“Is there?”
I shook my head.
He didn’t seem surprised. “I’m sure Laura’s taken the mantle on that. She always liked to be in control of things—not in a bad way. Just in a . . . way.”
“Laura?” I asked. The redhead in the photo?
“She’s my ex-fiancée,” he replied, absently rubbing the wedding ring between his fingers, as if it were a comfort. His ring, I guessed, remembering when he said he had no one to contact about unfinished business. He didn’t include Laura in that. Then again, she was his ex. Lee would be the last person I’d want to see after I died, too.
“Can I ask what happened?”
He tilted his head, thoughtful for a moment, trying to find the right words. “I’d gone on a business trip to the Winter Institute,” he finally began, “but I caught a cold and came home early. Didn’t tell her because I thought I’d surprise her with a weekend all to ourselves. She was always pointing out how I never had time for her. I was always working. I would edit manuscripts at work, and then I would bring them home, and I would edit them there until I fell asleep.” His eyebrows furrowed. “She was in the shower with a coworker of hers. They’d been seeing each other for a few months at that point.”
I sucked in a breath. “Oh, Ben . . .”
“It wasn’t all her fault. She was right—all I did was work. I did little else. We were engaged but I didn’t—I was—” He pursed his lips and trained his eyes on a dark knot in the wooden bar. He scratched at it absently. “What kind of person makes his fiancée resort to someone else for love and affection?”
“Makes?” I echoed. “Ben—it wasn’t your fault. You can’t control what other people do. Her cheating was her choice—”
“And if I’d been present with her? If I’d been there and loving and—what I should have been?”
“She could’ve communicated with you.”
“She shouldn’t have to—”
“Yes, she should,” I bit back. “Relationships aren’t perfect all the time. You have to talk to each other. I’m sorry, but your fiancée was a dumbass, and she made a mistake, but that was her choice.”
He swallowed thickly and looked away. “She said as much,” he replied. “She asked if we could try again.”
“But you didn’t?”
He shook his head.
I didn’t understand. He was clearly still very much in love with her—or at least unable to forget about her. “Why?”
“Because it was my fault in the first place, Florence, and I loved her too much to cause that pain again. She deserves someone better than me.”
I clenched my hands tightly into fists. If Lee had contacted me once after we’d broken up, if he’d asked to try again, to meet in the middle, I would’ve— “You’re an idiot.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“So—what—you believe in love but just not for you? You believe in romance and grand romantic gestures and happily ever afters but you think there is something so fundamentally wrong with you that you don’t deserve it?”
“It’s better than not believing in it at all, isn’t it?” he snapped back.
I rolled my eyes and slammed my laptop closed. “I’ve got to go—do something. But for what it’s worth? You’re wrong.” Then I hopped off my stool and stalked out of the bar and up the stairs to my room, and he didn’t follow. Carver texted me a little while later, while I was pacing back and forth in my hotel room, trying to calm down.