He wasn’t going anywhere in particular. He had juice boxes. Extra diapers. Vanilla wafers and a couple of Disney movies downloaded on the tablet. And he was driving. On every single street in Santa Raquel.
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sp; “Sha sha!” Caleb called out, kicking the back of the seat in front of him. Max had already seen his son’s favorite restaurant. He was the one who disapproved of feeding Caleb fast food.
But he knew that Meri did. Once a week.
She’d been gone more than a week now.
And before he really thought about what he was doing, Dr. Maxwell Bennet found himself in the drive-thru for the second time in fewer than seven days.
He strained to see inside the joint. Maybe Meri was there. In honor of Caleb. Clinging to pieces of the life she’d left behind.
One thing was for certain.
Meri was here someplace. At least she had been as recently as two days ago.
And he had the rest of the day off.
He couldn’t sit at home knowing that she might be out there somewhere in the same city. Even if he just had a glimpse of her—one second to see the bounce in her step, or a smile on her face—he would feel better.
Hell, just being out driving, knowing she was there somewhere, made him feel better.
And if Steve Smith thought that Max’s being hopelessly in love meant he was weak, he had another think coming. He was going to find the bastard.
And have him put away permanently.
The guy was never going to have a chance to bother Meri again. Ever.
* * *
JENNA COULDN’T SLEEP Thursday night. And couldn’t stay cooped up in her room, either.
Caleb was young enough that he wouldn’t even remember her, wouldn’t need to be hurt by her past life, or her abandonment. If his father was providing him with a new mother, she wasn’t going to get in the way of that.
She wanted to, though. So badly that it was eating her alive. She wanted to order Chantel Harris to get away from her men. To stay away.
She wanted to go home.
Instead she quietly made her way out to the living room she’d yet to use except as a corridor from the front door to the kitchen or her bedroom.
She wasn’t going to turn on the television. Didn’t want to disturb her housemates.
But there was a library out there—a collection of fiction—as there was in every bungalow on the premises. She used to love to read.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d picked up a book. Sometime after her marriage to Steve, but when?
He hadn’t liked her reading, she remembered. He’d said that her reading made him feel lonely, had tried to distract her with butterfly kisses any time he’d seen her with a book in the early days.
Later there had been fights. He’d resented her time with her romance novels. He’d said the books were filling her head with dangerous notions about women’s roles, giving her false expectations of relationships. They were coming between them, ruining their marriage. The books were changing her.
Standing in the living room, perusing shelves of novels that were unfamiliar to her, a tiny bit of anticipation started to grow within her.
She couldn’t remember making a conscious decision to give up reading. But she remembered feeling guilty for wanting the escape.
Remembered sitting in the bathroom, pretending to do her business so she could finish a book after Steve got home.
She remembered the broken wrist she’d ended up with the time she’d pulled one of her novels out of the drawer in her desk, looking for an excerpt to use as proof of an example of something she was trying to explain to him. She’d long since forgotten the conversation. It had had something to do with differences between men and women, a statement a character had made that resonated with her. But she remembered that he’d grabbed for the book, he’d said, in attempt to understand, to share it with her, and had grabbed her wrist instead.