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.”He spoke of the hell as though it were over.She wanted to correct him.It wasn’t over.Sometimes she wondered if it ever would be.He turned his gaze to her.She wanted to look away, but couldn’t.“Can I say just one thing?” he asked.“Of course,” she said thinly.His hard mouth tipped into a smile.He touched a fingertip to her cheek, brushing at a spot of wetness and then pushing back a tendril of her hair.Chloe instinctively wanted to shrink away, but something, she wasn’t sure what, held her fast.“You did the right thing,” he said huskily.“By getting Jeremy out of it, I mean.”A burning sensation came up the back of her throat, and she was afraid her eyes might fill with tears again.“Normally, I have little if any respect for people who end a marriage over the illness of a spouse, but your situation was extraordinary.You did the right thing, Chloe.Children aren’t just a gift; they’re a God-given responsibility, and in cases of abuse, a mother should never—and I do mean never—let anything else come first, not even her husband.”Tears did fill her eyes then.“Yes, well, that was a lesson I took a while learning.After Roger came home from the hospital, I stayed for almost five months, hoping he’d get better, that the—” She gulped to steady her voice.“You can’t stop hoping, you know? I told myself there might be postsurgery swelling, or that maybe the incisions deep inside hadn’t healed completely.He was such a good man before the accident, a wonderful man.We had a solid marriage.” She pressed her fingertips to her temples.“I was conditioned, I guess—to think in terms of always.It was so hard for me to end it, and because it was, I waited too long.”“Five short months,” he corrected.He caught her chin on the edge of his hand and tipped her face up again so he could look into her eyes.“Five months, Chloe.If he was a good man before the accident, you owed him that much.What kind of woman waltzes out on an injured husband without giving him time to heal? And there’s not a damned thing wrong with being slow to give up on what was once a great marriage.Did you stay after the milk incident?”“No, he—” She panted for oxygen.“He was choking him, and I couldn’t get him off.I knew then.” She averted her face, breaking the physical contact between them because it unsettled her so.“I filed for divorce the next morning.That didn’t entirely stop Roger from disrupting our lives—thus my decision to move here—but at least it was never Jeremy in his line of fire again.”He nodded.“So, there, you see? When push came to shove, you jumped ship.Stop beating up on yourself.”“It’s hard not to.When I see what it’s done to my son, it’s almost impossible not to.”“You did your best.Jeremy’s out of it now.That’s the bottom line.You didn’t stay with his father and make him live like that for eighteen years.”The bitterness in his voice brought Chloe’s head around.He met her regard evenly, his face set in grim lines.“My mother had her reasons for staying,” he whispered.“I don’t blame her, and I never will.But I can tell you this.I’d be carting around a lot less baggage if she had divorced him when I was Jeremy’s age.”Having said that, he turned and went back inside the house, leaving her alone to digest what he’d said and to gather her composure.She fleetingly wondered how he had managed to zero in on the things that tormented her most.Even more bewildering, he’d succeeded in making her feel better.Jeremy was still on the love seat with Rowdy when Chloe reentered the family room.The child gave her a shamefaced look.“I’m sorry, Mommy.”“For what, sweetie?”“For telling ’bout Daddy.It’s s’posed to be our secret, and I forgot.”Searching her son’s troubled gaze, Chloe had cause to wonder if her decision to make their past a taboo subject with strangers wasn’t yet another count against her.That was a worry for later, though.Ben entered the room just then.After taking in Jeremy’s downcast expression, he glanced questioningly at Chloe.“My mom’s still asleep.After lunch, she generally naps for two or three hours.I was wondering, would you and Jeremy like to play hooky with me and take a walk?” He gestured toward the kitchen.“You got so much done this morning, I can do the chores this afternoon, no problem.”Chloe checked her watch.“Oh, I—”“About a mile from here, there’s a pretty little creek, and I spotted a beaver dam there the other afternoon.I thought Jeremy might enjoy seeing it.”“Can we, Mom?” Jeremy asked in a stage whisper.“Please?”Chloe sighed.Her son knew just the right note of pleading to inject into his voice.She also knew that Ben had suggested this outing to cheer the child up, and she had to admit it was probably a good plan.“It’s really not that far,” Ben assured her.“We can easily make it there and back, leaving you plenty of time to get to work.”“Well.” After the conversation with him on the deck, she would have preferred to go home where she could lick her wounds in private, but she decided that would be selfish.A walk might be just what Jeremy needed to push the unpleasant memories from his mind.“Okay.Why not? I’ve never seen a beaver dam.”For the next hour, Ben gave them a tour of his world.As they trailed behind him through the forest, he stopped occasionally to point out sights Chloe and her son might have overlooked.“Look there, Jeremy,” he said, gesturing at the top of a dead tree.“See that nest? It belongs to a bald eagle.”Just as he spoke, the mother bird swooped down to perch on the untidy collection of grass and small branches.Chloe would have sworn the eagle looked directly at them.Beautiful with a reddish-brown body and snow-white head, the raptor lifted her wings and did a half-turn, as though to show off for them.“Oh,” Chloe said softly, her skin tingling with awe.“She’s fabulous, Ben.The bald eagle is our national bird, Jeremy.”Jeremy stood there, head back, expression solemn.He kept his voice hushed.“Does she have babies up there?”“Probably,” Ben replied.“And because she does, we really shouldn’t linger.No point in making her nervous.”He struck off through the trees again, moving with a fluid grace that Chloe found amazing in so large a man.He was, she thought nonsensically, as sturdy as the huge Ponderosa pines that defined the terrain.Soon Chloe heard the rushing sound of a stream
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