Page 82 of A Diamond Deal
A sob bubbled in her chest. She caught it before it escaped. But a lump formed so large in her throat she couldn’t swallow it.
She closed her eyes. So tightly they hurt.
She stopped crying.
Her tears wouldn’t helphim. But how could she help him? How did she teach him it was okay to feel when no one had shown him how? How did she show a man made of steel it was okay to bend? That she wouldn’t let him break?
She kept her head pressed to his chest. Listened to the loud beat of his heart in her ear.
She couldn’t. She knew this now. She couldn’t teach him how to feel. She couldn’t teach him how to accept the overload of what she knew now was inside him. But she could dothis.
She could hold him.
She could be here for him.
They could be there for each other.
She raised her head from his chest, but she didn’t release him. She kept him close. She understood what they needed now.
‘Were you happy?’ she asked.
His brows knitted. ‘With what?’
‘The life you’d built for yourself? Were you happy with our marriage?’ she clarified. ‘Before—’ she raised her right hand and gesticulated in a three-sixty turn ‘—were you happy withme?’
‘Were you?’ He flipped the question. ‘Happy?’
Isaak, he’d changed everything. But he never should have pushed them apart. He should have brought them closer together. She would let her son do that for them now. She would make it what it should have been.Now.
She stepped closer to him. ‘I think we can behappier.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I understand your choices so much better now,’ she said. ‘I understand—I know you—better than I did in our marriage. I understand myself better, too.’
And she did. She hadn’t been wrong all those years ago to choose him. It had taken their separation, the reunion, the battle of marriage contracts and terms of divorce to see it.
But she saw it now. There was no one else for her. And there was no one else for him.
‘All those choices I made before,’ she started, and a single tear slipped free.
It hurt her now. The truth. Their marriage…they’d never really let it begin.
If only they’d realised sooner the battles they were fighting on their own to maintain those too high walls, they could have fought them together.
She wiped the wetness from her cheeks. Demanded they stop. ‘I can’t undo them,’ she admitted.Owned it.Her mistakes. ‘But I can make different choices now because of them. I can choose to fight. AndIwant to fight,’ she admitted.
Puzzlement flashed in his black eyes. ‘What do you want to fight about?’
‘I want to fight forus.’
She released him. Let go of him and took a step back, because he needed to decide this was what he wanted too.
She’d thought she needed closure. In a sense, their conversations had given herthat. But it had given her something else too.
It had opened a door, and she had a choice if she wanted to walk through it. If she wanted to claim the marriage they had wanted all those years ago. But this time it would be stronger, she knew this. Becauseshewas stronger. She was different.Changed.
It would be different this time.
