She remembered what Andrew had suggested and decided to take his advice. “You have accrued plenty of personal leave. Spend today tying up any loose ends from home and you can start your leave tomorrow.”
“I’m the backbone of your whole operation. You know that as well as I do. The whole company is going to fall apart without me.”
Rosie very much feared Pam was right, though she intended to fight like hell to make sure that didn’t happen, as she had after Gary’s death.
“You have been an invaluable part of the company,” she said.
Pam looked as if she had more to say but she finally turned to go. Before she returned to her vehicle, she threw out one more conversational grenade.
“I did care for Gary, just so you know. I loved him. And he loved me.”
She didn’t want to hear this. Rosie fought the urge to clap her hands over her ears.
“How long had your affair been going on?” she finally asked, through lips that felt stiff and unnatural. She didn’t want to ask, but the words came out anyway. She needed to know how clueless she had been.
Pam looked away. “Not long. A few weeks.”
A few weeks too long. Rosie felt queasy again.
“We never slept together, for what it’s worth. Though it would have happened sooner or later, I’m sure. I don’t know if you could even call it an affair.”
He had kissed this woman, though. Shared things with her he hadn’t with Rosie.
“I think in those last few weeks Gary was a man tormented, trying to figure out how to have what he truly wanted—me—without hurting you in the process.”
Rosie assumed Pam told her that as some kind of consolation prize but the words actually made her feel worse. She might have found her late husband’s betrayal easier to handle if it had strictly been a physical relationship, with no emotions involved.
Knowing he might have truly cared for Pam and might indeed have been planning to leave Rosie felt so much worse.
The weight of this revelation, ten years in the making, threatened to crush her. She wanted to scream, to lash out, to demand more answers, but found herself paralyzed by the enormity of it all.
With one more hard look, Pam climbed into her vehicle and drove away, leaving Rosie standing by her flower bed, trowel still in hand.
Rosie returned her supplies to her gardening shed and walked slowly up the stairs to the house she and Gary had renovated together, feeling as if the carefully tended narrative of her marriage had burned to the ground overnight.
Had their love been a lie? Or worse, had it been real, only to be discarded so easily for someone else?
She fought tears as she grappled with this new reality. But beneath the pain and betrayal, a small spark of something else began to ignite.
Determination.
She had rebuilt her life once after Gary’s death, learning to run the company alone. She would do it again without Pam.
This time, she would rebuild on a foundation of truth, no matter how difficult it might be. Rosie took a deep breath and headed into her bedroom to shower and change for the day.
She had a company to run, a daughter and granddaughter to love, and a life to reclaim—one that was entirely her own.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Andrew
This deadline was going to kick his butt.
The next time he decided to pack up and move his family eight hundred miles away when he was so close to a hard and fast deadline, Andrew needed to tell his future self to get his ass in gear.
He had turned his phone on Do Not Disturb so that he could have an hour of uninterrupted work time, but he couldn’t seem to make his brain cooperate. His thoughts kept going back to the evening before, to Rosie’s ravaged features as she told him about the shocking revelations she had learned that night.
He couldn’t imagine what she must be going through. He had wanted to call or text her a dozen times that morning to see how she was doing but hadn’t been able to think of anything that didn’t feel like hollow words of comfort.