Public Secrets

next morning, she was asleep. Standing in the doorway, Drew studied her dispassionately. The side of her face was swollen. He’d have to make sure she didn’t go out in public for a couple of days.
Stupid to have lost his temper, he thought, rubbing his palms on his thighs. Satisfying, but stupid. But then, she was always pushing him. He was doing his best, wasn’t he? And it wasn’t easy. A man might as well take a dead fish to bed as sleep with her. And she was always talking about her goddamn show, sneaking off for hours in the darkroom instead of taking care of him.
It was his work, his needs, that came first. It was time she understood that.
A wife was supposed to take care of her husband. That’s why he’d married her. She was supposed to take care of him, to help him get where he wanted to go.

Maybe knocking her around had been a good thing. She’d sure as hell think twice before defying him again.
But, now that he’d shown her who was running things, he could afford to be generous. Sweet little Emma, he thought. It only took a little effort to manage her.
“Emma.” Carefully, avoiding the shards of the broken lamp, Drew crossed to the bed. He watched her eyes open. Saw the fear. “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry.” She winced when he stroked her hair. “I don’t know what happened. I just lost it. I deserve to be locked up.”
She didn’t speak. Like an echo, her mother’s thick apologies came back to her.
“You have to forgive me, Emma. I love you so much. It was just the way you were screaming at me, blaming me. It wasn’t my fault.” He took her rigid fingers and pressed them to his lips. “I know those scum had no right to be in here, in our room. But it wasn’t my fault. I tossed them out myself,” he improvised. “It was just a rage,” he continued. “When I saw them in here, I was so furious. Then you turned on me.”
She began to cry again, slow, silent tears that squeezed between her tightly shut lashes.
“I’ll never hurt you again, Emma. I swear it. I’ll go away if you want. You can divorce me. God knows what I’d do without you, but I won’t ask you to let me stay. It’s just—Christ, it’s just that everything’s piling up. The album isn’t selling as well as we expected. The Grammy passed right over us. And … I think about us having a baby all the time.”
He began to weep then, holding his head in his hands. Tentatively, she reached out to touch his arm. He nearly laughed, then gripped her fingers in his, falling on his knees beside the bed. “Please, Emma. I know the fact that you were hounding me, that you turned on me, is no excuse for what I did. Forgive me. Give me another chance. I’ll do anything to make it up to you.”
“We’ll work it out,” she murmured.
With his face pressed against the coverlet, he smiled.

Chapter Thirty-One

T HE PARTIES STOPPED . Oh, there were a few gatherings now and again with people Emma was comfortable with. But there were no more throngs of strangers in her home. Drew was attentive and sweet, the way she remembered him from their courtship. She convinced herself that the rage and the violence had been one isolated incident.
She had pushed him. He reminded her of that often enough to make her believe it. She had blamed him for something that wasn’t his doing. She had turned on him, viciously, instead of supporting and believing in him.
And if he lost his temper occasionally, if she saw a flare of violence in his eyes , watched his fists clench or his mouth tighten, he could always give solid, even logical reasons why she had set him off.
Bruises healed. Pain faded. He made an effort to take an interest in her photography, though he pointed out in dozens of subtle ways that her hobby, as he called it, took time away from their marriage and her support of him and his career.
It was a nice print, he might say, if one cared to look at old ladies feeding pigeons. So why had it taken her so many hours away from him to come up with a few black-and-white snaps of people loitering in the park?
He supposed he could eat a cold sandwich, even though he’d been composing for six hours. Apparently it was up to him to drag the laundry to the cleaners, despite the fact that he’d been tied up in a meeting all afternoon.

She wasn’t to worry a bit. If her work was so bloody important, he could entertain himself for another evening.
Whatever criticisms he handed out were tempered with compliments. She looked so inviting standing in