Free Making Me Believe by Kirsten Osbourne Page B

the lake. The relaxation and just plain time away from life was refreshing. They left on Friday morning and the plan was to return on Monday evening. They went to a cabin on Lake Fork about a two and a half hour drive from Arlington.
    On Saturday morning, after a good breakfast, Rose finally broached the subject that she hadn’t been able to get out of her mind. “I want to talk to you about something, Alex.”
    He looked up from the book he’d been reading while she showered. “What’s that?”
    She took a deep breath. “I talked to Sarah about the picture that I found in your night stand. She told me about Jill.”
    A shuttered look fell over Alex’s face. “What about her?”
    “I want to know if you’re still in love with her. If you are, I don’t see how we can make our marriage work,” she said honestly. She’d thought long and hard about how she was going to bring this up, and had decided that the direct approach, while more painful at times, was the best approach in this case.
    Alex sighed. “No, I’m not still in love with her. She’s been dead for two years, and I’d just like her to stay that way.”
    “Will you tell me about her? Sarah gave me her opinion and her perspective on everything that happened, but I’d love to hear it all from you. You knew her best.” Rose knew that now that he was starting to talk about it, she needed to press the subject until they got it all out in the open. He laughed at that. “I thought I knew her best. Sarah and Mom both thought I was nuts to want to marry her. They kept telling me that she was a self-centered witch, but I just didn’t see it. Not at first. It just kept making me angrier and angrier that they were so against her.”
    She frowned. “What happened to make you think they were right?”
    He shrugged. “It was never one big thing, more like a lot of little things.
    She always acted like my opinions were important to her, but when we made a decision together regarding the wedding she would go behind my back and change it. She wouldn’t let Sarah be in the wedding, which I really wanted, but then finally, when she found out that Sarah would be showing a great deal at the time of the wedding, she asked Sarah to be in it. One of her other friends was extremely overweight, and lost over fifty pounds. Jill picked a fight with her and took her out of the wedding party.”
    Rose looked at him contemplatively. “She sounds interesting.” She had known most of this from Sarah, but was glad to hear that he had seen it for what it was.
    Alex grinned. “That is a huge understatement.” He sat looking down at the paper for a minute. “I thought about breaking it off, but felt like being engaged was a commitment. I didn’t want to back out. Then I found out she was sleeping with a friend of mine. Well, a former friend. He came to me and told me he was in love with her and she was afraid to break it off with me. When I confronted her, she admitted it, but said it had all been a mistake. He’d pressured her into bed with him.”
    Rose shook her head. “I see. Did you believe her?”
    “I’d already noticed too many weird things about her story to believe her. I told her that I was done with her. She took off. Three hours later I got a call that she’d been killed in car crash. Hit head on by a drunk driver.
    Apparently, she’d left my place, and gone straight to a bar. She was hit on her way home. Her alcohol content was just barely under the legal limit. I don’t know if she’d have been able to stop if she hadn’t been drinking.”
    Rose sat thinking for a minute. “Why didn’t you tell me about her?”
    “Why would I tell you about her? She’s been gone from my life for two years. No one knew that we’d broken it off before the wreck, so I played the grieving fiancé. I had no desire to date again for a while. I wanted nothing to do with another woman who could mess with my mind the way she had,” he said.
    “Sarah thought you were