Chapter 27 #2
“Look at me.” He used his finger on her chin to compel her to meet his gaze. Her eyes were broken, and he wanted nothing more than to wrap his arms around her. “I don’t want you to go.”
“This is her home, and she’ll want it back now. It was on loan to me, just as you were.”
“No, Andi. I was never on loan to you. I love you. I want you to stay.” He tried to embrace her, but she moved out of his reach. “I need you.”
“You’re married, Jack. My mother was right all along.”
When she stood, he took hold of her arm.
“Your wife will need you, and she won’t want to share you. Please don’t make this any harder than it already is.” She tugged her arm free and picked up her bag.
“So that’s it? You’re just leaving? What about Eric? What about our babies?”
“Eric will want to see you, but that’ll be up to you. We’ll work something out when the babies are born. Please, Jack. Let me go now.”
Brushing past him, she took her bag and went downstairs to Eric’s room, where she put his backpack on him and took his hand.
“Honey, listen to me,” Jack said. “Let’s talk about this. We don’t have to decide anything tonight.” He followed her through the darkened house to the front door. He caught up to her and put a hand on the door so she couldn’t open it. “Please.”
She reached for the door handle, and when she pulled to open it, he removed his hand to let her.
Eric looked up at Jack with big blue eyes. “I love you,” he signed.
“I love you, too. I always will.” Jack felt like his heart had been ripped out and run over as they walked to her car.
Andi opened the back door for Eric, helped him into his booster seat, and got into the driver’s seat.
Jack walked up to the door before she could close it. “Andi, honey. Please don’t go. I love you so much.”
“Bye, Jack.” She closed the door and drove off without looking back.
He watched her taillights fade out of sight and then took off running.
He ran for miles without paying any attention to where he was or where he was going, emerging from his daze to discover he was on the beach.
Exhausted, he fell to his knees on the sand and screamed, with agony and joy at war inside of him.
When he had screamed himself hoarse, he wept.
Andi got Eric settled in bed and tried again to explain why they’d had to leave Jack’s house.
“He loves you,” she reminded her son as she brushed tears off his cheeks. “He’ll be in touch with you. I know he will.”
“It won’t be the same as when we lived there.”
“No, baby, it won’t.”
After he’d nodded off, still sobbing in his sleep, she tucked the covers up around him and walked out of his room. Swiping at fresh tears of her own, she blamed herself for his heartbreak. She’d allowed him to love a man and a family that didn’t really belong to them.
They were staying in the suite Infinity provided to each of its property managers so they could live at the hotel if they wished to.
Since she hadn’t needed the suite before now, it’d been available to guests.
Fortunately, it wasn’t booked that night.
They could stay there as long as they needed to, but she hoped to find more of a real home for Eric and the babies when she caught her breath.
Andi sat on the sofa and put her feet up on the coffee table, seeking relief for her swollen ankles.
When she ran her hand along her burgeoning waistline she felt a first flutter and recognized it as a baby moving.
In that moment, the dam broke, and her gut-wrenching sobs would’ve woken Eric if he could’ve heard them.
She cried until there was nothing left, and then she slept on the sofa, dreaming of Jack.
But when she reached out to him in her sleep, she couldn’t get to him.
Suddenly awake and forced to absorb the blow all over again, she dragged herself to bed and drifted back into a fitful sleep.
This time she dreamed of two beautiful babies with dark hair and gray eyes.
Jack spent a sleepless night worrying about Clare as well as Andi and Eric. In the morning, when he tried to reach Andi at the hotel, she refused his call.
Despite their protests, he sent the girls to school. They’d missed enough days since Clare had been in the hospital, and he promised they could see their mother right after school.
Jill wondered how she’d ever concentrate on her classes, but he encouraged her to try.
“Where’re Andi and Eric?” Maggie asked over breakfast.
“They went to stay at the hotel for a few days.”
“They can’t live with us anymore, can they?” she asked sadly.
The pain must’ve shown on his face, because Kate intervened.
“Let’s go, Maggie,” Kate said. “I’ll drop her off, Dad.”
“Thanks.” He kissed them good-bye. “I’ll see you after school.”
Feeling as though he were trudging through quicksand, Jack walked into the hospital and took the elevator to the seventh floor, where Clare had been moved from the intensive care unit after her fever broke.
Propped up in bed, she lit up when he came in.
“Good morning. Did you sleep well?” He kissed her cheek and set a dozen yellow roses in a crystal vase on the table.
Her dazzling blue eyes were filled with life, the way he remembered them, and he was once again so grateful to have her back.
But when he thought about what he had to tell her, his stomach ached and his heart raced.
“The flowers are gorgeous. You look exhausted. Didn’t you sleep?”
“I’m fine. Have the doctors been in yet?”
“I talked to the neurologist, but I couldn’t tell him much.” Her voice was already stronger than it’d been the day before. “The psychiatrist will be in later this morning to talk about the accident.”
“What about rehab?”
“They’re arranging for me to go to a facility here in the hospital to help me regain my mobility.
I’ll probably have to be there for quite a while, maybe even six months.
And it’s still possible I may never walk again.
” She looked down at her hands. “I’ll have to relearn everything, from the simplest of tasks to the more complicated,” she continued.
“They said the physical therapy you made sure I got is the only reason I have a chance to fully recover.”
“They told me that at the very beginning, so I always insisted you be cared for as if your condition were temporary. I’m glad now that I did.”
“You had hope, Jack. Even in what must’ve seemed like a hopeless situation.”
“Not always.” He dropped into the chair by her bed. “I did for the first year. After that I had to stop hoping. The girls were a mess. I was a mess. I had to get back to taking care of them. I couldn’t rely on Frannie to fill in for me anymore.”
“I can’t imagine what it was like for you.”
“It was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, Clare. There’re no words to describe how helpless I felt.” He’d felt almost as helpless the night before watching Andi leave with Eric and his babies.
Clare tried to move her hand to take his. “I’m sorry.”
He reached out to save her the trouble. “Don’t be sorry. Nothing about this is your fault.”
“Did you bring the video?”
“I did, but are you sure you want to see it? It haunted me for months after I first saw it. I’m not sure that showing it to you is the right thing to do. Maybe we should ask the psychiatrist.”
“I want to see it. Please.”
He got up to put the disk into the DVD player that was part of the hospital TV. After he turned it on, he went back to Clare’s bedside and took her hand. The whole thing happened quickly, but there was no denying she’d had time to get out of the way.
“Play it again.”
“Clare—”
“Please, I need to see it again.”
Jack released her hand and got up to replay it.
Her eyes were riveted to the screen until the moment of impact when she was forced to look away. “Did I have other injuries?” she asked in a small voice.
“You broke your left arm and leg, your liver was lacerated, and your spleen had to be removed.”
“I don’t understand. Why didn’t I move?”
“I don’t know, honey. I’ve asked myself that question over and over again for three years.”
“What in the world was I thinking? The girls must’ve been so traumatized.”
“I got them into counseling as soon as I saw the video. I felt so bad because I didn’t believe them when they first told me how it happened.”
“I don’t remember anything about it. I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of a reason why I’d do something so foolish.”
“I’m sure you’ll remember in time.” He took a deep breath, knowing he couldn’t put this off any longer. “Listen, there’s…um…more I need to tell you—things I don’t want you to hear from anyone else.”
“What things?”
He struggled to find the words to tell her about his life without her, the choices he’d made, and the other woman he loved.
“After I’d had you at home for a year, Frannie talked to me.
She helped me see that having you in the house in that condition was hurting the girls, and me, too.
The hospital bed, the equipment, the nurses in and out.
Our home was like a hospital. We couldn’t go on any longer the way we were.
So we moved you to your own place. That was the lowest point for me.
I felt like I’d failed you so completely.
” Battling the overwhelming emotions that came with revisiting the darkest time in his life, he glanced down at the floor.
“Jack,” she said softly. “You didn’t fail me.”
“Frannie and Jamie helped me so much, and I’m so grateful to them. I guess by helping me, they found each other after all those years of being friends. In a way, you can take some of the credit for them being married.”
“That’s something I still can’t get over.”
“Sometimes I still can’t believe it myself, and I was there.” He smiled and forced himself to continue. “I finally went back to work. I’d been gone fourteen months by then. Can you imagine that?”
“You never even wanted to take two weeks at a time for a vacation.”
“I proved I’m totally dispensable.”
“Did you feel better when you went back to work?”
“It was good to get back to some sense of normalcy. We’d been hired to design and build an Infinity hotel on Ocean Drive.
I took over that project, and it gave me something positive to focus on.
Of course, I had the girls, too, and they gave me a reason to get up and keep moving every day.
” He hesitated and must have looked pained, because she tuned right into his dismay.
“What is it?”
His heart beat frantically, and his hands were suddenly damp. “The hotel project moved forward, and through our work with Infinity, I met someone, Clare.”
“What do you mean?”
“I met a woman in their Chicago office, and we…I fell in love with her.”
Clare closed her eyes and sucked in a sharp deep breath.
Jack had to force himself to press on. “I hadn’t been dating or anything like that, so this wasn’t something I was out there hoping to find. It found me, and I struggled with it, believe me. Everyone was pushing me to get on with my life. They told me I had to live, that you’d want me to be happy.”
“This woman,” Clare said haltingly.
“Her name is Andi.”
“Do you still love her?”
“Yes.”
Clare turned away. “Where is she now?”
“She and her son have lived with us for more than a year.”
Her gaze whipped back around to him. “In my house? You brought her into my house? The house you built for me?”
He had to remind himself that to her it was like five minutes had passed, not three years. “I thought about moving when they came to live with us, but we didn’t think it would be good for the girls to leave their home after they’d already lost you. So we stayed there.”
“Are we divorced?”
“No.” He held up the hand where he still wore her ring. “It never crossed my mind, Clare. I never would’ve done that. Ever.”
“So my return from the near-dead must not have been an entirely pleasant surprise for you,” she said with a bitter edge to her voice.
“That’s not true! I’m thrilled to have you back, and the girls are, too. It’s what we’ve wanted for three long years. But we had to stop spending every day hoping it would happen so we could find a way to live without you.”
“Does she plan to continue living in my house when I get home from the hospital?”
“She left last night.”
“No wonder why you look so devastated and exhausted,” she said in an accusatory tone.
He couldn’t deny that, so he said nothing.
“Is there anything else the rest of the world already knows?”
The look on his face must have told her there was more—much more.
She gasped. “Do you have children with her?”
“Her son is important to me. And we’re expecting twins in September.” He looked her in the eye as he said it. He refused to be ashamed of his relationship with Andi or of the children they were having together.
“Please go.”
“Clare…”
“Please. Just leave me alone.” She turned to look out the window.
“We need to talk about this.
“Not today.”
Jack stood there for a long moment before he turned and left the room.