“I love her,” I finally said. “That’s why I married her. It’s as simple as that.” Simple, but impossibly complicated.

His gaze bored into me for a few moments before he said, “Did she give you time?”

I thought back to that night I’d bared a part of me to Kate in her old bedroom. “Yes.”

“So what are you doing with it?”

I scrubbed my face with my hands. “I fucked it up.” We had talked. We’d taken a trip together. Then I’d done what I always had and she’d left. “How am I supposed to change when I don’t know what else I can do?”

“Have you talked to Dad?”

“Nope.”

“Dawson? Beck?”

I shook my head.

“Anyone?”

I meant to be sarcastic, but I couldn’t summon the energy. “Think that’s my problem?”

Xander snorted. I shot him a dirty look, but his expression turned somber. “Maybe that’s where you need to start.”

“I tried.”

“You gotta keep doing it. I also wouldn’t waste that time she gave you. I saw her with another guy.”

Fury spread through my body like a brush fire, only to be cooled by despair an instant later. Another guy? She wouldn’t move on that quickly.

Would she? “Maybe it was a coworker.”

“It was the truck stop with the restaurant.”

The relief was so instant, I almost put my hand on my heart to make sure it resumed beating. “She meets her dad there.”

“Does her dad look like he’s our age?”

Damn. Her dad was older than ours. She wouldn’t be that far from the library for lunch with a coworker.

Xander interpreted my silence as a no. “I was filling up and she was by the window, and I don’t know, man. She was different.”

“How so?” I couldn’t brace myself against what he had to say. It was like my bruised pride opened up for the beating.

“She was laughing and talking and gesturing with her hands. She’s so reserved around us, like she wants to engage more than she does. Do we intimidate her?”

“No. I do.” I drained my beer. Had she moved on? Did I think we had more time while she was living the life she’d been missing out on? Like lunch in the middle of the day, at a place where she could get the greasy diner burgers and crispy fries she loved. When was the last time I’d met her for lunch?

Xander rose in one swift move. “Well, she’s not here, but I am. Practice talking to me. Removing the stick from your ass is going to be hard, but I’ve got some ideas.”

But doing something with my hands was better than listening to the litany of my own faults I could recite in my sleep.