Sophie was still waiting for a longer answer. “Why would you torture yourself? I was here—” Her gaze dropped to her hands. “I was waiting for you,” she finally whispered.

Patrick felt as if he were strangling. What was he to say? I didn’t want to see you, to eat supper with you, to speak to you—because I know you don’t love me? His wife would laugh out loud.

“I don’t know what I was doing,” he finally admitted, his voice a bleak thread of sound. “But I wasn’t sleeping with other women, Sophie, I swear it. Mostly I walked the streets; sometimes I went to my offices in the warehouse.”

Sophie’s ear caught the unmistakable sincerity in her husband’s tone.

“I’m … I’m very glad,” she whispered. “Even if—I know it won’t be like this forever, but—”

“God damn it, Sophie!” Patrick’s voice was harsh. “What makes you think I’m such a despicable character? What did you hear about me?”

Suddenly Sophie woke up to the fact that she had insulted her husband. “I didn’t mean anything in particular about you, Patrick,” she said anxiously. “But I know what men and women are like, or what men are like anyway,” she said with some confusion. There was no point in pretending that she would ever lose interest in Patrick’s body. “I know that you won’t be satisfied with just one woman forever, but I will not be a troublesome sort of wife. I wasn’t, was I? I never complained when you stayed out.”

“That’s certainly true,” Patrick said through clenched teeth. “I thought you didn’t give a damn whether I was around or not.”

“Oh.” Sophie gasped. “But I didn’t want to make you feel trapped—”

“Because I might never come to your bed again, am I right?” Patrick was beginning to see a pattern here. A family pattern, as it were.

When Sophie nodded, he said gently, “I’m not your father, sweetheart. And you are not at all like your mother. I have complete confidence that I will still be coming to your bed every night when I am eighty-four years old. In fact, I think I’m going to burn your bed in your room, and then we’ll just have one bed. What do you think?”

Sophie looked at him, dazed. “Why?”

“Because I want to sleep with you every night,” he said fiercely. “We haven’t talked enough, Sophie. We should have been talking, all those hours when I was walking the streets, sweating at every pore with longing to come back and climb into your bed.”