Free Results May Vary by Bethany Chase Page A

want me to try.
    •
    But before I could begin to decide what to do, there was someone else I had to talk to. I got my chance a few days later, one afternoon after work while Ruby was at an appointment with a prospective client. I had a feeling she would not approve of this particular gambit, but I had to do it. I had to know.
    I was certain he would answer the call. Though he wouldn’t know my number, he’d be hoping it would be somebody worth talking to. The trick was going to be keeping him on the line long enough to tell me what I wanted to know.
    “This is Patrick. Who am I speaking with?”
    “It’s Caroline Hammond. Please don’t hang up.”
    He paused. “I’m pretty sure that this is a conversation I don’t want to be a part of. I’m going to go ahead and hang up.”
    “Please. I’m not calling to yell at you. Just hear me out.” It burned my throat like acid—begging him—but I did it.
    “So if you’re not calling to yell at me…”
    “I need a favor.”
    “A favor? From me?”
    “I need to understand what happened. Adam won’t talk about it. I need to hear it from you.”
    “Wow. That is not what I expected you to say. Listen…I have no idea why he won’t talk about it, but I do know he would not be happy if I got in the middle of this.”
    I laughed, and it sounded like a normal laugh roughed up by a cheese grater. “Patrick. You already are.”
    “The thing is, I’m not. His vows have always been his problem, not mine. I’m the way he chose to break them, and that’s it. So I don’t want to implicate myself in making this worse for him.”
    “Aww, you don’t want him to be mad at you. You care about him. That’s so sweet!”
    I could practically taste how badly he wanted to bite back at me. And I was dying for him to. Rage was surging inside me like lava.
    But he didn’t. “Like I said, I don’t want to get involved. So, I think it’s time for me to get off the phone.”
    “Wait.”
    He paused. But I didn’t have the first idea what I wanted to ask. All the questions I really wanted answered belonged to Adam. Not the ones I’d already asked him—the ones I couldn’t bear to. Why did you let yourself fail me? Why was it worth it? Or was my dignity simply not a consideration for you? Let alone my love?
    “Caroline?”
    I sighed. “Forget it.”
    “Okay.”
    And then he was gone. No apology—but why should I have expected one? He’d known it was a shitty thing to do when he did it, and he hadn’t cared then; there was no reason it should suddenly start mattering to him now.
    I wondered who he thought Adam was. What parts of himself Adam had selectively presented, in his bottomless need to be adored—especially by someone as self-consciously cool as Patrick. Would I even recognize that alternate version of my husband?
    Then again, there were huge chunks of my own version of Adam that I had never even suspected. A goddamned human iceberg.
    I just couldn’t imagine what it would be like, to be with someone who barely knew me. Who hadn’t known me since I was a quiet bundle of twigs, hiding my new breasts under my dad’s sweaters and writing poems about loneliness. How on earth did people get married to people they’d only known for a couple of years? Let alone a couple of years only as an adult? How could you fully love someone without having shared their life for as long as Adam and I had?
    You might learn that he hates bleu cheese, but you weren’t there the night he got annihilatingly sick on buffalo wings, and you didn’t spend the hours from one to four A.M. slumped against the wall outside the bathroom because he was sure he was going to die and you didn’t want to leave him alone with his paranoia and his bacteria. Patrick might have known that Adam’s father had had a heart attack, but he hadn’t seen his face when he got the news. Hadn’t held him, and felt him trembling. Hadn’t heard the words he mumbled into my hair the night Theodore was upgraded