“We’ll sit out here. I’ll bring it out.”

When he went in, she brushed herself off, stowed her gloves. After climbing up to the veranda, she settled into one of the deep, wide chairs with the thick navy cushions he’d chosen, let out a long, end-of-day sigh.

It felt damn good to just sit. Even better to just sit, admire the view, smell the fresh mulch.

When he came out, handed her a glass, she tapped it to his bottle. “You did good on the furniture out here. Comfortable, casual class.”

“I like it.” He sat in the chair beside hers, gestured to the view. “Now I’m king of all I survey.”

“Damn right. How’s the lawyering business?”

“Chugging along.”

And satisfying, he mused. More satisfying than he’d expected.

“I’ve got myself an intern for the summer, and she’s working out. She’s smart. I don’t have to ask you how business is going. I’m in the middle of it. You were right about the wall.”

“Yeah, I was.”

He just shook his head. “Not just the aesthetics, which have yet to be fully realized, but from the relief on my sister’s face when they all came up for a cookout and she saw what was going in.”

“Good. And how’d that go? The cookout?”

“All I had to do was provide the burgers, dogs, drinks. Since Emily and Britt made everything else, it went just fine. So, the ex-husband.”

Brows lifted, Darby glanced over. “That’s some segue.”

“Inside my head, it was. What’s the story, or is it off-limits?”

“If it was off-limits, I’d have said a line drive broke my nose.” She shrugged. “Okay. I’ve just finished college, and there he is. Great-looking guy, a friend of a friend of a friend I meet at a party. Trent Willoughby.”

“Willoughby. Sense and Sensibility.”

“Points for you knowing Austen.”

“Big readers in my family,” he told her.

“Yeah, mine, too. So Willoughby—and he’s just that handsome and charming and romantic. Trust-fund kid, but I don’t hold that against him. He’s started up his own advertising firm with two of his college buddies. We talk, some sparks, and since he’s a friend of a friend of a friend, I figured sure, we can exchange numbers.”

“I guess he called.”

“The very next day. He hadn’t moved on me at the party, kept it easy. So he says his family has a box at Camden Yards, and the O’s are playing at home, would I like to go? I go, because who wouldn’t? If you’ve never watched a game from a box, you’re missing something. I also discovered he knew next to nothing about baseball, but I found that endearing, right? He’d made the date to please me. Sweet.

“One thing led to another, blah, blah, blah. I met his family, he met my mother. Everything was smooth. We dated for six months, and all I saw was this terrific guy, considerate, interesting, crazy about me, romantic. He takes me to Paris—I mean freaking Paris—for a long weekend.”

With a half laugh, she sipped more beer. “I’d never been out of the country, never, in fact, been west of the fricking Mississippi, and now I’m in Paris. It’s dazzling. And he proposes to me on the banks of the Seine, with the moonlight, and Jesus, I wasn’t thinking about marriage—not yet, down the road—but Paris, moonlight. So, I said yes.”

She took a moment and studied her beer. “I didn’t really want a big, splashy wedding, but it got out of hand—or out of my hands. You could say his family sort of took over, and I got swept up. If I tried to throttle it back, he’d say how it would hurt their feelings. Anyway, more blah, blah, blah. I can say, looking back I can now see there were signs. But that’s hindsight. Was he demanding, possessive, domineering? Yes, to all, but so subtle, and offset by that crazy-about-me, the romance, the little sweet things.

“I was stupid,” she murmured. “And he was just so good at it.”

“It doesn’t take being stupid to get taken in,” Zane corrected.

“Maybe, maybe not. Anyway, right before the wedding, he drove me out to this fancy gated community, pulled up to this monster house in a maze of monster houses. Our house, he told me. And I’m ‘but—but.’ His parents put down the deposit as a wedding gift. Done deal, not once consulting me. But he rolled over that. Surprise! Ten days before the wedding, and I’m a little sick. I don’t want this monster house in Stepford Land, one that’s a solid forty minutes from my mother, from our business.”

“Did you tell him?”

“Tried. Not hard enough. I let him manipulate me, no question there. I thought, Well, I can make it work. I can landscape the yard, make it mine. I can just get up earlier to get to work. I loved him, didn’t I? The important thing is we were starting our lives together.

“So we did. We had the big, splashy wedding his family somehow pulled off in six months because I should be a spring bride. Even though that’s our busiest season. We had a honeymoon in Paris, where he started pushing for me to go off birth control so we could start a family.”

“You didn’t talk about kids before?”

“We did, and we’d agreed to wait a little. So I pushed back there, I want a year with him first before we talk kids. Hell, I was only twenty-three, I had plenty of time.

“We’re barely home when he gets back on that again. He wants to make a baby with me, start our family. Don’t I want to have his children? Then it’s that I work too much, too hard. I’m coming home too late, and too tired. Owning a business should mean I don’t have to work.”

At Zane’s quick laugh, she had to smile.

“Right? Owning means you work the hardest, but he didn’t get it. And I’d already seen he didn’t exactly put in tons of time and effort in his own firm. So it’s around and around, up and down.”

She paused, stared out at the view, the boats gliding on the lake. He waited, saying nothing.

“Six weeks and two days after I said ‘I do,’ I come home from a long, sweaty day that ended with me fighting ugly traffic, and he’s sitting there, drinking a gin and tonic.”

She had to stop again, let out a little breath. “He’s laying down the law. Look at me, exhausted, filthy, and he’s coming home to an empty house. A house he provided for me. I’m to sell the business and start behaving like a wife.

“I was so tired. It wasn’t the work, you know, I loved the work. It was that horrible commute. I said no, I wasn’t selling the business, and I wasn’t going to talk about it because I needed a shower. The next thing I knew I was on the floor.”

She shook her head. “In the year I’d known him he’d never shown any signs of violence. None. He could be demanding, yes, pushy, single-minded, and yeah, he could strike out with words. But that backhand shocked the hell out of me. It seemed to shock him, too. He was immediately contrite, appalled at himself. He cried. He made excuses—he’d had a terrible day, too much to drink, he’d been so worried about me, and more. He begged for forgiveness. I’d been married six weeks, and now the man I’d married was on his knees, weeping.”

Zane said nothing. He already saw the end.