The Liar by Nora Roberts Page A

me to say Richard was an asshole? There I can oblige you, as it turns out he was. I had the bad judgment to marry an asshole. Is that better?”
    “Some.” He kept his gaze level on hers. “Did he ever hit you?”
    “No. God, no.” Stunned, she lifted her hands. “He never touched me that way. I swear.”
    “You didn’t come back for funerals, for births, for weddings. Clay’s, you made Clay’s, but barely. How’d he keep you away?”
    “It’s complicated, Forrest.”
    “Simplify it.”
    “He said no.” Temper began to simmer and burn inside her. “Is that simple enough?”
    He stirred himself to lift his shoulders, let them fall. “You didn’t always take no for an answer so easy.”
    “If you think it was easy, you’re wrong.”
    “I need to know why you looked so tired, so thin, so beaten when you came home for what seemed like ten minutes at Christmas.”
    “Maybe because I’d come to realize I’d married an asshole, and one who didn’t even like me very much.”
    Temper hammered against guilt with guilt slapping against fatigue.
    “Because I’d come to realize before I found myself a widow and my child without a father that I didn’t love him, not even a little. And didn’t like him much, either.”
    Tears clogged her throat, threatening to burst through the dam she’d so laboriously built to hold them back.
    “But you didn’t come home?”
    “No, I didn’t come home. Maybe I married an asshole because I was an asshole myself. Maybe I couldn’t figure out how to pull myself and Callie out of the muddy mess I’d made. Can you leave it at that for now? Can that be enough for now? If I have to talk about all the rest of it now, I think I’ll break into pieces.”
    He walked over, sat beside her. “Maybe I’ll move annoyed down to mildly irked.”
    Tears swam and spilled; she couldn’t help it. “Mildly irked’s progress.” She turned, pressed her face to the side of his shoulder. “I missed you so much. Missed you like an arm or a leg or half my heart.”
    “I know.” He draped an arm around her. “I missed you the same. It’s why it’s taken close to five years to get down to mildly irked. I got questions.”
    “You always have questions.”
    “Like why you drove down from Philadelphia in a minivan that’s older than Callie, and with a couple of suitcases and a bunch of packing boxes and what looks like a big-ass flat-screen TV.”
    “That’s for Daddy.”
    “Huh. Show-off. I got more questions yet, but I’ll wait on them. I’m hungry and I want a beer—I want a couple of beers. And if I don’t get you down there shortly, Mama’s bound to come looking, then she’ll skin my ass for making you cry.”
    “I need some time to settle myself before the questions start. I need to breathe for a while.”
    “This is a good place for it. Come on, let’s get down there.”
    “Okay.” She got up with him. “I’m going to be mildly irked with you for being mildly irked with me.”
    “That’s fair.”
    “You can work some of that off getting Clay to help you bring in that TV, and then help figure out where it needs to go.”
    “It needs to go in my apartment, but I’ll just come over here and watch it, and eat all Daddy’s food.”
    “That’s fair, too,” she decided.
    “I’m working on fair.” He kept an arm draped around her shoulders. “You know Emma Kate’s back.”
    “What? She is? But I thought she was up in Baltimore.”
    “She was up until about six months ago. I guess more like seven now. Her daddy had that accident last year, fell off Clyde Barrow’s roof, busted himself up pretty good.”
    “I know about that. I thought he was doing okay.”
    “Well, she came back to take care of him—you know how her mama is.”
    “Helpless as a baby duck with no feet.”
    “That’s the truth. She stayed a couple months. He was in and out of the hospital, in physical therapy, and her being a nurse, she could help more than most. The guy she’s hooked