Rose was quiet. “I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t mean to create all this drama. Maybe you would have been better off not knowing about this.”
I unlocked my desk, opened the bottom drawer, and slipped my purse inside. “Don’t be sorry, sweetheart. I’m glad you found out. Whatever happens, we’ll get through it together.”
Yet I felt as if my world were spinning out of control. I needed a moment to get my bearings.
I woke at dawn the next morning, just as a faint gray ribbon of light reached through the small opening between the drapes. The bed was empty beside me. Gabriel had already risen, which proved what I’d already suspected: He was troubled by our conversation at dinner the night before, when we’d made the decision as a family that Rose and I would travel to Australia to meet Susie. And to visit the place where Dean might be living. Gabriel supported the idea, but now it was sinking in, for both of us.
I rose from bed, pulled on my bathrobe, and went downstairs to the kitchen. The house was quiet in the dim morning light. I noticed the door to the basement was ajar, so I padded softly down the wooden steps in my slippers and peered over the rail and into the rec room, where I found my husband. He was sitting on the sofa, polishing his saxophone with a soft white cloth.
“Hey there,” I said as I made my way closer and sat down beside him. “You’re up early.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” he replied, glancing at me briefly.
“Neither could I.”
He continued to polish the brass instrument until it gleamed in the lamplight. Then he set it inside the open case and said, “Coffee?”
“Definitely.”
He closed the case, put it away, then followed me to the kitchen, where I set about brewing a fresh pot. Gabriel fetched two mugs and set them on the counter, and while the coffee maker gurgled and hissed, we stood, side by side, watching it fill the glass decanter.
“I wish I was going with you,” he finally said. “Maybe I should.”
“But next week is the music festival,” I reminded him. “Your students need you.”
“They do. But you need me too.” He regarded me intently, his eyes searching mine. “Don’t you?”
“Of course,” I quickly assured him. “But Rose and I will be okay.”
Gabriel faced me. His expression stilled and grew serious. “This morning when I woke up and imagined you on the other side of the world—in a place where you might see Dean again—I wanted to break something.”
I heard the old jealousy in his voice and recognized the worry in his eyes because we’d been down this road before. He had never been completely confident that I loved him more than I had once loved Dean.
“You can come if you like,” I replied. “Maybe you should.”
He thought about that for a moment, then faced the coffee maker again. “No. You should go on your own. You and Rose.”
I contemplated this firm, unequivocal decision. “I feel like maybe this is a test,” I carefully suggested. “You want to find out for sure if I’ll come back to you.”
Gabriel folded his arms. “It could be that. What’s that old saying? If you love something, set it free . . .”
“If it comes back, it’s yours.”
“If it doesn’t, it never was.”
I turned to him, touched his arm, and looked into his eyes. “I am yours, Gabriel. Surely you know that by now. I hope you can believe it.”
The coffee finished dripping, and he filled both our cups. “I’ve always tried to believe it. Most of the time I do, but every once in a while, when the house is quiet, I feel you grow distant, like there’s a sadness in you that has nothing to do with me, so I can’t fix it. I just have to leave you alone with it.”
I accepted the coffee mug he held out to me. It was warm on my cold hands. “You’re right. Sometimes I do remember the pain I went through, and nothing can fix it or erase it. It’s a part of me. But that doesn’t mean I still want Dean. After everything we’ve learned about what he did, I feel only anger toward him. A sense of betrayal. There’s a shadow over all the memories, like a dark thundercloud.”
Gabriel leaned back against the counter. “I hear what you’re saying to me. You want me to accept that you chose me—and that you will continue to choose me—but I can’t help but worry that if he’s there and you see him again, you’ll feel a spark, despite everything that happened. You’ll remember that passion you felt for him when you were young. I’m not sure you and I ever had that kind of passion. It was love and friendship when we got back together, not lust.”
“But it was so much deeper and better than lust,” I told him, needing desperately to make him understand. “What you and I had was a history of friendship and respect. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t physical. There was definitely lust. There still is. But it was the icing on the cake, not the cake.”
“But sometimes,” he argued, “passion and lust can be more powerful than love. It can light you on fire and cloud your judgment, and just like that”—he snapped his fingers—“you’re in someone else’s arms. Or worse.”
“No, Gabriel. My judgment will remain intact. I promise you that.”
He faced me from a distance. “I know you would never want to be unfaithful, but if something does happen, I want you to think of me, here in our home. Remember how much I love you. How much I’ll be missing you and waiting for you.”
I closed the distance between us and laid my hand on his cheek. “Nothing will happen. And I will come home.”
The morning sun beamed through the kitchen window and flooded the room with an auburn glow. Gabriel clasped my hand and kissed my open palm.
God, oh God . . . I didn’t want to hurt him, and I knew he would have preferred that I not travel to Australia at all—that I simply report the DNA results to the authorities and let them take it from there. But I had to go, and Gabriel understood that. If Dean was alive, I needed to see him for myself and ask why he’d done what he’d done. Only then would I be ready to come home and finally put an end to the wondering.
CHAPTER 31
OLIVIA
Cairns, Australia, 2012
I stood at the railing on the balcony of our hotel and looked out at the Coral Sea. The day was hot and bright beneath a cloudless blue sky, and palm leaves fluttered gracefully in the breeze. The scent of suntan lotion reached me from the beach, and I looked down at Rose on the white sand, stretched out on her belly on a lounge chair, the side of her face turned toward the sun.
I wondered what she was thinking about. Her half sister, Susie, perhaps. They’d had time to get to know each other since our arrival in Brisbane, when Susie’s mother, Patricia, welcomed us like family. We were jet-lagged and in need of a hot shower and a soft bed, and they picked us up at the airport and drove us to their home in a Riverside suburb outside the city, where we stayed for three days.
Initially, I refrained from asking questions about Patricia’s brief relationship with Susie’s father because it didn’t seem polite. But on the second day of our visit, Susie took Rose on a tour of her university, and Patricia invited me out for lunch, just the two of us. We sat on an outdoor patio with elegant, white-clothed tables, and she ordered a bottle of chilled pinot grigio. As soon as it arrived, she sat forward and asked what I wanted to know about her one-night stand eighteen years ago.