“My home is where you are. You’re not here with me,” he says and then goes back to the picture book.

The reactions play out in my mind, but my mouth stays closed. I could tell him he’s wrong, but he’s not. I could give him false hope, but I won’t. “I don’t know what to say.” Which is the only honest thing I can reply.

He closes the book and I sit next to him. “You can say you’ll try. Maybe you can forgive me, see how much I love you. Are all the years of marriage worth so little to you?”

I look over as tears begin to fall, painting my face with the pain in my heart. “It was never easy for me to let you go. I struggled so much with it. Even at my angriest, I never wished you dead.” Aaron brushes the tears from my face. “But you hurt me so badly. Even if you had only slept with her once, you did it on one of the worst nights of my life. She loved you, Aaron. I could see it in her eyes. She came to your memorial.”

“She’s irrelevant to me. It’s you who has my heart. It’s you who has my world.”

I don’t acknowledge his statement, because right now, I don’t believe him. I know what it’s like to be someone’s world.

The bruise on the side of his face is starting to fade, and my hand reaches up to feel it. I try to remember what his skin felt like beneath my fingers. How his clean shaved face would allow the pads of my fingers to slide down with no resistance. The way our bodies would come alive at each other’s touch. His head leans into my hand as if I’m comforting him. How long did he endure pain? How much was he awake for, and how did he suffer?

“Did they torture you?” I don’t respond to his statement because all I can think about is his marred skin. The way the Aaron I knew is gone in every sense of the word. His body, which was once strong enough to lift me even when I was pregnant, doesn’t look like it could lift much more than Aarabelle.

His eyes close. “I can’t talk about that. I was badly injured and barely holding on. It wasn’t until the end that anything really happened, and then Charlie got word out.”

“But they hurt you. Why did she wait so long?”

Aaron grips my hands. “I think it looks worse. Remember I was in an explosion. Some of these are injuries that didn’t heal right. There was a medic on site of the extraction and he said I’m really lucky. She had a job to do, exposing me would’ve sacrificed everything she’d worked for. Her helping me was a huge risk. I respect her mission. I feel like I need to tell you something.”

I brace myself for whatever it might be. “I don’t know how much more I can take.”

“I’m going to fight for you. I didn’t live for nothing. I’ll be damned if you think I’m going to fade away. You and I are for life, Lee. You, me, and our daughter. We have a lot of adjusting and a lot to work through, but we make sense.”

“I need you to stop and listen to what I’m saying,” I plead hoping he won’t make me say it. I’m battling everything inside of me to not tell him I went to Liam’s last night. I’m fighting to not tell him I want to be there right now. But I know it’ll break him, and no matter how badly he hurt me with Brittany, I know that this will wound him deeper.

Brittany was a nobody in my life. Liam is his friend. The man who went and rescued him and then brought him to me. They share a bond that I never had with her. I try to imagine what it would feel like if I still loved him the way he claims he loves me and it were Reanell. I would be devastated.

“I told Liam the same thing.”

“What?” That stops the words that were forming on my tongue.

When the hell did he talk to Liam? Did Liam tell him we spent the night together? Oh my God, maybe he knows.

“Liam and I talked today. I told him the same thing—I’m not giving up. I asked him to step aside and let us have a chance to fix this.”

The color drains from my face and my throat goes dry. “W-what did you . . . ? Why?”

“Because you’re my wife. Because you’ve been my girl since we were kids. He understands that this isn’t just some relationship. You and I, baby, are the real deal. We don’t quit because someone died.”

My eyes snap open. “I didn’t fall in love with him because you died. That might have been what forced us together, but I love him in a way you can’t understand,” I say and see the way his jaw ticks.

“You can’t convince me you love him more. I know you. I know your heart and your soul. I can see everything you’re feeling before you say it. So I told him to step aside before he destroys us all.”

“How dare you?” I rip my hands from his and stand, needing to dispel some energy. “You don’t get to make that decision for me.”

“We made vows.”

“You broke them.”

“Is this your whole argument? That I broke promises? You did too, babe. You promised to love, honor, obey. You fucking fell in love with someone in under a year. What does that say?”

Anger rips through me as I clench my fists. If I were a violent person, I would’ve punched him by now. “What does it say, Aaron? It says we weren’t happy. It says we had problems. It says that I met someone, fell in love, and moved on. It says that you met someone while we were married and did the same.”

“Well, we’ll see, because Liam and I have an agreement,” he says smugly.

Fuck him.

“I hope he told you to go to hell.”

Aaron stands and walks away. He stops and turns toward me. “He said he would give us time.”

My heart plummets. “Of course he did.” I nearly choke on the words.

“I’m not a fool to see that he loves you. But he knows we have a life, a child, a home.”

Liam and I are going to have words. His text message now makes sense. He’s giving up on us. After all we’ve shared and how far we’ve come. All the promises are lies, just like those of the man who stands in front of me.

“Had,” I say and stare into his eyes. “We had. You keep forgetting what we had is now past tense. Right now, we have a mess to clean up. Do you even want to acknowledge the fact that you were going to leave me for your whore?” I bite back the nasty retort floating around in my mouth.

“I’m not with her now, am I?”

“And if we don’t work out, will you go back to her?”

“Is that what you want?” he asks, watching my reactions.

I huff, “I can’t even believe you. You sit here telling me you love me, spouting off how we have a love no one can ever understand, but you can’t even answer me honestly once. Are you going to admit what your relationship was with her?”

His story has too many holes. There are too many nights I remember being alone or wondering. The times I pushed down my woman’s intuition and smothered it. Ignorance is a beautiful place sometimes, but I don’t plan to live there anymore. The hardest part in all of this is that I’m going to be the one to hurt Aaron. I was supposed to be his lifeline. Just as Liam has become mine.

Then I think about what Aaron said about him stepping aside.

Fuck them both.

I get a say in who I’m with, and they’re both going to learn that quickly.

“Who knows?” Aaron says and then shakes his head. “What is the truth anymore?”