Page 55 of Between Our Hearts

That gut-punch sensation ripped away all his elation. He’d suspected Sadie had been picking up shifts, but it still hurt hearing it from Maggie.

Maggie patted his jacketed arm. “At least you’ve still got most of your Sundays together. I like that she made Sundays off a contingency of her accepting the directorship. It’s important to have work-life balance. Few surgeons understand that.”

The hairs on the back of Clark’s neck stood up, and he rolled his shoulders to try and dissipate the sudden pinprick sensation. Somehow, he forced his feet to move down the table of food. Sadie still had Sundays off? Up until a week ago, she’d implied that she’d been on call or had been at mandatory meetings all those days. If she hadn’t been at the hospital . . .

His gaze darted up.

Sadie pushed Vinay’s jacketed arm as she, Linus, and Kerem burst into laughter. Clark blinked. Did her fingers linger? A sinking feeling pulled his stomach down to his calves. When he’d been introduced to the man before the graduation program started an hour ago, Clark hadn’t thought anything about him. He was just another one of Sadie’s many male colleagues. Now, however, he noticed Vinay was actually a rather attractive man. One who was smiling with rapt attention as Sadie spoke.

Apparently, Maggie had kept talking. “. . . makes sense because they spend so many years working to get to where they are, it’s hard to take some time off.”

“Uh, yeah, I’m sure you’re right,” he muttered. “It was good to see you. Excuse me.” He moved away swiftly, setting his full plate on a nearby open table and walking out the side door that led to an exterior balcony.

Raspy loud breaths pulled into his lungs as his fingers found the notch between his brows. When the first miscarriage had happened and Sadie had become more emotionally distant, when the work hours had started to increase, he’d never even considered she wasn’t in the OR. He’d always trusted her.

Even when she’d explained that she’d been mourning at the park, that had made sense to him. But considering that she might have been spending her free time with another man made his muscles revolt. They didn’t know if they should loosen and drop him to the decking below his feet or tighten to the point of sending the bones of his fist colliding into the jaw of another man.

Clark glanced back through the plate glass window to see Sadie’s smiling face pay more attention to Vinay than she did the other two men at her side.

Things started to click together like Lottie’s chunky Duplo blocks. Sadie had said she’d been at Peaceably Park, but there were times when she would have been there at the same time he and Lottie were there for class or for an afternoon playdate on the playground. The park wasn’t that big. He’d have seen her or her car. No, there weredefinitelytimes when she was scheduled off and he was at the park and she wasn’t.

This plummeting sensation ripped through him, prompting his hand to grab the sun-warmed railing in front of him. He pulled his phone from his suit jacket pocket—6:46 p.m. Before the plan was fully formed in his mind, he was pushing back into the luxuriously decorated dining space.

Though his pulse was pounding in his throat and adrenaline was coursing through his veins, he made his mouth form an approachable smile as he interrupted the foursome. “Parker called. Lottie wants to say goodnight to us.” He forced his fingers to not shatter the phone in his hand as he tilted his head toward the staircase that led back to the rest of the restaurant.

Sadie frowned slightly, and sourness hit the back of his mouth with a potency that was almost agonizing. She excused herself from the conversation before following him downstairs. He wasn’t listening as Sadie babbled on about how excited she was that another particularly skilled resident had decided to join their practice as well. She didn’t even seem to notice that he’d marched them out the front door and around the side of the restaurant where they could have some privacy.

At last, he turned and faced his wife. “Are you having an affair?” He’d planned on starting in a better, more clever way, but his brain only wanted an answer to that question.

“What? No!” His wife’s brow pinched as her face morphed in shock. “Why would you ask that?”

Clark carefully gauged her reaction. He’d never thought of Sadie as a dishonest person, but maybe in the end, he really didn’t know her. She kept so much to herself.

He crossed his arms across his chest to offer some protection to the organ breaking beneath his breastbone. “You admitted that you weren’t working all the times you were away from home. That you were at the park thinking about our unborn children.” He tried and failed to say the last sentence without his voice breaking. “But that can’t be right, Sadie. There were times when we would have been there at the same time.”

His wife’s face froze, and that action was all he needed to see. An expletive left his lips as his eyelids closed painfully. She’d been lying to him. She’d told him she was grieving, but she’d been taking hours upon hours of time doingsomethingaway from him and Lottie.

“Have you been with him?” His arm swung to the restaurant.

“Who?”

“Vinay.” Forcing himself to say the man’s name almost made him vomit in his throat.

“No. I mean, not unless I said I was when we were working. But only working. Not doing anything else. Not doing what you think we were.” She visibly shuddered, and he didn’t know if he should take that as a good response or good acting.

“I put up with a lot. You not talking to me, pulling away, not wanting to work on our relationship, but I will not tolerate you sleeping with another man.” His fingernails dug into his palm.

“I’m—” she sputtered. “I’m not. I promise.”

“Then where have you been?”

“At the park,” she said softly. “Ours and some other ones.”

“After everything we’ve been through, you could at least be honest with me.” He shook his head, stepping past her toward the parking lot.

“Clark, wait.” She reached out and grabbed his forearm.

“Don’t touch me.” The wrenching back of his arm threw her off balance, but he didn’t reach out to catch her.

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