Page 78 of What He Doesn't Know

“I know you better than anyone,” he tried, grabbing for my hands, but I ripped them away.

“YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT ME!”

My chest heaved as I watched him hold up his hands. I’d surprised him, maybe even scared him, and I was glad.

Maybe now he’d wake up.

“Please,” he said, taking a tentative step toward me again. “You said before that I don’t understand, but I’m trying to. You have to help me, Charlie. Help me understand.”

“But that’s just it, isn’t it?” I challenged, stepping right into him. I met his chest with my own, burning his eyes with a gaze so strong I felt it in every nerve of my body. “You don’t want to understand. You want to forget.”

Cameron’s jaw clenched, his nose flaring. “I’m trying.”

“You’retrying?!” I laughed the words as another tear fell down my cheek. “Hiding the baby stuff, that’s trying? Huh? Never saying their names, that’s trying, too? Going right back to work, right back to our normal routine, never asking me if I was okay or if I needed you or if I needed anything atall— that was all trying to you?”

I trembled as emotion surged through me like a tidal wave, pummeling every rational thought out of my head.

“Let me guess — cheating on me? Finding comfort in another woman while your wife had night terrors in the bed you shared with her, was thattrying, too?”

Cameron broke at that, tears welling in his eyes as he reached for my hand, but I tore it away, storming to the bed for my coat.

“Charlie, I never—”

“Don’t!” I warned, spinning on my heel. “Don’t you dare finish that sentence, not when you know it’s a lie.”

He clamped his mouth shut again, and I saw the flash of helplessness in his eyes.

Good. Now he knew how it felt.

“I’m leaving.”

“Where are you going?”

“Out.”

He lunged for me, wrapping his hand around my wrist and whipping me back around to face him. His eyes searched mine, his jaw set.

“Please, don’t do this.”

“Do what?”

“Don’t go to him.”

He pinned me with his pleading gaze, and a cold flood of guilt soaked me to the bones.

I tried to find my husband in the man who stood before me, in the eyes glossed over with unshed tears, in the hand wrapped around my wrist. I tried to find the boy who had shook the first time he took me to bed, who had danced with me in the rain the night he asked me to marry him, who had held my hand through every beautiful, agonizing minute of the birth of our children.

But I couldn’t see him.

I only saw a stranger, one I didn’t want to pretend with any longer.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

And with those two words, we both knew it was over.

I pulled until he let my hand go free, along with the tears he’d been holding back.

Reese