Phoenix (28 page)

As soon as Jack showed up in Natalie’s office, he knew the session would be a catastrophe. Caroline was already sitting in a chair and didn’t look too happy, but the doctor smiled and beckoned him to take the seat next to his wife. Oh, that would go over well.

“Thank you for joining us, Commander,” she said.

Caroline scowled, not acknowledging his arrival. Yes. This was going to be bad. Hard to believe that the woman sitting next to him had been so civil during lunch only a few days ago.

“Happy to do it,” he said, trying to sound as cheerful as possible. His wife looked like she wanted to run out of the room. A tempting idea indeed.

“Let’s talk about your marriage,” Natalie said.

He had to give Dr. Haddad credit. She didn’t waste any time. If things were going to blow up it may as well be sooner rather than later. Jack heard Caroline suck in a hard breath.

Natalie smiled at her. “Let me guess. You don’t like the topic?”

“Not particularly.”

“Did you think I wanted the two of you to come in here to talk about something else?”

Caroline plucked at a stray stitch on her sleeve. “I guess not.”

Jack twisted the heel of his boot into the carpet. “Maybe this isn’t such a great idea. I don’t want to make Caroline uncomfortable.”

She turned to look at him. “Nice of you to think of that now. What do you think these therapy sessions have been like for me?”

Another hit. He’d sustain a lot of those over the next hour. “I hope they’ve been beneficial,” he said.

“They have,” Natalie assured him. “She needs a few minutes sometimes to get used to the office environment. Right, Caroline?”

Caroline rolled her eyes. “Right.”

Natalie zeroed in on her. “You promised me you’d try, remember?”

“I remember,” she said, jabbing a thumb at Jack. “But he should go first.”

Natalie smiled. “Fair enough. Let’s talk about what you wrote down. Did you both bring your assignments?”

Caroline shoved a piece of paper toward her and Jack did the same. “Did you think we wouldn’t?” she asked Natalie.

“I wasn’t sure. You two can be stubborn.” Natalie read each paper before frowning at Caroline. “Seriously?”

“You’re displeased with our answers?” Caroline asked.

Natalie folded the paper in half. “I’ll deal with yours later. Jack, really?”

Dammit. So much for avoidance. He should have known this was coming. The wall hangings were completely captivating. Maybe he could focus on them for a while. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“We’ve talked about this,” Natalie said.

She’d wanted him to be honest, hadn’t she? Jack glanced over at his wife then back at the wall. “Doesn’t mean it’s resolved.”

“What did you write down?” Caroline asked.

“‘I will never overcome who I used to be,’” Natalie read.

Caroline frowned at him. “Really, Jack?”

It sounded a lot worse when Natalie read it out loud. “I don’t need both of you laying into me,” he said.

“Yours isn’t much better, Caroline.” Natalie picked up her sheet of paper and unfolded it. “‘I will never live up to who he thinks I am.’”

Maybe that was a clue as to why she had that scowl on her face. “You’re one to talk. Really, Caroline?” he mimicked.

Natalie rubbed her forehead. “We may need more than one session for this.”

“No way,” Caroline said. “I agreed to one. That’s it.”

“You made it sound like you wanted to participate,” Jack said.

“Do you?” she asked.

Fuck no.
“Yes. Even if it makes me uncomfortable.”

She crossed her arms. “Fine. Let’s get this over with.”

Natalie folded the papers up and put them in a drawer. “For two people who project such an aura of outward confidence, you are both incredibly insecure.”

Jack smiled a little. No matter how difficult the session might be, he was relatively confident that Natalie would call them both out. Probably for good reason. “Aren’t most politicians insecure?”

“I’m starting to think so. Would you agree with that, Caroline?”

“We’re insecure,” Caroline said.

“But you were secure in your relationship. Right?”

“I guess.”

Short answers. Uncertain answers. Surely her self-doubt hadn’t overridden her ability to see reality. What the hell? “Of course we were,” Jack said. “I never questioned Caroline’s feelings for me.”

“Caroline?” Natalie asked.

Caroline stared at her feet.

“Okay,” Natalie said softly. “We’ll deal with that later.”

“Don’t do that,” Jack broke in. “You know how I felt about you. How I still feel.”

“Jack, don’t worry about it. We’ll get to her.”

Did Caroline think he didn’t love her? Even after all the comments she’d made in anger, could she really believe that? “But she needs to know.” Jack touched her shoulder. “You were everything I wanted in a wife. You still are.”

She shifted away from him, wrapping her arms around herself. He turned to Natalie. “I don’t know what else to do.”

“Let her be. Caroline, are you willing to listen and maybe answer a few questions?”

It took a long time for her to nod her head. Too long. “I guess,” she said. “I just don’t want to talk about that. Not yet.”

“Okay,” Natalie said. “We won’t. Let’s pick another topic. What was one of the more difficult parts of your relationship?”

Oh, that seemed like a
much
better idea. He hoped Natalie knew what she was doing with this. Jack coughed. “Things were pretty good, all things considered.”

“Caroline, remember what we talked about last week? Maybe we should deal with that.”

“Jack didn’t like my best friend,” Caroline said.

“Has that been bothering you?”

“A little.”

“Is that true, Jack?”

Exactly how much had Caroline told Dr. Haddad? This discussion was heading down a bad road. A very bumpy road indeed. Jack rubbed the back of his neck. “For the most part, I guess.”

“How did that make you feel, Caroline?” Natalie asked.

“Lousy. They’d fight in front of me all the time.”

“Did you ever tell them how it made you feel?”

“My feelings didn’t affect their behavior.”

He had to nip this in the bud. “Caroline-”

Natalie cut him off. “It’s still her turn.”

“No,” Caroline said. “It’s okay. I think that’s about it.”

She looked like she was about to cry. Jack almost wished for the scowl to return. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I shouldn’t have given in to it. It was a two-way street and I would tell myself to walk away but sometimes Christine would goad me into something and I’d keep going.”

Her anger blew up on him so quickly it almost knocked the air from his lungs. “Don’t blame it on Chrissy.”

“I’m not. But she had a sharp tongue and she knew to hit just where it hurt.”

“We all have that ability.”

A funny thing for his wife to say, since she’d been honing her skills on him as of late. “I’d like to think you and I have done a better job of controlling it,” he said.

Natalie cleared her throat. “Jack, we talked about this before, but Caroline deserves to know. Why did you write down what you did before the session?”

“I-” Dammit. He’d been set up. “You altered the course of the conversation on purpose. You knew about my difficulties with Christine.”

“I did.”

“I don’t think Caroline needs to know that.”

“Know what?” Caroline asked.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Apparently it does, if Natalie mentioned it.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“We’re in a therapy session, Jack. Were you planning on letting me say all the hard stuff?”

Maybe she hadn’t lost her sense of reason. Maybe it would help if he told her. Maybe she’d open up too. Or maybe he’d regret even touching the topic. He dived in anyway. “I was a very different man several years ago. Running for Congress hadn’t changed my behavior. I used a lot of women and treated many of them like shit. But then I met Caroline.” He saw Caroline close her eyes. She’d always hated talking about his past, with good reason. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s not like Natalie doesn’t already suspect this.”

“Where did you two meet?” Natalie asked.

“At a New Year’s Party.” Jack smiled. “At Christine’s, actually. I hadn’t wanted to go. Wasn’t sure why I’d been invited, didn’t know who would be there. I thought it would be a good start to the new term. I didn’t realize that Caroline was the one who insisted Christine invite me.”

“Why was that?” Natalie asked. “She didn’t even know you.”

“That’s true,” Jack said. “But she’d said…a few bad things about me during the campaign.”

“Terrible things,” Caroline said. “I gave a rotten speech. You’re being too forgiving.”

“It’s my point of view. I’m not going to make it sound worse than it was.” Jack turned back to Natalie. “Almost everything she said was true, but that didn’t stop me from taking offense. But she wanted to apologize to me. I blew her off the first time she came up to me. I was a supreme asshole. In other words, I was myself.” He shook his head. “That’s the worst part. I was completely myself the first time I met her, and all she was trying to do was make amends. I basically told her to fuck off, grabbed my coat, and was about to leave but Robert Allen stopped me on my way out the door.” He turned away from Caroline, not wanting to see the expression on her face.

“What happened with the Speaker?” Natalie asked.

Should he keep going? “He was angry,” Jack said. “He’d been so pleasant when I’d met him earlier and his mood had totally changed. He grabbed my arm, hard enough to hurt. And he said, ‘You’re not allowed to leave until you accept that woman’s apology.’ I played it off and the man snapped. He made it clear that the only reason he’d endorsed me was because Caroline had asked him to. That I was a worthless, superficial candidate who shouldn’t have won, but he’d gone out on a limb for this woman because of who she was to him. And then he said, ‘She’s had a rough year.’” Jack cleared his throat. So help him, he had to keep his shit together. “‘You don’t know what she’s been through. You find Representative Gerard and you let her apologize, but you’d damn well better apologize first.’”

He mustered up the strength to look over at his wife. Caroline had her face in her hands. He didn’t have the guts to speak to her. Not right now.

“Do you want to say anything?” Natalie asked her.

“No,” she whispered. “Keep going.”                           

“He was really yelling at me,” Jack said. “I wondered why no one else was paying attention. Maybe they ignored it because of who he was. Then Christine came over. Her yelling at me was worse than the Speaker. She made me feel two inches tall.”

He paused again, waiting. Natalie didn’t say anything, just motioned with her hand. Was this entire session going to be a giant Jack monologue? If so, he’d been completely misled.

“They were quite upset with me, and made it clear that neither one of them would even speak to me if they’d had their druthers.” His voice broke again. Fuck it all. “But it was so obvious from their tone how much they loved Caroline. I couldn’t imagine who she must be to warrant that kind of devotion.” He turned to Caroline. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I know how much they meant to you and it makes me so sad that you don’t have them anymore. I-”

She returned his gaze, but only for a moment. “Please don’t.”

Now he’d gone and made her more upset. But he needed to see it through. The ending mattered most of all. “After the two of them were through, I was so ashamed that I was about to walk out the door, but Christine’s husband came up to me with a bottle of wine and told me to get my ass upstairs. Tom was the only one who didn’t yell at me.”

Jack dug his heel even deeper into the carpet. “When I think of what might have happened if I’d left that party,” he whispered. “How close I came to losing out on the life I was able to have. I wouldn’t have said two words to Caroline once we were sworn in. She wouldn’t have tried to apologize again because of how I’d treated her. I guess for once I made the right choice.”

Natalie turned to Caroline. “Would you have talked to him?”

Caroline didn’t look at either one of them. “I would have been cordial. But I wouldn’t have initiated anything. I don’t take rejection well.”

Jack laughed. “She can’t handle rejection and she doesn’t like compliments. She’s really the complete package.”

“It’s not funny,” Caroline said, but Jack saw the smile tugging at her lips. When she realized he was watching her she looked away again.

“What happened after you found Caroline at the party?” Natalie asked.

It didn’t matter that they both were on the verge of a total emotional collapse. That they’d lost their way and might never return again. That night was one of the best memories he had. Of her. Of them.