Aaron somehow lived and is home.

He’s holding our baby.

“God, she couldn’t be any more perfect,” he laughs and looks at me.

I sniff and try to rein myself in. “Yeah, she really is perfect.”

“You look just like your mommy.” He bounces her and wipes his eyes. “I dreamt of you. I wondered if you were okay,” Aaron talks to Aarabelle, and I have to take a few steps back.

Father and daughter are united.

“What’s her birthday?” he asks.

“August ninth.” She looks at me, and I walk over to them. I place my hand on her back while she touches his face.

Aaron just stares at her. Aarabelle squirms again and begins to fuss.

“She’s almost one. She just wants to move around,” I explain, reaching for her. “Do you want to go for a walk? She loves the beach.” I offer the olive branch to him. The confliction on how to handle this entire thing is too great to make things any harder.

His eyes soften, and he nods. “That would be great.”

I lean down, place Aara on the chair, and then remove her shoes. “You’ll need to hold her other hand. She’s a little unsteady.”

Aaron holds his hand out to her, and she wraps her fingers around his. With me on the other side, we begin to head toward the water. Mother, father, and daughter. It’s a picture perfect vision of how our lives could’ve been. My thoughts wander to the man who’s been at my side the last year. How would he feel about this?

“Lee?” Aaron asks as we walk along the water line, breaking me from my reflections.

“Yes?”

“I really do love you.” Aaron’s voice doesn’t waver.

“Mama!” Aara yells demanding my attention. I’m grateful for the distraction, because I don’t know how to respond. Do I love him? I’ll always love him. But because of Liam, my life this last year has been different.

“She’s getting hungry.”

“Okay,” Aaron says then looks away. “I should probably lie down. I’m exhausted.”

We start to walk back to our home, but I don’t speak. The silence says everything.

After I get Aarabelle to bed, and Aaron hovers watching everything I do, we both head toward the living room. It’s the first time we’re completely alone. I don’t know how I’m going to last days without talking about all the crap between us.

He sits on the couch, but he’s not relaxed. The muscles in his arms are coiled tight. His head rests on the back of the seat, but everything in his body shows his distress.

“Aaron? Are you okay?”

Immediately his eyes fly open. “Hey,” his voice is like ice. “I’m fine. Just got lost for a moment.”

I’m a fairly empathetic person, but how to navigate this is beyond my understanding. I have no idea what it’s like to be held captive. I don’t know how someone can endure that and resume their old life. Especially one that everyone has spent the last year moving on from, so that it doesn’t even exist anymore. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Aaron shakes his head. “I can’t yet. I’m trying to figure out a way to make it through this. I came home to a world I don’t have a place in. I lost you, my house, my life.”

“I know you want to give it a few days. I don’t think we can. How are we supposed to sit here and have all this just hanging? It’s putting us both on edge.”

Aaron shifts forward so that his forearms rest on his knees. “I don’t know. I’m in agony, Lee. It feels like you wish I’d stayed gone, and I don’t know how to feel about that. I’m your husband.”

“You were dead. You were gone. I had to live.”

“I fucking know that.” Aaron stands while his eyes focus on flag sitting on the mantle. “I see it in your eyes though, baby.”

“Don’t,” I warn. “You told me to move on, you made me promise. You can’t hate me or blame me for doing what you asked.”

My heartbeat falters as he kneels while gripping my hands. “I can’t. I’ve loved you my whole life. I can’t look at you right now and think of my fucking best friend touching you.”

I pull my hands back. He’s suffered and I know this. I can’t begin to imagine what the last year has brought him, and then to add insult to injury, I wasn’t here waiting for him. “You ruined me. I trusted you, and then to find out you had an affair . . .”

Aaron’s gaze drops, and he sucks in a breath. “I know. It was never like that.”

“No?”

He looks back up as I search for the man I once loved. Not because I want to be with him, but because I need to know he’s there. I implore him to tell me the truth. If he lies, there will never be a way for us to move forward.

“I was the broken one. I needed you so much, and all you cared about was getting pregnant. We didn’t talk if it wasn’t surrounding infertility. We didn’t touch if it wasn’t a part of your schedule. I couldn’t have sex with you because it would diminish my counts. I hated coming home. I volunteered to go on missions just because I needed a fucking break.”

His words cut me deeper than I ever imagined. They tear through any whole part of me that remained. He and he alone made these decisions for our family. My emotions and my needs were secondary in every way. I had to go through hell because he was too much of a chickenshit to fight. “You volunteered when I was already pregnant?”

“No, the ones before. When I would go on those trips, it reminded me of how it felt to be in charge of something. I failed at every fucking turn. Being your husband was exhausting.”

“So she was just some way to escape the horrors of being my husband?” I ask with disparagement dripping from my tongue.

“Natalie, it was a way to escape the horrors of not being man enough. It wasn’t about you. Don’t you get that?” He waits, but I don’t say a word. “It was me who wasn’t able to give you, my wife, the woman I would’ve laid my own life down for, a baby. I was inadequate on every level. She didn’t see that in me. She saw the strong, virile male who wasn’t a failure. I needed her to take the pain away.”

“Was she worth it?”

“It wasn’t about her.”

“Would you go back and do it again?” I ask with raw pain drowning my words.

Aaron looks away and then back again. “She gave me something you weren’t willing to give anymore. She looked at me like a man. She looked at me like a hero. In her eyes, I was someone worth loving. I needed that. I deserved that.”

“Would you do it again?” I ask again.

“I don’t know!”

I look at him, and he knows me well enough to see the hurt, anger, and despair in my eyes. He knows that was the end of any chance he had.

He just lost me.

Completely.

“Fuck!” I scream and throw the glass against the wall. It’s been forty-eight hours since I last saw her face. Two fucking days. I haven’t slept. I can’t eat. I want to rush back to her house and take her and Aarabelle. I need her like I need air.

But I have to stay away.

He’s my best friend.