Page 21 of The Wife He Neglected
"Not like this." He heard the fracture in his own voice and couldn't repair it, and he saw her hear it too, a flicker of something moving behind her eyes, there and gone.
She stepped back. "Briefly," she said.
Lucas entered. The door closed behind him with a quiet, definitive sound.
He stopped near the center of the room, unanchored by the absence of direction. She hadn't told him where to stand. Hadn't gestured toward a chair. She'd simply given him space and let him figure out what to do with it, and the disorientation of that, of existing inside her world without a script, left him standing in the middle of herliving room like a man who'd forgotten how rooms worked.
"I misjudged the situation," he said.
The statement felt insufficient even as it left him.
"That's one way to describe it," she said.
"I didn't take you seriously," he said, more carefully now. "I assumed you would remain."
Claudia watched him quietly. Giving him nothing to build from.
"That assumption was incorrect," he said.
She tilted her head slightly. "You came here to tell me your assumptions were incorrect?"
"I came here because—" He stopped. The sentence he'd been constructing, logical, controlled, shaped to produce a specific response, fell apart in his mouth. What replaced it came from somewhere else entirely. Somewhere he hadn't accessed in years, somewhere below strategy, below composure, below every polished surface he'd built to protect himself from exactly this.
"I came here because the house doesn't work without you," he said. "Because nothing works without you. Because I've been walking through rooms that should feel like mine and they feel like — like exhibits. Like places where something used to be alive and isn't anymore."
The words hung in the air between them, raw and unprocessed, and he watched Claudia's expression shift, watched itopen. A crack in the composure she'd been holding. A flicker of the woman underneath, the one who had loved him, the one who maybe still did …
"Lucas—" she said, and her voice broke on his name. Just slightly. Just enough.
It was the first time in days shehad said his name without it sounding like a verdict, and the sound of it undid him.
He crossed the space between them. He moved toward her the way a man moves toward the only light in a dark room, pulled by something older than strategy and more honest than anything he'd said in years.
"Don't," she said, but her voice lacked conviction, and her body didn't move away.
He stopped a breath from her. Close enough to see the pulse at her throat. Close enough to see how absolutely, devastatingly beautiful she was.
"I'm not going to touch you," he whispered. "Not unless you want me to."
Claudia looked up at him, and he saw the cost of her composure. It was written in the tension of her jaw, in the slight tremor at the corner of her mouth, in the way her eyes were bright with something she was fighting to keep from spilling over. She had been so strong. So controlled. So perfectly, devastatingly steady through all of it, the leaving, the filing, the silence, the refusal, and now, with him standing close enough to touch, the strength was costing her everything she had.
"You don't get to do this," she whispered. "You don't get to show up and look at me like that and?—"
"Like what?"
"Like youseeme."
The words broke something open between them.
"I do see you," he said. "Claudia. I see you."
Her hand came up to his chest. Not to push him away, to his relief. To feel him. Her palm flat against his shirt, her fingers pressing into the fabric the way they used to when she was deciding whether to let him closer or hold him at a distance, and he felt her hand trembling,felt the war happening inside her through the five points of contact where her fingertips met his body.
"This doesn't change anything," she said.
"I know."
"I mean it. This doesn't — it can't —"
