“You made it sound like you wanted to participate,” Jack said.
“Do you?” she asked.
Fuck no. “Yes. Even if it makes me uncomfortable.”
She crossed her arms. “Fine. Let’s get this over with.”
Natalie folded the papers up and put them in a drawer. “For two people who project such an aura of outward confidence, you are both incredibly insecure.”
Jack smiled a little. No matter how difficult the session might be, he was relatively confident that Natalie would call them both out. Probably for good reason. “Aren’t most politicians insecure?”
“I’m starting to think so. Would you agree with that, Caroline?”
“We’re insecure,” Caroline said.
“But you were secure in your relationship. Right?”
“I guess.”
Short answers. Uncertain answers. Surely her self-doubt hadn’t overridden her ability to see reality. What the hell? “Of course we were,” Jack said. “I never questioned Caroline’s feelings for me.”
“Caroline?” Natalie asked.
Caroline stared at her feet.
“Okay,” Natalie said softly. “We’ll deal with that later.”
“Don’t do that,” Jack broke in. “You know how I felt about you. How I still feel.”
“Jack, don’t worry about it. We’ll get to her.”
Did Caroline think he didn’t love her? Even after all the comments she’d made in anger, could she really believe that? “But she needs to know.” Jack touched her shoulder. “You were everything I wanted in a wife. You still are.”
She shifted away from him, wrapping her arms around herself. He turned to Natalie. “I don’t know what else to do.”
“Let her be. Caroline, are you willing to listen and maybe answer a few questions?”
It took a long time for her to nod her head. Too long. “I guess,” she said. “I just don’t want to talk about that. Not yet.”
“Okay,” Natalie said. “We won’t. Let’s pick another topic. What was one of the more difficult parts of your relationship?”
Oh, that seemed like a much better idea. He hoped Natalie knew what she was doing with this. Jack coughed. “Things were pretty good, all things considered.”
“Caroline, remember what we talked about last week? Maybe we should deal with that.”
“Jack didn’t like my best friend,” Caroline said.
“Has that been bothering you?”
“A little.”
“Is that true, Jack?”
Exactly how much had Caroline told Dr. Haddad? This discussion was heading down a bad road. A very bumpy road indeed. Jack rubbed the back of his neck. “For the most part, I guess.”
“How did that make you feel, Caroline?” Natalie asked.
“Lousy. They’d fight in front of me all the time.”
“Did you ever tell them how it made you feel?”
“My feelings didn’t affect their behavior.”
He had to nip this in the bud. “Caroline-”
Natalie cut him off. “It’s still her turn.”
“No,” Caroline said. “It’s okay. I think that’s about it.”
She looked like she was about to cry. Jack almost wished for the scowl to return. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I shouldn’t have given in to it. It was a two-way street and I would tell myself to walk away but sometimes Christine would goad me into something and I’d keep going.”
Her anger blew up on him so quickly it almost knocked the air from his lungs. “Don’t blame it on Chrissy.”
“I’m not. But she had a sharp tongue and she knew to hit just where it hurt.”
“We all have that ability.”
A funny thing for his wife to say, since she’d been honing her skills on him as of late. “I’d like to think you and I have done a better job of controlling it,” he said.
Natalie cleared her throat. “Jack, we talked about this before, but Caroline deserves to know. Why did you write down what you did before the session?”
“I-” Dammit. He’d been set up. “You altered the course of the conversation on purpose. You knew about my difficulties with Christine.”
“I did.”
“I don’t think Caroline needs to know that.”
“Know what?” Caroline asked.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Apparently it does, if Natalie mentioned it.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“We’re in a therapy session, Jack. Were you planning on letting me say all the hard stuff?”
Maybe she hadn’t lost her sense of reason. Maybe it would help if he told her. Maybe she’d open up too. Or maybe he’d regret even touching the topic. He dived in anyway. “I was a very different man several years ago. Running for Congress hadn’t changed my behavior. I used a lot of women and treated many of them like shit. But then I met Caroline.” He saw Caroline close her eyes. She’d always hated talking about his past, with good reason. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s not like Natalie doesn’t already suspect this.”
“Where did you two meet?” Natalie asked.
“At a New Year’s Party.” Jack smiled. “At Christine’s, actually. I hadn’t wanted to go. Wasn’t sure why I’d been invited, didn’t know who would be there. I thought it would be a good start to the new term. I didn’t realize that Caroline was the one who insisted Christine invite me.”
“Why was that?” Natalie asked. “She didn’t even know you.”
“That’s true,” Jack said. “But she’d said…a few bad things about me during the campaign.”
“Terrible things,” Caroline said. “I gave a rotten speech. You’re being too forgiving.”
“It’s my point of view. I’m not going to make it sound worse than it was.” Jack turned back to Natalie. “Almost everything she said was true, but that didn’t stop me from taking offense. But she wanted to apologize to me. I blew her off the first time she came up to me. I was a supreme asshole. In other words, I was myself.” He shook his head. “That’s the worst part. I was completely myself the first time I met her, and all she was trying to do was make amends. I basically told her to fuck off, grabbed my coat, and was about to leave but Robert Allen stopped me on my way out the door.” He turned away from Caroline, not wanting to see the expression on her face.
“What happened with the Speaker?” Natalie asked.
Should he keep going? “He was angry,” Jack said. “He’d been so pleasant when I’d met him earlier and his mood had totally changed. He grabbed my arm, hard enough to hurt. And he said, ‘You’re not allowed to leave until you accept that woman’s apology.’ I played it off and the man snapped. He made it clear that the only reason he’d endorsed me was because Caroline had asked him to. That I was a worthless, superficial candidate who shouldn’t have won, but he’d gone out on a limb for this woman because of who she was to him. And then he said, ‘She’s had a rough year.’” Jack cleared his throat. So help him, he had to keep his shit together. “‘You don’t know what she’s been through. You find Representative Gerard and you let her apologize, but you’d damn well better apologize first.’”
He mustered up the strength to look over at his wife. Caroline had her face in her hands. He didn’t have the guts to speak to her. Not right now.
“Do you want to say anything?” Natalie asked her.
“No,” she whispered. “Keep going.”
“He was really yelling at me,” Jack said. “I wondered why no one else was paying attention. Maybe they ignored it because of who he was. Then Christine came over. Her yelling at me was worse than the Speaker. She made me feel two inches tall.”
He paused again, waiting. Natalie didn’t say anything, just motioned with her hand. Was this entire session going to be a giant Jack monologue? If so, he’d been completely misled.
“They were quite upset with me, and made it clear that neither one of them would even speak to me if they’d had their druthers.”
His voice broke again. Fuck it all. “But it was so obvious from their tone how much they loved Caroline. I couldn’t imagine who she must be to warrant that kind of devotion.” He turned to Caroline. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I know how much they meant to you and it makes me so sad that you don’t have them anymore. I-”
She returned his gaze, but only for a moment. “Please don’t.”
Now he’d gone and made her more upset. But he needed to see it through. The ending mattered most of all. “After the two of them were through, I was so ashamed that I was about to walk out the door, but Christine’s husband came up to me with a bottle of wine and told me to get my ass upstairs. Tom was the only one who didn’t yell at me.”
Jack dug his heel even deeper into the carpet. “When I think of what might have happened if I’d left that party,” he whispered. “How close I came to losing out on the life I was able to have. I wouldn’t have said two words to Caroline once we were sworn in. She wouldn’t have tried to apologize again because of how I’d treated her. I guess for once I made the right choice.”
Natalie turned to Caroline. “Would you have talked to him?”
Caroline didn’t look at either one of them. “I would have been cordial. But I wouldn’t have initiated anything. I don’t take rejection well.”
Jack laughed. “She can’t handle rejection and she doesn’t like compliments. She’s really the complete package.”
“It’s not funny,” Caroline said, but Jack saw the smile tugging at her lips. When she realized he was watching her she looked away again.
“What happened after you found Caroline at the party?” Natalie asked.
It didn’t matter that they both were on the verge of a total emotional collapse. That they’d lost their way and might never return again. That night was one of the best memories he had. Of her. Of them.
“We talked for hours,” Jack said. “Almost six hours with hardly a break. No lulls, no silences. It was remarkable. I’d never made a connection like that before. It’s funny how life can change in an instant. It sounds so cliché, but it’s not. I spent almost five decades being a person I didn’t particularly like, and a few hours of conversation with Caroline changed everything. I’d never considered marriage but after that night I was convinced that I was going to make her mine. I didn’t know how, but I would find a way.”
Caroline brought her head up. “That’s not how it happened. He’s making it sound like I’m some amazing person capable of capturing hearts in only a few hours. I’m just me. I’m not, you know, some siren or something.”
“Maybe you were to him,” Natalie said. “Did you like him when you first met him?”
“After that night? I liked him. But I wasn’t – I couldn’t think of him that way. Not yet.”
“Jack, what happened after the party?” Natalie asked.
Great. She wanted an entire play by play. “I wanted to spend more time with Caroline but had to be subtle about it,” he said. “She wasn’t ready for anything. I wanted to get to know her better, enjoy her company, even if she didn’t see me in a romantic light.” He swallowed hard. “She was so sad back then. Sometimes it was hard to see. There were moments when I could see her personality peeking through but it would fade. I felt very torn about it, like I was insinuating myself into a situation where I wasn’t welcome. I gave her all the time I could, even though there was a part of me that wanted to make a move. I waited and she agreed to go out with me. Everything would have been great if I hadn’t fucked it up.”
“What happened?” Natalie asked.
Had he forgotten to tell her that part during their therapy sessions, or was she forcing him to say it aloud? “I didn’t tell Caroline I was running for governor,” Jack said.
“Oh,” she said. “That’s kind of a big political secret.”
Years later and he lugged his guilt around every damn day. He’d roll that boulder up the mountain the best he could and when he woke up the next morning, he’d find himself at the bottom again. “I didn’t want to lose her. I almost did anyway. She broke up with me and I thought it was over and then…she got hurt.”
“At the Capitol,” Natalie said.
Another obvious statement. Surely she knew all of this. “Yes.”
“But you were with her, right?”
“Yes,” he said. “At the Visitor’s Center and in recovery. Sitting around that waiting room was probably the worst thing that had ever happened to me until-”
“Did anything happen at the hospital?”
Oh fuck. The moment had arrived. He wished Natalie would have asked him about that in the first place. “I don’t think-”
“Tell her, Jack. It’s important. You know it is.”
“Tell me what?” Caroline asked.
He hated doing this to her. To himself. He’d tried so hard to block that memory out. “I don’t-”
“Tell her, Jack.”
Well, shit. “We were in a private waiting room at the hospital. Me, Jen, Katie, and Christine. Jen was extremely upset. I remember Kathleen trying to calm her down. I’d just gotten off the phone with Tom, told him to get to the airport because there would be a plane waiting there to take him to New York to get our – to get the girls. Christine was sitting in the corner alone. She hadn’t said a word the entire way to the hospital.”
Caroline had covered her eyes with her hand. Fuck. He had to keep going. Natalie wouldn’t let him stop, even if Caroline wouldn’t want to hear what he had to say. “It was terribly unsettling. She had all this blood on her hands, on her dress. Caroline’s-” He shook his head. He didn’t want to relive that part. “Christine was completely, eerily silent. I wanted to help her. Tom wasn’t going to be there for a while, Jen and Katie had each other, and she didn’t have anyone else. I sat next to her and asked if she wanted me to call someone to bring her a change of clothes. She didn’t say anything so I touched her shoulder. It was like a bomb went off. She started screaming at me. Some of it was incoherent but most of it was pretty understandable. It was frightening enough that Katie came over to break it up, but she failed.”
He took a deep breath. He hated doing this. He hated admitting what had happened. “I wanted to yell right back at her, to tell her all the things I’d always wanted to say. About how she’d interfered with my relationship with Caroline, how she’d never given me a fair shake, how she’d probably done more to keep Caroline from moving forward than help her process her grief, but I kept that inside. I just let her yell at me. Jen couldn’t take it. She ran out of the room and Katie went after her and the two of us were alone.”
Jack cleared his throat. “I tried to calm her down. Really, I did. But nothing worked. I wasn’t saying much of anything because I didn’t want her to go off again. And she said, ‘You will never be the man that Nicholas was. You’re a sexual predator and a manipulator, and you will never be good enough for her. Even if she can’t see it, I’ll always know the truth.’ Then she pushed past me and left the room.”
He dug his fingers into the armrest of the chair, staring down at his shoes. He was done. If Natalie asked him to talk about anything else, he was done. He might not have done much but he’d done enough.
“Caroline?” Natalie asked.
Jack heard the ticking of a clock. Low voices in the hall. If Dr. Haddad had any pins in her desk, now was the time to dump them all on the floor. A warm hand covered his. He flinched but kept staring at the floor.
“He always refused to tell me about what happened at the hospital,” Caroline said. “I don’t – it was not her place to say that. Chrissy always knew how to push buttons.” She squeezed his hand. “I’m sorry. I wish – I’m sorry.”
Jack gathered the strength to face her. He just needed to look at her. He’d tried and tried and tried so many times but maybe he could finally break through. Maybe he could tell her what he needed to say without words. Caroline instantly pulled her hand away, like she’d touched a hot stove. “I need to go,” she said, leaping out of
her chair.
Natalie stood up. “Caroline-”
Caroline was already backing toward the door. “We shouldn’t have done this. I’m sorry that you had to go through all of this for me,” she whispered.
“Stay here, Caroline,” Natalie commanded. “Don’t leave.”
Dr. Haddad had never spoken to Jack that way before. Did she do it often with Caroline? It was enough to compel him to rise. “Please stay. Things were going so well.”
Caroline rubbed her eyes. “What Chrissy said isn’t true. I want you to know that. But I can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry.” She turned around but Natalie had rushed over to block the door. “Get out of my way,” she said.
“No.” Natalie stepped back. “You’re going to listen to us.”
“I’m done listening. I did everything you wanted, I sat here almost the entire time, and I’m done. Okay?”
“No,” Natalie repeated. “Look at me. He’s not asking you to take on his pain. He’s asking you to help him understand it.”
“How am I supposed to do that?” Caroline asked. “I begged him to tell me what happened that day and he refused. Almost six years later I’m supposed to help him process it when he’s been dwelling on it alone for all this time? Bullshit.” She looked over at Jack. “I’m sorry I had such a horrible best friend who treated you so terribly. But you can’t lay this on me. Not now.”
He couldn’t let her walk out when she was that upset. Jack put his hands on her shoulders. “Sweetheart-”
She shrugged him off. “Please don’t call me that. I don’t – I need to go.”
He resisted the urge to grab her in his arms. “We can just talk. Nothing else.”
“Talk about what? Chrissy’s not here to defend herself. You can tell Natalie all sorts of awful things about her but I don’t want to stick around to hear them. You’re only doing it to hurt me.”
She would try to find a way to turn it around. Jack threw his hands up in the air. “Dammit, Caroline. The world does not always revolve around you.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
He wanted her to stay. He didn’t want to fight with her. “I’m not trying to hurt you. I didn’t – I shouldn’t have told you.”
Phoenix (The Bellator Saga Book 4) Page 27