Chapter 2
Luke watched as the woman stopped.
She didn’t fight him. Didn’t pull away. Didn’t turn toward him.
Instead, she froze. Tension stretched across her entire body.
“Why are you following me?” he demanded.
She remained motionless another moment.
Then she slowly turned.
Luke’s hand dropped as her face came into view.
When he saw the shape of her jaw. The way she held her shoulders. The small scar at her left temple.
Jenna. This woman was Jenna.
His wife. The one who’d left two years ago. The one he hadn’t seen since then.
She was thinner than he remembered. Her face had lost some of the softness he’d once known. The angles were sharper now, and her cheeks hollower.
Her eyes, the ones he spent every day trying not to think about, were the same hazel green. But somehow they looked emptied out. The warmth that used to live in her gaze had disappeared.
“Jenna.” His voice broke as he said her name.
She held his gaze, her eyes wavering with emotion. “Luke.”
His hands closed into fists at his sides.
So much time had passed since he’d last seen her. Jenna had simply been there one day, and she was gone the next.
Then it had just been him standing in their kitchen at six in the morning trying to figure out how to tell their children that he didn’t know where their mother was. Whether she was coming back. Whether she was even alive.
He’d tried to keep it together because his kids needed him to keep it together. He’d had no other choice.
Now Jenna—their mother, his wife—was standing in a hardware store parking lot in Blue Ridge Hollow. She’d been watching him and had tried to run.
He attempted to make sense of it all.
“Where have you been?” The words sounded like sandpaper as they left his lips.
A frown tugged at her lips as she said, “It’s . . . a long story.”
“And why are you back now? What do you want?”
She frowned and sucked on her bottom lip as if trying to choose her words. “I have so much I need to tell you.”
“So tell me.” His jaw tightened as he waited for her to say more.
She tugged at the bill of her baseball hat before glancing around. Her gaze landed on him again, hesitation evident in her features. “I’ve been trying to work up the courage to talk to you.”
He looked at her. At this woman he’d married. At the stranger she’d become in the time she’d been gone.
He had a thousand things to say to her.
Yet he couldn’t remember a single one.
Jenna stood still and let Luke look at her.
She’d imagined this moment a hundred times in the past month. She’d rehearsed words, discarded them, rehearsed others. She’d told herself she was ready for whatever she found on Luke’s face when they finally talked.
However, she wasn’t ready for this. There was no way she could be.
Luke’s hands had closed into fists the moment he recognized her. His jaw clenched.
She’d watched him tense like that throughout their marriage. When his youngest sister had left for Hollywood. At his other sister’s funeral. The night Jonah was born too early and too small.
He’d stood exactly like this each time—his shoulders level and his hands closed.
Right now, he said nothing. Neither did she. The spring air sat flat and cold between them, and years of silence stretched across every inch of it.
He spoke first. “How long have you been here?”
“A while.” How did she tell him she’d been in town for a month? That she’d kept talking herself out of approaching him?
Something shifted behind his eyes—something she couldn’t name and didn’t like. “That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say?”
She frowned. “It’s complicated, Luke.”
He let out a short breath. “Complicated? Let me tell you about complicated, Jenna.”
She went still, bracing herself for his next words—words she knew she deserved.
“Complicated is being a single father to three kids who don’t understand what happened to their mother. Complicated is sitting across the breakfast table from a child who keeps asking where Mommy went and not having a single answer to give her.”
She held his gaze. She deserved any guilt she felt right now or any harsh words Luke might hurl onto her.
“Complicated is watching your daughter cry herself to sleep for three weeks straight and not being able to do a thing about it.” Luke’s voice remained level, which somehow made his words harder to hear than shouting.
“Complicated is not being able to tell her it’s going to be okay—because you don’t know if it is. ”
Jenna’s throat tightened, but she said nothing.
“By every account it looked like you just gave up on us. Packed up and discarded whatever you felt for this family and walked away.” He paused. “That’s complicated.”
“It wasn’t like that.” Her voice trembled. “Luke, I need you to understand . . . there are things I haven’t been able to tell you. Things I couldn’t tell you. But I’m here now, and I need you to let me explain.”
“I don’t need to understand anything.” He didn’t raise his voice as he cut her off. “I have no idea what you’re doing here or what you think you’re going to accomplish by coming back after two years. But I need you to hear something.”
Luke’s gaze held hers. Just for a moment Jenna saw past his composure. She saw exactly how hard things had been without her.
“You lost any rights to our children the day you left,” he continued. “Whatever you came here hoping for, you need to understand that. I won’t put them through that heartache again. I can’t. I refuse.”
“Luke.” Her voice came out quieter than she intended. “Please. Just let me explain.”
He looked at her long enough that she thought he might stay, might give her even five minutes. Then something in his expression closed, and he turned away.
Her gaze scanned the lot while she tried to gather herself. It was an old habit, worn into her, she supposed.
Would she ever stop being on edge? Even now that she was safe?
She wasn’t sure.
Her gaze stopped on the dark sedan idling at the far end of the lot.
She didn’t recognize the make or the plates, but that wasn’t what tightened her stomach.
It was the fact that the driver simply sat there. Watching her.
Or maybe she was seeing things that weren’t really there. She’d been doing that for a long time also.
She forced herself to look away.
Luke had turned and was already striding across the lot, his shoulders set and his keys in his hand. He was done and leaving.
Their conversation hadn’t really started, yet it had already ended.
Panic raced through her.
She couldn’t leave things like this between them.
“Luke!”
He didn’t slow or even look back.
“Luke, please.”
He stopped.
His back remained toward her. Tension rippled across his shoulders, and his spine appeared rigid.
Jenna waited, praying he didn’t walk away. But she knew she after what she’d done to him that she had a lot of nerve wishing for that.