Page 41 of His Loving Wife

“Kate?” The woman waited, but Kate didn’t respond. “I’m Angie.”

Kate stood. For some reason, the image she’d had of Angie in her head didn’t quite fit. She’d thought she might be grungier, rougher. An entitled thought, she realized. The woman pulled out the chair and collapsed into the seat.

“I’m happy you finally responded to my letter,” she said, relaxing. “Another month, you might have missed me.” She patted her stomach.

“You’re pregnant.” Kate stated the obvious.

The woman gave a weird smile. “I am.”

“Is it your first?” Kate tried to stop comparing the woman who had written the letter to the woman sitting in front of her. She tried to speak with her like she would any other acquaintance she had bumped into.

“Yes. A little girl. We’re thinking of calling her Emma.”

“Beautiful name.” Kate smiled, her eyes falling again on the woman’s stomach. “Is the father—”

“Paul? Gosh, no. I’m remarried now.”

Kate looked at the woman’s ring finger. The sparkler looked brand new. “Congratulations.”

“Paul and I divorced ages ago, not that that stopped him from reaching out. In the years that followed the divorce, he basically stalked me. Then out of nowhere, he stopped. Dropped off the face of the earth it seemed. Part of me wondered what happened to him, but at that point, I didn’t really care. Then I heard about his arrest. I heard about what he did to your family. It all made sense.”

“What do you mean?”

All these months later, Paul latching on to her still didn’t make sense to Kate. How could it make sense to this woman she’d only spoken to for a few minutes?

“He found a new target. You. I reached out because I thought you might need someone to talk to. Not many people have been on the receiving end of Paul’s paranoia. I know from experience it’s not an easy place to be.”

“You say he stopped harassing you because he started following me. I still don’t understand why. Paul and I hadn’t had contact in years. Why develop an obsession with me now? It doesn’t make sense.”

“You were the one that got away.” Angie laughed. “You know, back in the early days, you’re the last person I could have pictured myself having coffee with. If anything, I envied you. Everyone has that one person they don’t end up with who they still think about. You were that person for Paul. He’d casually drop your name, tell stories from college. I’d imagine what you looked like. What you did for a living. If he would have rather ended up with you than me. I know that’s silly, but I was younger, you know? And Paul wasn’t always so crazy.”

“He’d really talk about me like that?”

“I mean, not all the time. I wouldn’t have married him otherwise. I felt secure that I was the newonein his life. But he mentioned you enough that when I found out he’d circled back round to you… well, it didn’t shock me.”

“I’m really baffled. Our relationship wasn’t even that serious. We dated six, maybe seven months.”

“I don’t think it was the relationship itself he couldn’t get over. I think it had more to do with the way it ended.”

“Oh.” My cheeks blushed. “So, he told you about that?”

“He said you left him for one of his frat buddies.”

“Yeah, I did. But come on, we were kids. And Andrew… our relationship was light years away from where I was with Paul. Or anyone else I ever dated. We married each other in under a year.”

“You don’t have to defend yourself to me. I really do get it.”

“I just can’t believe he was so hung up about it.”

“I don’t think much of anything bothered Paul, until it did. It’s like these issues would lay dormant inside him for years, and then they’d rise to the surface and he couldn’t let them go. At least that’s how it was with us.”

“Do you mind me asking, why did the two of you divorce?”

“Paul was my first love. We were so happy together those first few years. More importantly, Paul seemed happy with himself. Nothing like the suspicious person he turned into at the end.” She smiled, then her face slowly fell. “He started acting off once we started trying to get pregnant.”

“He didn’t want a baby?”

“No, he did. We both did. But things weren’t working. We went to a fertility clinic and found out the reason we couldn’t get pregnant was because of him. Incredibly low sperm count. It’s like he refused to hear any of it.”

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