Page 39 of Between the Shady Groves
They hardly ever drove anywhere together. Except church, when he went.
He wanted to take hold of her hand, but he wasn’t sure where they stood. She…hadn’t said that it was okay for him to be with her. She had left him, after all.
He needed to ask.
The waitress showed them to their seats, and they ordered their drinks and browsed the menus. He waited until after they had both ordered the special and the waitress had delivered their drinks before he folded his hands in front of him and leaned forward.
“I guess I might have been getting the cart before the horse. You…left me. I’m not sure where that leaves me in our relationship. Do I have the right to hold your hand? Have you changed your mind about leaving me? Where are we? Because… I guess I need you to help me navigate the relationship-type things, because where I can see the danger in the stray dog easily, I don’t understand relationships very well.”
There. That was as honest as he could be. He wanted to do it right, he just wasn’t sure what that was.
“I guess… I guess if you don’t want me to leave, I won’t. But I think that we should have the talk that we should have had before I left. Instead of leaving, I should have calmly and rationally gone to you and tried to talk to you about this.”
“I thought about that. I’m not sure I would have listened. I think that maybe you did the only thing that you could have done to get my attention, and that was to walk out. If you had just talked before you walked, it wouldn’t have caught my attention.”
She sighed and looked over at the window, which faced an alley.
Then she looked back at him. “No. I know you would have listened. I could have asked you to hold me, and you would have. I could have asked you to take a day off work and do something with me, and you might have groused about it, but you probably would have done it.”
“But I wouldn’t have liked it. I wouldn’t have understood. I wouldn’t have seen how desperate you were. How serious you were. How much you felt like I didn’t care or love you. I don’t recommend doing it again, and I definitely wouldn’t recommend it to any other woman, but I think I needed this as a wake-up call.”
She nodded, but she didn’t smile in triumph, even though he had basically told her that she was right.
Lauren wasn’t like that. She was sweet and funny, kind and considerate, not the kind of person who gloated or liked to rub anything in anyone’s face. Instead, she’d go out of her way to avoid hurting someone. That was the woman he’d fallen in love with.
That was the woman he was still in love with.
“Okay, just so I know I understand, we’re still together, but we’re working through some things.” He lifted his brows, wondering if he’d got it right.
“That sounds good. Yes. Working through some things.”
“So how do you feel about me selling the business?”
“I can’t believe it, to be honest.”
The waitress came with their meals, chicken and gravy and mashed potatoes and a vegetable on the side, and it smelled delicious. Maybe even homemade.
He waited until the waitress left, and he had said grace, before he picked up his fork and then said, “So you’re okay with it?”
“I don’t really want you to have to sacrifice everything. I mean, I’d love to be able to run my mom’s bakery, but it’s kind of impossible for you to have a business in Cincinnati and me to have a bakery in Raspberry Ridge. So we need to figure out who gets what they want and who gives up what they want.”
“I guess that seems obvious to me. We’ve been married for ten years, and in those ten years, I’ve been building my business the entire time. I’ve got what I wanted. It’s your turn.”
He didn’t really mean that as a consolation. He meant that sincerely. He’d built his business into a multimillion-dollar thing, and while he highly suspected that George was not going to be able to come up with the money, he thought that it wouldn’t be hard to sell to an investment group. The business had been profitable for the last six years, and before that, it had been borderline.
He had jobs lined up to last him the rest of the year, and his reputation was known all around Cincinnati. Maybe he was mistaken, but it felt like he was sitting on, if not a gold mine, a nice little nest egg.
“I don’t want you to have to give it up.”
“I’m sorry that you ever thought that you were in competition with the business. You’re not. You mean far, far more to me than the business ever will. I’m willing to give it up. I want to, actually. I like Raspberry Ridge. Matteo’s growing on me too.”
“You hated Matteo,” she said dryly.
“I don’t hate Matteo. I only hated Matteo when my wife was laughing with him and not laughing with me.”
She closed her mouth and stared at him for a moment before he looked away. It was the truth. He didn’t hate Matteo, he just hated himself for not being able to make his wife laugh and for another man to be able to do it instead.
“Can we think about it?”
