25 Years
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Tara Taylor Quinn
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18.5K
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30
CHAPTER ONE
“DID YOU JUST SAY you want a divorce?”
Jolene Hamilton Chambers shoved a couple of bras into the duffel open on the bed she’d shared with her husband for the past seven years. And nodded.
Not the best way to start a week.
The bras covered a corner of the eight-inch blue rectangular box poking out from the pajamas she’d already packed on top of it. Except for a brief glimpse to ensure that she’d grabbed the right package from the back of the bottom shelf in her linen closet, Jolene hadn’t looked at that box for months. Not since she’d purchased it and then unexpectedly not needed it. She didn’t need it now—but she was waiting until she was with Tina, until she was stronger, before she tackled that one.
Steve, standing with his arms crossed on the opposite side of the bed, watched her silently. He was still wearing the dress shirt and tie he’d worn to a new teachers’ July orientation meeting at the school earlier that morning. He’d been an elementary school principal when they’d married. His eyes had been softer then.
Now, seven years later, he was principal of Boulder’s Valleyview High School and his gaze could intimidate even the most pierced, purple-haired, grunge-wearing students under his authority.
Jolene wasn’t intimidated. She knew the tender-hearted man beneath the “Dr. Chambers” look. Adored him.
“Talk to me, Jo.”
His tone pleaded with her. She turned her back, scooped a handful of socks out of the open underwear drawer. So what if they didn’t match? She was only going to the cabin. That drawer shut, she yanked on the larger one below it. Three pairs of jeans, faded to varying degrees, followed the socks into the suitcase. And sweaters, she’d need sweaters. Didn’t matter that they were in the middle of Colorado’s hottest summer in years, the state’s northern woods still got chilly at night.
“You want a divorce.” His voice was deadpan. A complete antithesis of the emotional tug-and-pull twisting her insides.
Not trusting herself to speak, or to look at him, she meticulously refolded a couple of perfectly well-folded sweaters, and nodded again. The sweaters fit on top of the jeans with room to spare.
“Jo.” The back of Steve’s hand appeared in her line of vision. It rested on hers. She needed to slide her fingers from beneath his, to decide which blouses to take. Tina’s plane from Roanoke was landing just after two. That only gave her an hour and a half to load the car with the groceries and cooler and linens she’d packed that morning and get to the airport early enough to meet her best friend of twenty-five years.
His hand was warm, thrilling and comforting at the same time. “I…mean it, Steve.” While her words were barely above a whisper, her voice didn’t waver. And neither did her intent.
He released her hand. “Why?” Thrusting his own hands in the pockets of his dark brown dress slacks, he paced to the end of the bed. “Is there someone else?”
She couldn’t blame him for sounding incredulous. How could she possibly be hungry for another man when she was so easily aroused by the man she was leaving—as their usual Sunday morning in bed had shown him quite clearly the day before.
“Of course not.”
“Then…why?”
She walked to the closet, her legs shaking as she pulled open the folding door. “Because I love you so much it’s killing me.”
Hand trembling, Jolene reached for a group of hangers and dropped the whole pile on the sweaters in her suitcase. She went into the adjoining bathroom, carried out her bag of toiletries, plopped it on top of the rest. And couldn’t avoid her husband’s gaze any longer.
He hadn’t moved. His face, normally so expressive, was stiff, his eyes glassy with shock as he stared at her. Jolene stared back. She didn’t know what else to do. She was so close to falling apart she didn’t trust herself.
She’d made the right decision. There was such absolute certainty about that she knew she’d be able to go through with it. But she felt no clarity about anything else. How did one go about divorcing the love of one’s life? And what would come afterward?
“Could you explain that?”
Jolene jumped. Had he read her mind?
Then she understood.
He’d been responding, about five minutes late, to the reason she’d given him for the divorce.
“I can’t do it anymore, Steve.” Emotion suffocated her, making it nearly impossible to speak. Yet in spite of the trembling of her lips, the tears pushing against the back of her throat, she was resolute.
“Do what?”
“You, me, us. Our need to be parents. No baby. I can’t get over the guilt.”
He moved so quickly around the bed, he had her by the shoulders before she could shift to avoid him. “That’s what this is about?” he asked, his voice almost light, as though at any moment laughter would burst forth. “This is just another bout of pretest jitters?”
His grasp, as he pulled her against him, was fierce, almost crushing. She could feel the shaking in his arms, hear the pounding of his heart. “Thank God,” he murmured raggedly. “We’ll get through this, babe, we always do. No matter what we find out, we’ll go forward just like we have every other time.”
Drawing back, he held her arms, staring at her, moisture glistening in his eyes. “You have no idea how scared I was, Jo, thinking I was the only one here who’s still so much in love I can’t see straight. I couldn’t figure out how your feelings had changed without my knowing. I’m so damned relieved, I’m babbling like an idiot….”
His grin scorched her from the inside out. If she could have, she would’ve grinned back. If it had been a year ago, or the year before that. If she hadn’t already gone through the crushing disappointment so many times, she might’ve had the capacity to handle more, might’ve had shoulders strong enough to take on his disappointment as well as her own.
But it wasn’t last year. Or any other time. It was now. She was thirty years old and couldn’t spend the next seven years wasting her energy on something that would never happen. She couldn’t spend another year living with the shadows in her husband’s eyes whenever they went out to eat and were seated near a couple with a small child, or went to the grocery and passed a toddler sitting in the store cart, or went to church or to the movies or shopping, or stopped at a light next to a van with a car seat. She was through with this—had to be. The pressure was too much.
“I’ve lost ten pounds, Steve.”
“You’ve had a rough couple of months at work—”
She shook her head, effectively cutting him off. Yes, her position as social worker at the local crisis nursery was stressful. Yes, it had been particularly bad this spring and into the summer as her files filled with more children than there were acceptable foster homes to accommodate them.
“My inability to conceive is destroying me.”
“So we’ll adopt—”
“Steve!” She was as shocked by her scream as he was.
Lowering her head, Jolene zipped her bag and pulled it off the bed. “I’m sorry,” she said, extending the handle as the suitcase landed at her feet. “But this is exactly what I mean. The guilt, the disappointment, the pressure—it’s just too much for me. I can’t even maintain control of my emotions.” She looked at him because she couldn’t not look at him. “I know how much you need children of your own—not someone else’s children to care for. You do that all day long, and so do I. You need children who are a continuation of you, of your father….”
Steve’s father, a policeman, had been gunned down by a desperate homeless teenager trying to break into a pay phone. Steve was ten. His mother had died shortly after he was born from a blood clot following simple outpatient surgery to fix a prolapsed bladder resulting from his birth.
She yanked on the suitcase handle and headed out to the hall, the bag feeling like a mass of hundred-pound rocks moving slowly at her heels.
“Sure I want kids.” Steve was right behind her. “But not more than I want you. You’re my life, Jo….”
And she’d had ovarian cysts that, once removed, had left scar tissue making it unlikely she’d conceive. Unlikely that she’d ever give Steve—her healthy and perfectly fertile husband—the one thing he wanted most out of life. A child of his own.
The last time they’d spent the thousands of dollars necessary for the medical procedure that had a twenty percent chance of impregnating her, she’d started her period almost immediately. That night, he’d thought she was asleep when he crept quietly from their bed. She’d been lying quietly beside him, trying to regulate her breathing, but she’d been far from asleep. She’d crawled out of bed, too, thinking they’d share a late-night drink as they had after a couple of the other disappointments. He hadn’t heard her. And he hadn’t gone for a drink. Instead, she’d seen him in his office, staring at a photo book she’d never seen before, but one she’d perused several times since. It was filled with pictures of him and his dad.
And that night, while she watched from the doorway, her husband of more than five years, the man who’d never shed a tear in her presence, had wept like a baby….
“I have to go….”
Opening the door off the kitchen leading to the garage and her year-old Ford Explorer, Jolene fled.
And didn’t look back.
