about the missed dinners and interrupted holidays, but Evan had spent years trying to build something no one else believed could work.
Hudson could damage it with a few angry calls made from a hotel room where he had been caught with Evan’s fiancée.
“I’m sorry,” she said as she looked down at his knuckles. “You shouldn’t lose anything else because of me.”
“This isn’t because of you.” Evan waited until she met his eyes. “His choices belong to him. Mine belong to me.”
The simplicity of the distinction unsettled her. Hudson had spent years explaining how other people forced his reactions, while Evan accepted responsibility for the worst thing Abby had seen him do without making her carry it.
Her phone vibrated again. This time Makayla’s name appeared.
Please answer me. I need to explain before Hudson makes this worse.
Another message followed almost immediately. I never meant to hurt you.
Abby stared at the words until the screen dimmed. Makayla had made hundreds of choices during the affair, but she still described Abby’s pain as an accidental outcome no one could have anticipated.
“She says she never meant to hurt me,” Abby told Evan as another message arrived. “How could she think there was an ending where I didn’t get hurt?”
Evan looked toward the empty highway. “I don’t know what she thought.”
There was no bitterness in the answer, only exhaustion. Abby remembered how Makayla had appeared in the hotel doorway wearing a robe and how quickly her apologies had become a plea for Abby to stay. She had not once asked Evan whether he was all right.
“Has she called you?” Abby asked as Evan’s phone vibrated inside his coat. The timing made the question unnecessary, but he took it out and checked the screen.
“Thirty-one times.” He silenced the device and returned it to his pocket. “I’m not answering tonight.”
Abby nodded, relieved that she did not have to hear Makayla’s voice through his phone. She stepped toward the car before the cold could settle any deeper into her clothes.
Evan opened the passenger door, then paused when he noticed the engagement ring near the front tire. Rain had washed it close to the painted line, where the diamond caught the light every time water moved across it.
“Do you want me to leave it?” he asked as he kept his gaze on Abby.
She imagined a stranger finding it after dawn, taking Hudson’s carefully selected diamond to a pawnshop, and reducing nine years to whatever the stone could bring in cash. The thought should have felt satisfying, but it left her hollow.
“That would be silly. But, can you pick it up?” She climbed into the car. “I don’t want to touch it.”
Evan retrieved the ring and placed it in an empty cup holder. He did not clean it or offer it back to her, and the diamond lay beneath the dashboard light like an evil talisman.
Sadie lived twenty-five minutes away in a narrow brick house at the edge of town. Abby had driven the route countless times, but the rain and the late hour stripped the streets of familiarity.
She called once they were on the highway. Sadie answered groggily before the first ring had fully ended. It was almost four a.m.
“Abby?” Her sister’s voice came through thick with sleep, followed by the rustle of sheets. “What happened? Are you hurt?”
“I’m not hurt.” Abby heard Evan exhale quietly beside her, and she realized how uncertain that answer sounded. “Can I come over?”
Sadie became alert at once. “Of course you can. Where are you?”
“I’m with Evan.” Abby looked at his profile as he drove, his eyes fixed on the road. “We’re about twenty minutes away.”
The silence on the line lasted long enough for Sadie to understand that the explanation would not be simple. “What? Do you mean Hudson?”
“No.” Abby pressed one hand against her sternum as the pressure returned. “Please don’t ask me anything until I get there.”
“I won’t.” Sadie’s voice softened without losing its steadiness. “I’m going downstairs now. The door will be unlocked.”
Abby ended the call and held the phone in her lap. Hudson had sent six more messages during the conversation.
Do you have any idea what that looked like? He followed that with, Makayla is hysterical because of the way you confronted her, and then, I’m trying to protect you from making a mistake you can’t undo. The last two abandoned every attempt at concern: Answer me. Abby, answer the damn phone.
She read the sequence twice. Hudson had progressed from injured fiancé to Makayla’s defender in less than four minutes, then returned to issuing orders when neither approach worked.
She locked the screen. “He thinks I made a mistake.”
Evan slowed as they approached a curve. “Do you?”
The question contained no preferred answer. Abby looked at the ring in the cup holder and tried to separate the promise she had made from the man who had accepted it.
“I don’t know how to stop loving someone in one night,” she said. Shame burned beneath the admission, though Evan gave no sign that he judged it. “I saw him with her. I read what he wrote about me, and some part of me still expects to wake up beside him tomorrow.”
“You spent nine years expecting that.” Evan adjusted his grip on the wheel, protecting his injured hand. “Your mind hasn’t caught up with what happened.”
Abby turned toward the window. “Do you still love her?”
He did not answer immediately. Streetlights passed across his face, illuminating the fatigue beneath his eyes before leaving him in shadow again.
“Yes,” he said at last. “I don’t know what to do with that either.”
The honesty loosened something inside Abby. She had expected him to deny it after what Makayla had done, but love did not disappear merely because continuing to offer it had become impossible.
“She complained about you all the time,” Abby said as the memory surfaced. “She told me you cared more about the company than you cared about her.”
Evan’s expression tightened. “I knew she was unhappy. I thought if I could get through the next delay, I could give her the life she wanted.”
Abby pressed her forehead against the cool glass. “I told her you were working for both of you. Then I would go home, and Hudson would tell me to take her to lunch or plan a weekend because she needed me.”
“They used what we believed about each other.” Evan’s voice remained controlled, but his injured hand curled against his thigh. “She knew you would come whenever she said she was lonely.”
“And Hudson knew I would feel guilty if I didn’t.” Abby closed her eyes as old conversations shifted in her memory. “He used to complain that she took too much of my time. I thought he was being patient when he encouraged me to see her anyway.”