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The silence between them thickened and grew until it was suffocating, the weight of their past too much to keep ignoring. Sarah tried anyway, removing her hands from underneath Ray's, inching away from him as she did so. "It's in the past. We wouldn't have stayed together anyway."

"How do you know that?" he insisted. "We might have".

Her gaze falling to her lap, she interrupted him. "Drop it, Ray. I don't want to go there. Now isn't the time to explain all that."

He waited for her to raise her face but she kept her eyes down. If she looked at him, he'd know she was lying, and she didn't want that to that happen. Not now.

"But I hurt you," he said bluntly. "And I shouldn't have. You didn't deserve it."

At his pronouncement, a flood of emotion overcame her, and she couldn't stop herself. The mask she'd constructed so carefully fell away. She jerked her head up and looked directly into his dark eyes. "You didn't just hurt me, Ray. I was devastated when you left me."

He pulled himself together with an obvious effort, a grimace of pain rippling over his face. "I know."

She blinked hard, the memory of that agonizing time suddenly as fresh as if it'd happened the day before. "You could have warned me."

"No," he said slowly. "I couldn't have."

"I don't understand. What do you mean you couldn't have? What kept you?"

"It was complicated. Too complicated"

She interrupted him again. "Nothing's that complicated. Tell me what I did that was so horrible, tell me what I did that ran you off." She clasped her arms against her chest as if the gesture could protect her heart, the one he'd already broken so many years before.

"You didn't do anything," he answered wearily. "It had nothing to do with you. I told you that then and it's still the truth."

"You're lying."

Despite his pain, he leaned toward her. She didn't reach for him, but she didn't move, either. He clasped her shoulders with both his hands and looked straight into her eyes. They were blue, so blue it almost hurt him to stare at them.

"It's the truth, Sarah. I left you because I had to. You didn't do a thing. Something...happened. Something neither of us could control."

"What? Just tell me, Ray. "

In the past five years, Ray had played this scene a thousand times inside his head. He'd picked up the phone countless more times, wanting to call her only to put the receiver down abruptly.

More than once or twice, he'd even driven past her apartment. She lived on a quiet side street, just off Highway 98, kept flowers on her porch and flew a bright blue windsock shaped like a cat. Sometimes she stayed up late and watched television. He'd seen the blue flickering light.

He took a deep breath. "We couldn't stay together, Sarah. I had to marry Joan. She was pregnant."