Page 113 of The Truth About Love

They’re empty though, the sheets. Summer-Raine isn’t wrapped up in them and I take that to mean she’s somewhere else in the house when a draft alerts me to the balcony doors being open.

The wooden floorboards creak as I step through the doorway to the place that holds a handful of my happiest memories. As soon as I feel the warm ocean air on my skin, it’s like I’m transported back in time.

Suddenly, I’m eighteen again. I can feel no wedding band on my finger, Mama is still alive and I still have the heart and love of Summer-Raine. She’s still mine. No complications, no complexities. She’s mine and that’s all there is to it.

“Auden?” her surprised voice cuts through the gentle breeze and reality sets back in.

Words escape me now that I’m here, now that she’s looking at me with those wide eyes and sad smile that makes my heart ache every fucking time I see it. I can’t remember the last time she showed me her real smile. God, the things I’d do to be able to see it again.

“Mind if I sit?” I motion to the chair beside her and fold myself into it when she nods.

The sky is still a painting of vibrant reds and purples, though the dark stretch of night isn’t far away from spilling black all over it.

We watch it for a while, the way we used to do, though she’s not curled up in my lap like she would have been back when she was mine.

We don’t say anything. We don’t need to. We just live in this moment together, breathing in the memories of a time when things were simpler.

“Do you ever wish we could go back?” Summer-Raine asks.

“Everyday.”

She sighs and it’s this sorry wistful sound that makes me want to cry. “Me too.”

I look down at my hands and the gold ring on my finger. That awful piece of metal that connects me to a woman I don’t want to be with. God, I ache to wrench it off my finger and hurl it into the depths of the ocean.

“Do you love her?” She asks it so quietly I’m not even sure I hear her right.

“What?”

“Cara.” She refuses to look at me, her hands rubbing nervously together in her lap, like she’s scared to hear my answer. “Do you love her?”

I don’t answer straight away. Truth is, it’s not a question with a clear-cut answer.

I can’t stand Cara as a person and I’ve never beeninlove with her, but when you have a child with a woman and then go through the shared trauma of losing that child, it’s difficult not to carry some feelings of affection towards her.

“Not in the way I love you,” I say finally.

I hear her gasp despite her attempt to disguise it with a cough. The way she’s looking at me, like I’m breaking her heart and holding it in place all at once, steals the very breath from my lungs.

I feel it too. That ache in my chest that only ever exists around her. Like I’m shattering into a million tiny pieces despite only ever feeling whole when I’m in her presence. It’s dizzying.

“Then why are you still married to her?”

I turn away and look out over the sea. The sun has completely set now, the only natural light coming from the celestial glow of the moon. It dances across the waves and distracts me from the conversation just enough to get my heartbeat under control.

I hate talking about my wife with Summer-Raine.

“What kind of man would I be to divorce a woman who’s still mourning the death of her baby?”

Beside me, Summer-Raine releases a shaky breath. “But what about you, Auden?”

“What about me?” I look at her again and find her jade eyes sparkling with unshed tears.

She shakes her head mournfully. “What about what’s best for you? What about what you want?”

“It doesn’t matter what I want.”

She leaps out of her seat and comes to stand in between my legs, crouching down to bring herself eyelevel with me. “Of course, it does.”

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