Chapter 22 Andrea Kendal
Andrea Kendal
“It wasn’t right, Eric marrying so quickly after Roxanne died. That right there shows his culpability. There should be a mourning period after a murder. Four, five years, at least. He started parading around that tart just a year after what happened.”
Eric was in the kitchen feeding Ryder when Andrea trudged through the wide, arched opening.
Her bathrobe was on, her face scrubbed and pink, her hair not yet brushed.
She yawned and kissed Ryder on the head, then wrapped her arms around Eric’s waist and looked up at him, accepting a kiss on the lips.
He was in surgical scrubs and had likely been up since five.
He and Ryder were on the same schedule; for every middle-of-the night feeding he’d missed out on with Cameron, he’d more than made up for it with Ryder.
She was the only wife she knew who was able to sleep in and wake up knowing her husband had already fed and dressed the kids.
She returned to Ryder, who was happily babbling to himself while he smeared applesauce over his high chair, and dropped into the chair beside him. “What’s your schedule today?” She rolled his high chair closer to her.
“First surgery at nine. I’ll be done around seven, maybe a little earlier if everything goes smoothly.”
Or maybe later if it didn’t. She was used to the life of a surgeon’s wife.
Cardiac surgery didn’t take second fiddle to dinnertimes, date nights, or lunch meetups.
There had been countless times when Eric had gotten a call in the middle of the night, or gotten up mid-meal for a VIP or difficult case.
That was the side effect of being the best, and from the moment he’d decided to go into medicine, being the best was the only standard he was happy with.
Perfection, for her husband, was the minimum.
She caught her reflection in the window and turned her chin slightly, examining the smooth line and absence of a double chin.
She had never been fat, not in the slightest. But she’d always had a small pocket of fat under her chin that, at certain angles, showed itself.
Eric had worked with the surgeon to suck out the fat and shave down the jawbone to create a more feminine line. Heart shaped—that was her face now.
His standard of perfection had extended to all parts of his life except in the area of Roxanne.
Roxanne had been a mess. A natural beauty, if you didn’t mind a misshapen nose and slightly hooded eyes.
A flat chest and a pear-shaped physique.
She’d had slightly crooked teeth and a smile that showed too much of her gums.
And Eric had loved every inch of her. Worshipped her.
He thought Andrea didn’t know about the photos, but she’d found the folder that was hidden in the bottom drawer of his desk.
Candid shots of Roxanne laughing, her eyes pinched shut, her crooked teeth on full display.
Personal shots of them in bed, her dark hair everywhere, her lipstick smeared, her eyes soft as she looked into the camera.
Andrea understood why she was different.
Eric had approached her desire to change her appearance with the same rigorous attention to detail he applied to a surgical ventricular restoration.
He’d asked what she wanted, and she said to be beautiful.
What woman didn’t want that? What woman didn’t yearn for the opportunity to look into a mirror and see perfection?
But maybe seventeen surgeries hadn’t been necessary. Maybe she should have spoken up before he’d gone too far. Because it had been years and she still saw a stranger every time she looked at her reflection.
A perfect, beautiful stranger who was the complete opposite of Eric’s first wife.
Could he really love them both?