“I gave up two years for you.” Her voice was shaking.
“Do you understand what that is, at thirty-eight?
I turned down a regional job in Phoenix in September.
For you.
And I accepted everything — every deployment, every cancelled weekend, every photograph of a woman I never met, every single mood that child brought into that house—”
And there it was.
“Accepted,” I said.
“What?”
“You said accepted.”
She looked at me.
“That’s the whole thing,” I said.
“You’ve never once said you loved her.
In two years.
Not one time, to me, about my daughter.
You said she was sweet.
You said she was doing well.
You said she was a lot, twice.
You accepted her.” I picked up my cover off the shelf where I’d put it.
“You were never going to be her stepmother.
You were going to be a person who tolerated her until you had enough standing to stop.”
“That is an appalling thing to say to me.”
“It is,” I agreed.
“It’s also the only explanation that fits what you told her in that room.”
Pamela pulled her engagement ring off and put it down on a metal shelf next to a stack of folded tablecloths, which is where it stayed for four days until the venue manager found it and called me.
