Moonlight Road (Virgin River #11)(76)

“I haven’t complained. And until now, neither have you. If you want me to, I can get a house cleaner and a nanny. I have some money saved.”

“I think we get by all right. I like the time I spend with the kids. If we had another one, we’d manage and be happy about it. But I’m not going to the lengths you want me to for a third.”

She got tears in her eyes. “Even if it means everything to me? Even if I want to so much it’s all I think about? Day and night?”

He stood up from the table and went to her, standing in front of her. “That’s what’s weird about this. It came out of the blue. This isn’t something you started talking about after Emma was born. When I asked you if you were doing okay with the hysterectomy, you blew it off. You were fine, you said. You didn’t whimper and cry that you were so disappointed you couldn’t have more children…. You said you had a lot of blessings to count and considered us damn lucky to get the two kids. Now, suddenly, this is a desperate move. It’s out of character. I’m worried about you.”

“This isn’t anything to worry about,” she insisted. “It’s something to talk about doing!”

He shook his head. “I think the person who should talk to John is you,” he said gently.

She stared at him openmouthed for a moment, then said, “Ach!” She turned and stomped off to the bedroom.

“Mel! You haven’t eaten!”

“I’ve lost my appetite!” She disappeared around the corner.

“We still haven’t talked about it!” he said to her departing form, voice raised. “We need to talk about your uterus, not someone else’s!”

She poked her head back into the dining room. “There is nothing to talk about!” Then she escaped again.

He looked at the doorway to the bedroom. “Exactly,” he said.

Erin thought about running home to Chico before she had to see Aiden again. She knew she was incomparably strong, but in this instance, she truly feared she might crumble. When she thought about all the heartbreaking things she had managed to survive with strength—her mother’s death, her father’s, Marcie’s husband Bobby’s catastrophic war injuries—it was amazing even to her she hadn’t collapsed. Surely she could get through this without coming completely apart.

But she was so in love with him, and despite her practical nature she had been secretly hoping this was the real thing. Before this story even approached the ending, she was in the garden Aiden had laid for her, pulling weeds, dropping her tears on the freshly tilled dirt.

Then she heard his SUV grinding its way up her road; she knew at once it wasn’t that smooth, expensive, quiet baby-blue Lexus. She stood up from the garden, mud on her knees, dirt under her nails, her soup pot and metal spoon nearby. She briefly wondered if she could bang it to scare him away.

Her front door was locked and he walked around the deck to the back. He stood at the edge of the garden and said, “I’ve seen the lawyer. Worst case, it takes a few months because she’s uncooperative or unresponsive, but it’ll get done. She doesn’t have to agree to the divorce.”

“Uncooperative? Unresponsive?” she asked.

“When she showed up at Luke’s, she gave me a business card with a phone number on it, but it’s a nonworking number. There’s no business number or address on the card. She’s dropped out of sight. Typical, I’m afraid.”

“Have you called her?”

He shook his head. “Why would I even try? I want nothing to do with her. And Preston advised me not to contact her—he tried to reach her. It’s time for her lawyer to talk to my lawyer, if she has a lawyer.”

She took a step toward him and damn it all, her voice trembled when she spoke. “She was here, Aiden.”

His face got red—instantly! “Here?” he said, raising his voice. “How the hell would she know who you are or where you live?”

“Please don’t yell at me,” she said. “I have no idea how.”

“God!” he barked. “Does this give you any indication of what kind of a person she is?”

Erin shook her head. “She’s just a kid,” she said. “A very beautiful kid. Just looking at her, I felt so middle-aged.”

“Don’t do that to yourself—you’re perfect. Annalee used her looks to snag me—that incredible combination of blow-your-mind sex appeal combined with innocent youth. It’s all an act. You should see how much older she can look when she’s firing glassware across the room.”

“She was only eighteen when she met you. How could she be so—”

“Twenty-one,” he said. “I looked at her driver’s license, for God’s sake—I married her!”

“Oh, man,” Erin said weakly, running a dirty hand through her hair. “Oh, man, this is so creeping me out.”

“How do you think I got trapped in this mess to start with?” he asked her. “I know I was stupid, but I wasn’t stupid in all these ways. I was deceived.”

“What ways were you stupid?” she asked.

“I told you,” he said impatiently. “Young, horny, picked up a girl in a bar…No matter what you might be tempted to believe right now, that was never a habit of mine. Listen, we have to work this out, Erin. I’m not going to let her f**k up our lives. We have to get this behind us.”