“I did between sixteen and twenty-four.” He gave her a wry smile. “By the time I met you, I’d grown up.”

She ignored his pleading expression urging her to understand the foolishness of youth. Perhaps if that was all this had been, she’d have forgiven him. But Nick was too far removed from young and stupid for it to be an excuse. When she coupled that with the fact he’d never once hinted that he and that woman had a teenage sexual history, it drove her belief down deep that there was so much more to this situation than either of them were telling her.

Despite his answers hitting her like shot, she needed to know everything—even if it explained nothing. “Was it always a just blow job?”

He closed his eyes and sighed. “No.”

“When did that change?”

“Um … After the second time.”

“So you sought her out to have sex?”

“No!” It was the first time he’d sounded decisive. “It was nothing like that. She always initiated things.”

“And you never said no.”

“Like I said, I was young and stupid. Libs, it didn’t mean anything. Not like you …”

She gripped her arms and started pacing. “But you’d stopped with her before you met me?”

“Yes! Ages before I met you. I grew up and stopped writing myself off.” He opened his hands in supplication. “Please believe me. When I’m sober, I don’t have a problem resisting Jess.”

“Hah! If that’s true, then how the hell did you end up fucking her two years ago?”

Shame pinked his face. “Jess and I shared a bottle of Bundy.”

“You don’t even drink rum!”

He sighed again. “I did when I was eighteen. So did Jess. Every country kid did.”

“I didn’t!”

“Your childhood was a little more sheltered and cultured than most of the bay. I drank it to rebel against my parents’ homemade vino. Jess probably drank it because her mother always had bottles in the house.”

A memory shot into Libby’s mind of the week she started working as an intern. She was lifting a bottle of rum out of Jess’s hand and replacing it with a wine glass of chardonnay. “Sophisticated city women drink wine.”

“We’re sophisticated now, are we, Dr. Hunter?”

“Absolutely.”

Jess had laughed, or at least that’s how Libby had always remembered it. But in today’s memory, Jess’s pink bow mouth was pressed tight and the laugh more of a “humph.”

Libby shook away the irrelevant detour into the past, recognizing it as a delaying tactic. Her need to know exactly what had happened between her ex-best friend and her husband was matched by an equal desire not to know. Once she heard the story, she couldn’t unhear it. But she couldn’t go through life not knowing either.

“So, when you screwed her and knocked her up, where was I?”