Free Remembered Love by Diana Hunter Page A

friend weave his way through the cubicles, Gary felt a pang of jealousy. Very few had the close relationship Alex and Amy shared. Alex just didn’t understand the real world that most of humanity dealt with.
    And later, by the time Gary pulled into the driveway of his suburban home, he’d worked himself into quite a state. He hadn’t gotten the report finished because he just couldn’t keep his mind on it. Alex’s words nagged him—the ones about not valuing what his wife did for them. But he didn’t have it right. There was far more wrong with Val than just the division of labor. Feeling in high dudgeon and filled with self-pity, Gary parked in the garage and headed into the house.
     
    Val heard the car pull in and shook herself from her reverie, quickly pulling on her sweatshirt. Her job started earlier than his did in the mornings, which allowed her a half an hour of quiet before he got home at seven. Just enough time to change her clothes and get dinner started. But today she just couldn’t shake the feeling that somewhere they’d gone horribly wrong. She’d spent her half hour staring at the walls of their bedroom, wondering what had happened to those two kids who’d been so in love.
    Fresh from her memories of happier times, she decided on optimism. They could put things back together, find what they’d lost. She just knew it. Plastering on a happy face, she skipped down the stairs, ready to greet him as he entered the kitchen. The look on his face as he slammed through the door, however, pulled her up short. She didn’t know who the glower was for but her heart sank as she realized it didn’t really matter. Nothing she could say or do would move him when he was like that.
    Pulling the remnants of her memories around her, she knew she needed to give it a go. Even if he didn’t realize it, they were sinking into the morass of “ordinary” and she wasn’t about to go under without a fight.
    “Looks like you had a tough day,” she remarked as he walked past her. When did they stop kissing each other at the end of the workday?
    “I didn’t get a report finished that Sampson’s going to want first thing in the morning.”
    “Oh.” At least he wasn’t mad at her for something she either did or didn’t do. So hard to tell these days. “So you’re going to finish it here?”
    Gary paused in the act of picking up the mail and looked at her as if she were a stranger. “Since when do I bring work home?”
    “Well, never…but…well, there’s always a first time. And if you have to get it in—”
    “You sound like you want me to bring work home. I thought our agreement was that work stays at work and home is for us? He tossed the envelopes back on the table. “I’m going up to check my emails.”
    His nightly routine and hers too. Neither of them accessed their private emails and IMs and Twitters at work and the early evening often found them sitting on opposite sides of the small bedroom that had become their study—he at his computer and she at hers, each talking away with online friends, both far and near.
    But they never talked to each other, she realized as she slowly followed him up the stairs and into the study.
     
    While idly scrolling through messages, Gary tried to figure out why Val would ask him such a dumb question. Neither of them brought work home. Leaving work at work served as their assurance that any problems that started at work didn’t come home to color their idyllic life together. Ha! Some idyll he had going here.
    He chanced a glance across the room to where his wife’s face was lit only by the light of her screen. She’d pulled her long, brown hair into an untidy ponytail that did nothing to flatter her face. He loved her face, which tended toward roundness. He had first fallen in love with those brown eyes that twinkled with life and her heart-shaped lips made for kissing. Only later had he seen the caring, passionate woman underneath and fallen in love for