LITMIR.BIZ

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accustomed in any area to having his will thwarted. This seemed almost shameful on his part, certainly nothing to be proud of, but that’s how it was. He was a top surgeon. People did what he wanted. Always.

      Alicia, too. Maura and their previous nanny, Kate, another two nannies before that. And Rosanna, the rare times he saw her.

      Abby and Tyler were almost the only human beings who ever defied him.

       “Time to get out of the bath now, sweetheart. Both of you.”

       “No! Not yet!”

       “No, no, no!”

      He realized he wasn’t comfortable when that happened. He tended to opt out and have Alicia or the nanny take over. “Here, they’re unmanageable tonight, and I’m tired.”

      But Alicia was speaking now. He focused quickly on her voice down the line. “Of course I won’t just spring it on them, MJ. Is that really who you think I am? Someone who would risk destroying my own children’s sense of emotional security that way, like Anna and James are doing? Someone who would use them as a weapon against you?”

      “No … No, I’m not suggesting that.”

      “You seemed to be.”

      “Look, it wasn’t intentional. It wasn’t. Our marriage is nothing like what Anna and James had. If you’re saying it is—”

      “No, no, I’m not. You’re right. There’s no comparison.” Something they agreed on! He felt a brief moment of relief.

      “All I’m saying is that I want us to do this right. If we have to do it at all. I don’t want it, Alicia. If there’s anything I can do, anything I can say, any way I can change, or we can both change, talk so that—” He stopped.

      Hell, was he begging?

      She stayed silent at the end of the phone, after he’d broken off. He waited, head pounding, jaw tight. Should he seize the window opened up by her silence? Take the initiative? He didn’t know how.

      She spoke again before he had any answers. “You’ll have to come up here again.” The words were slow and careful. “I do know that. Maybe it’s best not to put it off. Can you get some time?”

      “This weekend,” he said quickly, while the back of his mind buzzed, rearranging his schedule, working out a few favors he could call in. In his position, it wasn’t easy to get a chunk of time off at short notice.

      Alicia knew that, and he hoped she would see his willingness as a step toward—

       Toward having this whole thing just go away!

      But he’d begun to accept that this wasn’t going to be an easy fix.

      “If you could, that would be great,” Alicia said, still with that slow, careful way of talking, as if she was having to bite her tongue not to yell at him or blurt out a hundred deeply felt grievances. “It doesn’t need to be the whole weekend….”

      “It’s going to be the whole weekend. I’ll drive up Saturday morning, back down Sunday night.” Another ten hours in the car. He didn’t care.

      “All right, if you want. I think you’d better book into a motel.”

      “What will the children think of that?”

      Thick silence. “Make a reservation, please, MJ. It—it may turn out that you can cancel it …” He felt a rush of relief and hope. Short-lived.

      “… if we can stay civilized enough for you to sleep in the study.”

      “In the study?”

      “I made up a folding bed there for Maura—of course, she never used it—and I haven’t put it away yet. There are really only the two bedrooms. Abby and Tyler are sharing. But they don’t need to know where you’re sleeping. Anyway, they’re not going to see our choice of sleeping arrangements—” a pause “—the way an adult sees it.”

      “No.”

      So this was how she saw the physical side of their marriage, as a “choice of sleeping arrangements.” It felt like a body blow. Like a kick in the—

      Yeah. There.

      “Was there anything else you wanted to say?” Alicia asked him carefully.

      “Uh, no. Face-to-face, of course. But not now. Could you call and cancel Rosanna for tomorrow? I don’t want her—”

      “Yes, okay, that’s probably a good idea.” She took a breath. “So can you text me with a rough arrival time? In case I’m out with the kids?”

      “Sure.” He got through another couple of rounds of practical back-and-forth, then flipped the phone into the breast pocket of his shirt, his mind still snagged on the “sleeping arrangements” thing like ripped skin snagged on a rusty nail.

      In other words, it hurt. Bad.

      Did she mean it that way? Was she completely dismissing the sex life he’d always viewed with such satisfaction and pleasure and pride?

      They were great in bed together. They were. They were dynamite.

      But even as he thought this, he realized his attitude was a little out-of-date. He was thinking back to that sizzling week in Las Vegas and the vacations they’d taken together early in their marriage, before they’d decided to try for a baby. Those times stood out in his memory like a series of magazine-perfect honeymoons, four or five of them, some only a couple of days, others a week or more. Las Vegas, Bermuda, Paris, Aspen, Martinique.

      He could call up a thousand pictures. Alicia in a red bikini with her luscious breasts bouncing as she walked along a tropical beach and her blond hair shining brightly in the sun. Himself taking the bikini off in the privacy of their suite, by pulling at that saucy string bow that only just held things together in the front. Lying back in a foaming private spa together, champagne within reach. Sitting across the softly lit table from her at a three-star restaurant, anticipating the moment when they would get back to their Paris hotel room and he could pull her into his arms.

      At home, lately, sex had been different, he realized. They were both tired. He needed the release but didn’t need the slow, sensual build. It was over in minutes, and even though he was vaguely aware that she didn’t show the abandonment she once had, he put this down to the same priorities that dampened his own performance—just do it and get some sleep.

      While he was burning with the knowledge that he would miss her body in his bed the way he would have missed air or gravity, she seemed to be implying that she wouldn’t miss their lovemaking at all. For the first time, it occurred to him that maybe she’d left him for the worst and hardest reason of all.

      She’d found another man.

      At the very thought, he felt as if someone had knifed him in the gut.

      When he dragged himself into bed at ten o’clock, he felt her absence like an illness, and when he woke up at three after a couple of hours of unrestful sleep, he found he was holding her pillow in his arms as if he was cradling his own pain.

      It smelled of her hair and her shampoo … it just smelled of her … and he was surprised that she’d left it behind now that he thought about it. Very surprised. She almost always took it with her when they went away, cramming it into a suitcase or nestling it into the corner of the backseat in the car. Its presence in their marital bed spoke to him, helped him, even though he couldn’t work out what it said.

      He almost slid the pillow back to its rightful position on her side of the bed, but then in a moment of … he didn’t know—weakness? hope?—he pulled it closer again and hugged it like a child, or like an ardent lover, until sleep came over him.

       Chapter Six

      “What’s happening today,

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