Page 42 of The Soldier's Homecoming

She looked across to see the adjoining table of people looking at them, but she didn’t care. It was so nice to be laughing for the hell of it again.

To not have anything else on her mind other than her husband and his seriously burned mouth.

“Burn your tongue?” she asked as he swallowed an entire glass of water in one gulp.

He glared at her like it was her fault, raising an eyebrow.

“Gee, you think?”

Penny dropped her fork and held her napkin to her mouth. She couldn’t have stopped laughing if she tried.

“How is my burning my mouth funny?” he demanded.

She laughed harder, unable to stop herself. The kind of cheek-aching laugh that she hadn’t enjoyed in forever.

Daniel went to protest again but couldn’t stutter the words out. He started laughing, too. The kind of huge, hiccupping laughs that had tears filling both their eyes.

Her laughter slowed to a sort of hard-to-control gulping, and she was sure everyone in the restaurant must have been watching them by now.

Daniel’s lips were still curved into the cheekiest of grins, still touched with laughter.

“How did we get here, Penny?” His words were solemn but his face was still kind. Happy. Despite his burned flesh.

She almost asked him what he meant, but deep down, she knew.

“Did we grow apart?” she asked him. Although she knew in her heart she hadn’t grown away from him, even through their long absences. “Did you grow apart from me?”

He looked sad, his expression falling. “I don’t want to make excuses, but I think we just spent too long apart. The distance became too great.”

She wanted to be angry with him, she did. Sadness, bitterness about what had happened still circled deep within her belly like a vulture over prey. But she was able to control it.

“Daniel, even if you hadn’t cheated, do you think it would have been easy? Coming home, both of us, and picking up where we left off? Stepping into the life we’d imagined for so long but hadn’t ever really lived?”

The sadness of the smile he gave her told her she was right to ask the question.

After all this time, all those hours and days she’d spent thinking about what had gone wrong, blaming him, when maybe it hadn’t been entirely his fault. When maybe his cheating had simply been the tip of a slow-forming iceberg within their marriage that they’d both ignored.

Every day, week or month they had spent together had al- ways been on limited time. They’d both always had to spend long absences from home, sometimes for months.

She wasn’t going to forgive him, he’d still made vows to her, promised to remain faithful. But…

“Penny, I’ve never stopped loving you, but maybe we did spend too long apart,” he said, voice low as his hand moved slowly across the table. As if he was asking permission to touch her this time, without wanting to say it out loud. She moved her own hand forward, let him rub his finger across hers. “The longest time we ever spent together was when Gabby was born.”

Tears touched her eyes, tickled at the back of her throat.

“So we were always doomed?”

A brightness lit Daniel’s eyes, changed his expression, made him look almost fierce.

“No,” he said. “You’re wrong, Penny.” He shook his head before squeezing her hand tight. “I stuffed this up, it’s still my fault we’ve ended up like this. But maybe we should have been more honest about our feelings, instead of trying to pretend everything was always okay to make the other feel good. When you were away and I was home I never wanted to worry you, never wanted to trouble you, and I’m guessing you felt the same when our roles were reversed.”

She dropped contact with him, picked up her fork again and speared a prawn. Her appetite had fallen away, there was no longer a hunger growling in her stomach, but she still wanted to eat. Didn’t want to waste the beautiful food in front of her

And she needed time to think.

Because he was right.

“I wish everything had gone to plan, Danny.” She slowly ate the prawn, then another, before dunking her bread and eating that, too. “I feel so bitter about my service being extended. I know it’s wrong, that I should just get on with it and focus on finishing this tour, but leaving Gabby behind will be so hard this time. And then I start to wonder if we’d have been okay, if none of this would have happened, if my term had finished up when it was supposed to.”

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