“He left his number on the counter and I put it in my day planner. Why?”
“I need it.”
Her brother took his day planner from the pouch on his chair where he always kept it. “Here you go.”
She dialed as he read off the number. Then the phone began to ring. Once, twice, three times. Reenie was just about to hang up. She didn’t plan on leaving a message. Then Isaac answered.
“Hello?”
She cringed at the voice of the man who’d brought such devastation to her doorstep, the brother of her husband’s other wife.
God, this can’t be real….
“When did it start?” she asked without preamble.
He immediately knew who she was and understood what she wanted. Maybe her question was one he’d been expecting her to ask last night. “Nine years ago.”
She’d been prepared for a blow, but nine years still knocked the wind out of her. Nine years was a long time to live a lie. “How many children do—” she struggled to swallow “—do Keith and…and this woman have? One?”
“No, two. And her name’s Elizabeth, by the way.”
She could sense Isaac’s stubborn loyalty and knew it made them enemies. “Two,” she repeated, as if venturing out on a ledge she wasn’t quite sure could hold her.
“An athletic boy and a very bright girl,” he added.
A numbing coldness swept through Reenie. “What—” she took a bolstering breath “—what’re the children’s names?”
“Reenie, listen—”
“What’re their names?”
She heard him sigh into the phone and knew he wasn’t enjoying the confrontation any more than she was. “Christopher and Mica.”
“Did she know about me? Your sister, I mean?”
“No. She’s not that kind of person.”
She believed him. But the fact that she couldn’t blame his sister somehow made everything worse. The man she loved had done this to her. Keith alone was to blame.
Reenie massaged her temples. She couldn’t seem to think straight, to sort out this tragedy.
“He’s on his way back to you,” Isaac said. “You know that, don’t you?”
She remembered Keith’s panicked response. I’ll quit my job right now, buy you the farm. During the past two months, she’d all but begged him for both. He’d made her feel selfish for even asking, then flown off to be with his other family. He’d been lying to her for nine years. Lying as he made love to her. Lying as he told Jennifer he couldn’t come to her play because of his work. Lying, lying, lying. She couldn’t see an end to the lies….
He couldn’t love her and hurt her the way that he had.
“Tell your sister she can have him,” she said, and hung up.
IN L.A. THE DAY WAS GRAY and drizzly, but Elizabeth was wearing sunglasses when Isaac threw his small bag into the back of her white SUV and climbed in the passenger side. She mumbled a greeting but barely looked at him before checking traffic and pulling away from the curb. Mica and the kids had to be in school because they weren’t in the car. Isaac was grateful for that. He wanted to be able to speak candidly, work through this mess one hurdle at a time.
“The weather turned almost the day after you left,” his sister said as if the lack of sunshine was important. She was wearing a pair of brown wool slacks with a beige turtleneck sweater and leather boots. If Isaac didn’t know what had happened, he wouldn’t have guessed from her appearance. Although her face was devoid of makeup and she’d combed her hair into a low ponytail instead of her usual more sophisticated style, she looked as collected as always. The sunglasses, and the strain in her voice, provided the only clues that today wasn’t a day like any other.
His sister was a real class act.
What Keith had done was so grossly unfair.
Liz drove past the other terminals and finally swung out of the airport. When they came to a stoplight, she turned her windshield wipers up to combat the falling rain, and Isaac’s gaze fell to her hands. He’d been wrong a moment earlier, he realized. There were more clues to her fragility than he’d first noticed. Her fingernails, usually perfectly manicured, had nasty sores around the cuticles. She’d been picking at them. He knew because it was the same nervous habit she’d had as a child. One she’d worked hard to overcome. She also wasn’t wearing her wedding ring or the tennis bracelet Keith had given her.
“You okay?” he said.
She nodded, but he couldn’t get past those painful-looking fingers. She’d probably paced the floor, digging at herself the entire night. How was she holding herself together? When he’d called her after leaving Reenie’s house, he’d found her almost frantic with worry. Since Keith had suddenly disappeared, Isaac had been forced to tell her.
His words had been met with dead silence. Afraid that she’d collapsed, he’d called her name several times, and she’d finally answered—quietly and without tears. Certainly she hadn’t reacted to her husband’s betrayal in the same vocal, angry way that Reenie had. Reenie was confident enough to acknowledge and express her pain, and to feel justified in doing so.
That was normal; this was not.
“Liz.” Isaac squeezed her shoulder, hoping to lend her his strength. “I’m so sorry.”
“I know,” she said softly, but she was still sitting stiffly in her seat, staring at the snake of bumper-to-bumper traffic ahead of them.
“That’s it?” he said as they inched their way toward Interstate 10. “That’s all you’ve got to say?”
When there was some space between her and the car in front of her, she eased off the brake and let the SUV roll forward a few feet. “My husband left me last night. What do you want me to say?”
Did she think she could cope with this the same way she’d coped with so many other unfortunate events in her life—by simply absorbing the hurt and shock and carrying on as if nothing was wrong?
“Holding the pain inside will only make it worse, Liz.”
When she spoke, he detected a deep reservoir of emotion behind her words. “And letting it out will change what, exactly?”
“Venting might help you to recover.”
“How will it do that?”
“I don’t know. Most women would cry if they faced what you’re facing right now, wouldn’t they?”
A slight crease marked her normally smooth, high forehead. “I’ve never been like most women, Isaac. You know that. Maybe that’s why Luanna hated me so much.”