Ethan (15 page)

“She was
smart and lovely. But she was a woman used to getting her way. No was as foreign to her as the Yucatan Peninsula.”

He knew that what his mother said was true. He was young and stupid. Tina was self-centered, but she may have grown out of that had she lived long enough.

“I’m glad Shae is in your life, for however long,” Adele concluded. “And I’m glad you’re working through the past. It’s had its hold on you for too long.” She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “And I hope you’ll be equally happy for me. . .”

She paused and studied his face for a moment.

“You have news, Mom?”

“I do. I just hope this is the right time. Last year, well, I had to focus on Emme.
So Rob and I changed our plans. We had hoped for Christmas. . .and now that it’s coming around again—“ she looked into Ethan’s eyes. “We’re getting married,” she said simply. “What do you think about that?”

Ethan
assumed a frozen expression, letting his eyes flare slightly. He waited a beat, to let the tension build, then said,

“It’s about time.”

“You brat!” Adele said and took a swat at his arm. “You worried me.”

“Sorry.
” But his laughter negated his apology. “Will I have to wear a tux?”

“Goodness, no. I’ve already had all that. Rob, too. We thought a quiet ceremony at home on Christmas Eve.”

He hugged his mom and then turned her in his arm so they could walk poolside, where Rob was waiting for them. Ethan shook his hand. He liked the guy. He was happy for his mom. So why did he feel like he was pitching backwards in some kind of freefall?

“The girls know?” he asked.

“Yes. Emme’s okay with it. I was worried about that. And Eva is glad we’re ‘getting that out of the way.’ I think she’s got some plans of her own in the making.” She looked up at him. “It could be a busy year.” Her smile was one part encouragement three parts sauce.

Chapter Fifteen

Shae
nursed the drink Ethan had made her. She was admittedly a light-weight, and suspected that Emme was, too—she had as much left of her Mai Tai as Shae. She really liked Ethan’s sister. She was unassuming but had a sharp wit and while Shae had noticed shadows pass between them during some of their conversation, she shared openly from her childhood and even her spotty dating history. Shae learned enough about the boy Ethan had been to actually picture him lobbing water balloons and hiding his sisters’ love letters.

“You’ve been good for Ethan,” Emme l
eaned across the table and confided. “He seems different, in a good way. More engaged, but a little nervous, too, like he’s walking on egg shells. A man only does that when he knows he has something too good to lose.” She sipped from her drink. “How is he doing with the Tina-thing, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Shae absorbed Emme’
s comments. She honestly didn’t know how Ethan felt about her. Perhaps confused. He was in a tenuous position, with the present and the future washing up on the broken pieces of his past.

She was sure, though, about his feelings regarding his marriage.

“He’s making progress,” Shae said.

“It kind of snowballed on him—disillusionment. Tina’s betrayal, the idealistic views that had him signing up, the tours of duty that exposed
so much of the bad the world has to offer. I worried about him for a long time.” Emme shrugged. “He was never a player, you know? But he went through woman at an alarming rate. Always someone new every time we visited.”

Shae felt a frown forming on her face, pulling on her brows and lips. She didn’t like
thinking she was just the latest in Ethan’s history of failed relationships. She didn’t like thinking about any of his past women. Even Tina was getting on her nerves, and the woman was long dead and should be allowed to rest.

Emme reached across the table and laid a hand over Shae’s. “S
orry. That was really lacking sensitivity, wasn’t it? What I wanted you to get out of that, is that you’re different, too. Also, different-good. You have more substance. And definitely a personality.”

“Ethan’s women lacked both?”

“They smiled. A lot. Even when they were talking. It gave them this breathy voice that was absolutely irritating—a come-on in every syllable.”

Shae laugh
ed. The Marilyn Monroe effect. She’d seen it in a lot of the young starlets.

“Am I interrupting something?” Ethan asked. He pulled a chair up to their table and sat down, close enough he could lay
his arm along the back of Shae’s chair. His fingers caressed lightly over her shoulder.

“We’ve been talking about you,” Emme said.
“Tearing apart past girlfriends and giving up secret handshakes.”

Ethan frowned and Shae felt his body tense. No one liked having their secrets spilled. Shae tried to lighten the mood:

“Did you really read from one of Emme’s love letters at the dinner table?”

“
Pure retaliation,” he assured her.

“And a lot of embellishment,” Emme said.

They laughed and Shae felt the breath ease out of Ethan’s chest. He adjusted against her side, pulling his arm from her shoulder so he could twine his fingers with hers.

“It’s good to hear you laugh, sis,” Ethan said.

Emme’s face sobered, but she returned, “It’s good to see you moving on.”

Ethan’s expression turned thoughtful and he nodded once. “It feels good, too.”

“Ditto.” Emme smiled. It touched her eyes and added warmth to her cheeks.

Eva dropped into
the only vacant seat at their table then and proclaimed, “Time to go.” She nodded toward the house, where Rob and their mother stood under the amber glow of the lanterns, engaged in quiet conversation. “So what do you think, Ethan? Mom and Rob?”

“It’s a good thing,” he said.

“I’m sorry they waited so long,” Emme murmured. “I would have understood—”

“They’re not sorry, Em,” Ethan assured her.
“You were a priority. You needed to be.”

Eva nodded her agreement and took her sister’s hand in her own.

Shae knew she was missing a critical piece of information. Something about Emme and her private life, so she didn’t intrude with obvious questions, but enjoyed watching the sibling closeness. She wanted to experience that again, too, with her sisters and brother. And she would, soon, she reminded herself.

There was nothing like family to ground a person. And she needed them more now than

ever before.

“How’s the work progressing?” Eva directed the question at Shae, but turned to Emme to fill her in. “Ethan wrote a screenplay.”

Emme nearly choked on a mouthful of Mai Tai. “You didn’t!” She protested.

“I did,” Ethan confirmed, his voice stiff with feigned offense.

“But you can’t write,” Emme pointed out.

“Ouch.” Ethan rubbed his chest, above his heart, but continued in a thoughtful tone, “It’s the process I need. I don’t care about grammar. It’s not a story, really, but my life. And if I can get it all on paper, then I can take a step back an
d look at it objectively. So far, it’s working..”

Emme understood
, but had clearly chosen sides. “I hope you made Tina the villain.”

“No one is all bad,” Shae said and all
eyes turned on her. She shrugged. “I’m not defending her. I don’t even know the whole story. Not yet. But I think there was a lot more going on than. . .” She searched for the right word. In front of his sisters, stating it as betrayal or an affair or anything close, seemed too personal.

“Infidelity?” Emme posed.

“Yes,” Shae agreed.

“What more?” Eva asked.

“Distance. Isolation—for both of them. Even—” Shae began.

“
Friendly fire,” Ethan confided, the words whispered as though he’d just discovered what

had elud
ed him all these years. Answers. Why had his marriage slowly faded to black? Why had Tina chosen to end—everything?

Shae still had a good third of the screenplay to get through, so she could only guess, but
she felt the plot was moving toward a devastated and contrite Tina. And an Ethan reduced to that empty numbness where any action at all was impossible, mired as he was in conflict—abroad and at home. Feeling betrayed by himself, his country and his woman.

For Ethan, t
he revelation was complete. Shae could see it on his face. The stark reality made his features tense. A muscle ticked at his temple.

“I didn’t really react
,” he said.

“She would have felt better if you yelled at her. Had some kind of angry reaction,” Eva said. “I know I would have.”

“Instead, she was left to deal with her guilt. And the evidence of her betrayal was inescapable,” Emme added.

Ethan turned to Shae. “Tina was pregnant when she died,” he told her. “And the baby wasn’t mine.”

She heard the raw emotion in his voice, the way it shredded his last words. Her response to Ethan’s pain, to the loss of the woman and child, to the decision to end something so promising, such an opposite from what Shae so desperately wanted for herself, was to fall inside herself. She heard the rushing of blood through her veins, the shallow gasps of her breath, the hitch in her throat. She pressed back the hot rush of tears and sought the purchase of something tangible to steady herself. When she flexed her hand, she realized it was still clasped in Ethan’s and was surprised that she had lost the feel of him, even momentarily.

She gave him a reassuring squeeze, but it wasn’t answered. And when she opened her eyes she found him staring at her, his expression pained.

“You okay?” he asked, his voice rough, close.

She would be
. She felt a shifting inside herself, emotions both vulnerable and strong—that nurturing, life-giving part of who she was, what she was meant to be—rose up, strengthening her spine and her resolve.

She smiled, but knew it was weak. Her lips trembled and she gave up the gesture before it became obvious to everyone at the table that there was something ter
ribly wrong going on inside her.

“We’d better go,” Emme said.
Concern was clear in the glance she gave Shae. “Mom is waiting, Eva.” She took Shae’s hand in her own and drew her attention. “I hope we see each other again,” she said.

Shae nodded. She wanted that, too. And she must have said as much because Emme smiled then released her hand and stood up. Eva came around the table and gave Shae a hug.

“You’re leaving for San Francisco tomorrow,” she said. “You have family up there. Ethan told us. But you’re coming back.” Her eyes were soft with confusion and worry. “Right?”

Shae nodded. She was supposed to come back. That was the plan. “Monday,” she said.

Eva nodded. “So, we’ll see you again. Maybe.”

She sounded as certain as Shae felt. She watched his sisters hug Ethan an
d then they turned as a group and Ethan walked them through the house and to their car.

Why was this new piece of the puzzle so hard for Shae to bear? Why did she feel that baby’s loss as a personal experience? There had to be more to it than her own desire for a baby
. She was confused and scared and didn’t understand why. And for her, that meant she needed the shelter of a familiar place.

She stood and walked into the house. She found the guest room as she’d left it earlier, with her suitcase open on the trundle and the towel she’d used after her shower on the floor in front of the dresser. She picked it up and deposited it in the hamper in
the adjoining bathroom. Then she began sorting and folding the few pieces of clothing she had with her. She found the file she’d brought with her, labeled “Baby Matthews,” and took it to the bed, where she sat and began looking through it.

The file
included her ovulation charts for the past three months—she’d forgotten to update them this morning and the day before and was stunned by her lack of focus. She had last tested her ovulation Sunday morning and it had been positive, as she had predicted, using her established cycle from the previous two months. She also found the small pamphlet entitled, “Sperm Donor Selection Guide.”  She had looked through it numerous times. Had, in fact, taken notes and made comparison charts, and after lengthy deliberation had chosen her baby’s father—number 17B647. He was athletic, aced astrophysics and had similar coloring to Shae. So why was she now seeing a small, wiggling bundle of baby with green eyes?

No. Unacceptable. She would not go there. She was not having Ethan’s baby. Impossible.

Especially now. Shae would understand if Ethan never wanted a child, having been so thoroughly betrayed by a woman he had loved.

There was a knock on her door. This time Ethan didn’t wait for Shae to invite him in.
He pushed the door open, stepped into the room, and gazed at her with some serious weight in his eyes.

“They’re gone,” he said. “Back to the hotel.”

His eyes traveled over her body, lingered on her face.

“I enjoyed meeting them,” she said.

He towered over her, all muscle and power. It was hard to imagine him the jilted lover; so much easier to see him as the strong and confident man he was today.

He sat down beside her, his eyes warm with concern.
“What happened out there?”

She knew what he was referring to. Her reaction to the
baby bombshell. But she had no answers for him. She had withdrawn from him. She figured it was something close to the need to affirm life in the wake of tragic death. She played absently with the paper still in her hands until he reached over and took it from her. And then she remembered what it was, but it was already too late. She watched him skim the title and the muscles in his jaw tensed. When he looked up at her, his eyes were darker, sharper.

“You don’t have to go tomorrow, Shae,” he said.

“I do. Especially now.” She tugged at the pamphlet until he released it. She tucked it into the file and set it aside. “I know you have plenty of reason not to want a child of your own,

Ethan, and I understand that.”

How do you properly mourn the passing of a wife impregnated by another man? How do you mourn a baby not you own?

And yet Shae was. A s
enseless death. The kind of death Ethan saw almost every day when he was in the Middle East. That had clawed at him. Built in him. Rendered him numb.

It scared Shae, the loss of that tiny life, made her tremble inside. But
it also fired up her need for a baby. She wanted motherhood. She was
choosing
motherhood.  And that desire was like flame pushing back the darkness of Tina’s final decision.

“I wanted a family. . .once.,” he said.

“But not since?” she ventured.

“I haven’t thought about it,” he admitted. “I did everything I could not to think about those things. . .marria
ge and babies and, well, commitment.”