Page 38 of Between Our Hearts

Sadie spun and was confronted with another tradesperson wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a bee-print apron.

The woman surveyed her face with a worried expression. “You’re beet red. Do you need some water?”

“Sadie?” Clark’s concerned voice sounded far away as his hot fingers singed her, bracketing her bare upper arms.

At last, a noisy breath dragged into her empty and burning lungs. “I’m sorry” was her exhale before her knees dipped unwittingly.

“Love.” Her pet name was a panicked gasp as Clark gathered her tight to his chest. A split second later, he swooped her up, carrying her to the back of the tent under the shade before lowering her onto a plastic folding chair.

The crowd of people seemed to expand exponentially. Someone pressed a cold water bottle into her shaking hands. Another person draped a dampened handkerchief around her neck. Pam was using a twelve-by-twelve art piece as a makeshift fan. All while Clark kneeled in front of her, his nervous hands flowing over her body: pulling her sunglasses away, moving down her cheek, tracing her arm until he gripped her wrist, seemingly to take her pulse.

She wanted to tell him not to bother. To tell him there was no reason to check for a heartbeat because she knew the organ had disintegrated in her chest.

But like all the words she should have shared with her husband, those, too, were trapped inside her mouth.

“Do you want to go home?” Clark’s worried eyes were on hers again.

“Yes.” The truth burst out of her. She wanted to go home with Clark and Lottie and have things be like they used to be. She wanted her family again.

He swallowed hard, the muscles of his jaw tight. “I’ll have my dad bring his car around, and I’ll get you settled.”

Sadie halted her reactive wince. Of course. Clark had to stay here. This was his job now. He couldn’t leave just because she’d realized that everything between them was truly over.

The wearied muscles in her neck complied only enough for a single nod. “Okay,” she whispered.

He seemed to register her hesitancy. “Or I could—”

“No,” she forced the pained edge out of her voice by clearing her throat. “Mike can take me home, and I can walk to the car.”

His gorgeous irises darted between hers before she tore her gaze away.

Pushing out of the chair, she took Mike’s extended hand. “Stay, Clark. You belong here.”

?Chapter 20?

Wednesday evening, after wishing his parents a safe drive home earlier that afternoon, Clark tried to turn his frustration into something positive. But after forty-five minutes of trying and failing to coerce angled slivers of wood into their design frame, he turned off the compressor. The release valve sent the hissing sound of shooting air into his workshop. An awkward laugh almost bubbled from his lips because a similar pressure had built up within himself over the last few days, but there was no release valve in sight.

He scrubbed his free hand over his face with a nasally exhale.

Things had been so much worse since Sadie had overheated at the farmer’s market. Even his ball-of-sunshine mother had noticed the shift and exerted pallet-loads of energy trying to lift Sadie’s spirits at every turn. His father, a known quiet introvert, had begun engaging Sadie in conversation whenever they shared a room. Often his wife would politely smile and nod along, but the moment his parents’ attention was diverted, a deep frown would crease her lips. Even their daughter’s presence hadn’t had its usual brightening effect.

Maybe Clark should have come home with her Sunday, but for months it had been impossible to know what the right course of action was, so he’d listened to Sadie’s words and stayed. If he’d taken her home, he might have gotten the version of his wife that had flickered back into life after their date, or he could have gotten the version that had refused to talk to him when he’d brought sandwiches to the hospital.

Clark almost felt seasick with the unpredictability of his life right now. It was as if the physics of gravity were constantly changing, and he was stumbling to get his footing.

And then there was the other part of him that was already mourning, already anticipating that things wouldn’t get better from here.

Had he known that Friday afternoon would have been the last time he’d have heard his wife’s careless laughter, he would have savored the sound. Had he known that he’d only get one chance in his life to have Sadie’s gentle, tender kisses, he would’ve slammed the bathroom door shut and ignored the world. Had he known that the last time he would have held his wife to his chest was on that hot Sunday, he wouldn’t have let her go.

Only . . . in the end, it wasn’t an issue of him not letting go. It was that she kept pushing him away. There was only so much he could do before he had to resign himself to the fact that Sadie didn’t want him.

The muscles in his shoulders tensed.

“You can’t force someone to love you,” he murmured.

Even though he kept making his brain tell him things like this, to prepare himself for their inevitable separation, his body fought like a fierce, stubborn toddler against the idea. A foolhardy part of him writhed and kicked internally, refusing to relent to the harsh reality before him.

Clark started tidying up his tools, putting them back in their designated places to distract himself from the deep sinking feeling vibrating through his muscles. He ignored the bile stirring at the back of his throat as he turned off the window AC unit and flicked off all the lights.

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