“Hi,” he replied, kissing the top of her hair. “I thought you were asleep.”
“I want to be,” she said, “but I heard you come in.”
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she replied.
“What about the mail?”
“That was nothing,” she answered, expelling a deep sigh. “Just my insurance company and the hospital haggling. G’night.”
“Over your hospitalization last year? Or did something else happen?”
“Last year,” she replied.
“You might want to explain that to Paris and your mom when you have a chance. Paris was worried that you’d been in the hospital.”
“Okay. Good night, Gideon.”
“Good night.” It was clear she didn’t want to talk about it, and that was fine. Neither did he. That nervous collapse, as her friend had called it, had taken an issue that should have been discussed immediately and put enough time and distance between them that misunderstanding festered and suspicion grew.
He pushed the thought away, happy that they might survive that difficult episode after all. There was no point in dwelling on how it should have been handled.
He was awake with the first shaft of light. Prue was still snuggled to his side, though she now had an arm hooked around his neck and a leg thrown over him. He loved the way that felt.
He slipped out from under her to go to the bathroom, then tried to decide whether to go back to bed for another half hour or put the coffee on and enjoy a few minutes of quiet solitude. Women were wonderful, but the constant discussion of clothes and accessories was beginning to get to him. And it was going to last another few days. Small price to pay, he decided, to have Prue within his reach.
He had decided on climbing back into bed with her, when she rolled over in her sleep, wrapped an arm around her pillow and snuggled her head deeper into it with a groan. He smiled at the action, thinking she was having trouble getting comfortable because he wasn’t there, when he noticed the corner of a piece of paper sticking out from under her pillow, the white sharply visible against the gray flannel sheet.
Afraid she might hurt herself on the sharp edge, he pulled the paper easily out from under the pillow. It was a standard-size sheet of paper folded in three. Though the room was shadowy, he thought he saw the hospital logo that had been on the envelope Paris had brought over. What, he wondered, was it doing under her pillow?
Unable—and unwilling—to curb his curiosity, he went into the bathroom with it and turned on the light.
Under the hospital’s logo was the simple word Statement. Just as she’d said, it was a bill from the hospital.
The charge was for a…he had to study the words twice.
PRUE AWOKE to bright sunlight on her face. The first sensory impression to reach her was the herbal fragrance of Gideon’s cologne under her nose. She inhaled, all the images the smell evoked dancing in her mind. She stretched a hand out for him, smiling even before she opened her eyes.
His side of the bed was empty.
She listened for the sound of the shower, but the house was silent.
Maybe he was preparing breakfast. No. There was no smell of coffee and no sound of puttering in the kitchen.
Maybe he’d gone out for something—doughnuts, the paper.
Or maybe he’d just…gone.
She sat up suddenly, violently, her hair blinding her, her heart beating fast. Maybe his partner had called from Alaska. Maybe things were going together faster than he’d thought. Maybe now that he’d spent five days living with her, he remembered why he’d let her leave him in the first place.
Maybe she’d dreamed this whole scenario—him coming back, his aunt visiting, the photo shoot.
No. She saw the rustic walls of the A-frame she’d lived in for most of the past week. She hadn’t dreamed it. She felt a great sense of relief.
Then she spotted him sprawled on the love seat on the other side of the room. He was dressed in cords and a black sweater, and the look in his eyes shattered her relief and frightened her anew. In his right hand was a piece of paper.
She drew a breath and clutched the blanket to her bosom, feeling the need for a shield. She knew he held the hospital statement. She remembered studying it more closely last night, then hiding it under her pillow when she heard him come in.
“Good morning,” she whispered.
He didn’t reply, apparently in no mood for civilized niceties.
He held up the paper. “I found this sticking out from under your pillow,” he said. “I was afraid you’d open your eye on it and hurt yourself, so I removed it.”
He waited for her to speak.
Refusing to feel guilty, she waited for him to go on.
“You told me it was your insurance company and the hospital warring over charges.” He got up and came toward the bed, sitting on the edge of it and looking her in the eye. “You didn’t tell me it was for a D & C.”
Her throat closed and her eyes filled. It still astonished her how much that could hurt even a year after the fact. She didn’t trust herself to speak.
“Granted, I don’t know that much about procedures in the area of women’s health,” he went on quietly, “but isn’t that often done when a woman’s had a miscarriage?”
She sat up straighter. “Sometimes,” she replied. She tossed her head, and the need to sob abated. “Sometimes it just helps in the case of other female complications.”
He asked directly, “Was it for a miscarriage in this case?”
She looked away from him as the sob rose in her throat again, guilt surfacing in her despite her efforts to hold it off.
“Yes,” she replied.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THIS WAS A GIDEON she hardly remembered from their four-year marriage. In the beginning, he’d been kind and funny, gentle and loving. Then, as time and pressure wore on both of them, he’d become impatient, occasionally distant, sometimes angry.
But the fury she saw in him now was something he saved for dishonest colleagues and self-serving lobbyists. He controlled it with a careful tone of voice, but it was very much alive in him.
“I suppose you have a good reason for not telling me you were carrying our baby?”
She tried to remember that this was understandably shocking to him, but she was also overwhelmed with all the feelings from that horrid time in her life, and she was in no mood to deal with his righteous indignation.
“That was why I wanted us to have that weekend in Maine.”
She spoke in a very controlled tone, a fact that surprised her, considering she didn’t seem to be able to draw in any air. “I had bought booties to hide in your slippers, but things didn’t work out as I’d planned.”
Volley successful. Guilt in his court. He closed his eyes in acceptance of how that scene had played out, then opened his eyes again and pinned her with a dark glance.
“So, the nervous collapse was a miscarriage?”
The old hurt stabbed right through her. Lost him, lost the baby, lost everything.
“Yes.”
“And you were comfortable punishing me that way?”
Her control snapped like a strained cable on a bridge. “Punishing you?” she screamed at him. “I was the one who thought I might be able to get through the rest of your term with a baby to keep me company. You were the one who didn’t even have enough time to give me to find out you were going to be a father!”
He withstood her shrieks, then dismissed them all with a shake of his head. “How could you not have told me that you lost our baby?”
Guilt back to her. She’d lived with this one a while, but she’d managed to explain it to herself. “Because I thought you had someone else.”
“If you’d let me explain it to you,” he said grimly, “you’d have learned that I didn’t.”
“I only knew what I saw.”
“And I only knew what you told me. Nothing. No clue that I was going to be a father, that we were going
to be a family.”
She shook her head, tears falling, guilt winning. “After the miscarriage, telling you about it would have only looked like a ploy to get you back.”
He exploded to his feet at that, jamming his hands in his pockets as though afraid they might reach for her of their own accord. “And my knowing the truth wasn’t more important than whether or not you looked needy?”
“I shouldn’t have had to lose a baby to get your attention!” she yelled. Then she raised the blanket to her mouth as sobs came in painful gulps.
He stood there for a moment, then grabbed his jacket off the chair and stormed out of the room.
Prue fell back to her pillow and turned into it, crying out all the pain of that horrible time and all the regret of the intervening year. She felt Georgette’s cool hand on her forehead, nodded at her suggestion of a bracing cup of tea, then collapsed again the moment she was gone, hating what had happened.
She had hoped never to feel that pain again. And she’d hoped never to have to inflict it on Gideon.
GIDEON HAD NO IDEA where he was going, he just got into his truck and drove. It crossed his mind that Georgette and Bruno intended to take pictures today, that Georgette was paying for the photographer’s time and it was precious, even if the man wasn’t.
He had to pull himself together, remember how horrible and confused that time had been, and try to understand how Prue could not have told him.
But her not telling him the truth had been mean and small and deliberately hurtful. Anger coursed through his veins and darkened his perception.
He found himself in the parking lot of the Breakfast Barn, but he sat behind the wheel, unable to get out of the truck. His stomach was growling, but food had little appeal. He wanted to punch and kick. He’d have given anything to have the purse snatcher come back.
He finally got out of the truck, but went in the direction of the stream that ran alongside the lot rather than toward the restaurant. The trees on the other side of it were bright red and gold in fall dress, though the water trickled musically as though it was still summer.
He took a breath of the sweet air and drew it as deeply into his lungs as possible, as if he was preparing for a confrontation. But the moment he got the anger under control, the sadness took over. He’d had a child and lost it.
He imagined Prue pregnant with his baby. In the old days, that thought had been on his mind often, but they’d never conceived and the pressures of the job became such that he’d thought that was probably a good thing until there were better days.
Right beside the sadness surfaced a terrible guilt. Prue had been pregnant and he hadn’t even noticed? Of course, if she’d just been about to announce it to him, she couldn’t have been very far along, but still… Had she been sick? Had she craved strange foods? Had she been emotional and he’d completely missed it?
Well, she’d always been emotional, so that would be a hard indicator to go by. But there must have been some signs that had gone right by him.
“Hey.”
He turned in surprise at the sound of a familiar voice. It was Randy in jeans and a gray sweatshirt. He apparently was off duty today.
“What are you doing out here?” Randy asked. He was looking him over, Gideon noticed, like a mother—or a doctor. He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Food’s in there.”
Gideon tried to smile but it didn’t quite work. “I’m not really hungry.”
“You’re in the parking lot of a restaurant,” Randy pointed out.
Gideon nodded in self-deprecation. “Sorry. It’s not a day for making sense.”
Randy seemed to suddenly understand. “Woman trouble,” he guessed. He slapped Gideon’s shoulder and pushed him toward the Barn. “Come on. I’ll buy you a high-cholesterol omelette and you can tell me all about it.”
“I don’t understand what’s going on well enough to talk about it,” Gideon grumbled. “But coffee sounds good.”
“Keeping us confused is a woman’s stock-in-trade,” Randy said as they stood just inside the double doors. He pointed to an empty booth by the window and led the way there. Rita was on them in an instant with menus, two coffee cups and the pot.
She frowned at Gideon as he sat opposite Randy. “You look a little green. Want some dry toast and a soft-boiled egg?”
“A waffle?” Randy suggested. “Not too hard on the stomach but gives you something to go on.”
Gideon nodded. “A waffle, please, Rita.”
“All right.” She scribbled on her pad, then turned to Randy. “And you, I suppose, are having sausage and eggs?”
He smiled at her and handed back the menu. “You understand me, Rita. I’m getting married in three days. If you’re going to make a move on me, the time is now.”
She sighed regretfully. “Inviting as that sounds, I respect the strength of the O’Hara sisters. I wouldn’t want to answer to either of them. You’ll just have to go through with the wedding and pine for me afterward.”
Randy sighed theatrically. “You ask a lot of me, Rita.”
She whopped him on the shoulder with the menus. “That’s what a woman does, Band-Aid Boy. Keeps a man on his toes.”
As she walked away, Randy laughed. “So, there you have it directly from one of the women who knows everything. Don’t get between the O’Hara sisters and what they want.” His laughter turned suddenly to a worried frown. “Tell me you didn’t try to do that.”
“Well, not on purpose,” Gideon replied, sipping the hot coffee. It was strong and delicious but too hot to guzzle as he needed to. He added a little cream. “I found out something she’d kept from me,” he said, watching the cream swirl into the coffee with a new fascination for things that didn’t matter. Things that did seem to pose problems that had no solutions.
“Well, that sounds familiar. Go on.”
Gideon didn’t know how much to share. Randy was a nice guy, though he didn’t know him well, but Prue hadn’t even told her sister about the miscarriage and Randy was about to marry Paris. Still, he seemed levelheaded and compassionate and completely trustworthy.
“Prue hasn’t told Paris or Camille about this,” he said on a warning note. “So it has to stay between us.”
Randy nodded. “No problem with that.”
“Okay.” He started with the background of what had happened in Maine.
Randy nodded. “Right. Heard all that.”
“Okay. Well, what Prue doesn’t seem to have told anyone is that she’d wanted to spend that weekend in Maine with me to tell me she was pregnant. When I couldn’t go because of the investigation I couldn’t tell her about, she went anyway and that’s when she saw me with Claudia Hackett.”
“Geez,” Randy said.
“Yeah. When she ran back to Albany and I followed…” Gideon told him the rest.
“Dear God.” Gideon leaned against the back of the booth and closed his eyes. “I don’t know if I’m more angry at myself for being completely unaware of her pregnancy, or at her for not telling me she’d lost the baby.”
“Did she explain why she didn’t tell you?”
“Yes,” Gideon replied grimly. “Because it would have looked like a ploy to get me back.”
“Oh, boy.”
Gideon put both hands to his eyes, grief and anger connecting to form a biting pain in the middle of his chest. “You know what the worst thing is?”
“What?”
“I wonder if she lost the baby because of the shock of what she saw. Even though it was innocent on my part and she misinterpreted what she saw, she thought I’d destroyed our lives together—and lost the baby almost immediately after that.” The pain ground into him like an auger digging a hole in his stomach.
Randy pushed his coffee toward him. “Drink some of that.”
The coffee had cooled to a drinkable temperature and Gideon took a deep sip, feeling the hot caffeine burn a line down through the pain to reach his stomach and gain his bloodstream.
Their food arrived a
nd they leaned back to give Rita space as she placed their plates, dropped extra butter, several kinds of syrup, hot sauce and ketchup on the table.
“I’ll be right back with more coffee,” she said.
Gideon looked at his waffle with complete loss of appetite.
“Okay, listen,” Randy said, leaning toward him over his steaming plate. “I wouldn’t go blaming yourself for the miscarriage without more facts. I’m an EMT and I can tell you that ten to fifteen percent of pregnancies are lost in the first eight weeks, and three percent in the twenty weeks after that. It’s often hard to explain why, it just happens. While it’s true that the whole Maine thing was a shock to Prue, women have carried babies successfully through the most incredible conditions and against odds that seemed insurmountable. I think a baby’s destined to live to birth, or it’s not.”
Gideon studied Randy’s face, trying to decide if he was being honest or telling him whatever he thought would make him feel better.
“It’s true,” Randy said, reading his mind. “And to prove that I wouldn’t sugarcoat anything for you, I’ll tell you that Prue seems just like Paris when it comes to matters of pride and determination. She thought you’d cheated on her, so she endured the loss of your baby alone rather than let you think she’d use it to gain sympathy. Look what Paris did to me when she thought I didn’t want a family.”
Gideon nodded. “I’m just wondering how you live a lifetime with a woman like that. First, she wouldn’t believe me, then she wouldn’t tell me the truth. I can’t get on the winning end of the situation.”
Randy smiled grimly. “That’s because you’re dealing with an O’Hara sister. Their mother was a star—still is. Paris thought she didn’t have that center-stage quality and tried to live it down, but she found herself on a runway in Prue’s fashion show and the town went wild. Prue, on the other hand, has star quality. You only have to meet her once to know it. She’s probably convinced that she has the power, and the right even, to manipulate the lives of the people she loves, to work things out the way she thinks they should be.”
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