Slow Dancing on Price's Pier by Lisa Dale

entirety of their failed marriage fell on his shoulders, and his alone. But now, a kind of fury he hadn’t known himself capable of was raising the temperature of the blood inside him—and it didn’t feel bad.
    â€œI tried to tell you,” he said. “A thousand times. A million. But you wouldn’t hear it.”
    â€œJonathan . . .”
    â€œWhere did you go , Thea? After we got married. Where did you disappear to?”
    â€œI don’t understand—”
    â€œYou left me alone. For years . And I’m sick of it. I was there, Thea. For you, for Irina. For our family. I was there. But where were you? Tell me. Where?”
    Thea held her ground. “Are you saying it’s my fault that you slept with someone else? Like I locked you naked in some room with her and made you do what you did?”
    â€œNo,” Jonathan said, his head getting clearer by the moment. “But what I’m saying is that I don’t need you to assure me that you’re not mad at me. That you understand . That you forgive me. Because from where I stand, you should be asking me to forgive you .”
    Thea made a small noise, the sound she made sometimes if he accidentally stepped on her foot or caught her hair on his ring. And Jonathan felt fantastic. He took a few breaths, then started to walk away from her. It amazed him—how good he felt. When was the last time he’d had a fight with Thea? He couldn’t remember. They should have fought more often. The thought made him mad all over again.
    He turned to her over his shoulder. “I’m glad we had this talk,” he said cruelly.
    She hurried a few steps to catch up with him. He saw there were tears in her eyes. “What about Irina? Do you want her to have parents who can’t stand to be in the same room as each other?”
    â€œThe kind of father I am isn’t your business anymore,” he said. He stopped walking. “I love Irina, and I’ll be the best father I can be to her. I’ll see her all the time. But as for you . . .” He thought of their first Christmas together, of their fifth anniversary when he gave her a diamond-crusted wedding band, of the way she slipped her hand in his pocket when she got cold. “You’ll be hearing from my lawyer,” he said.
    Then, with the wind nudging him forward, he walked away.
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    July wore on. The City by the Sea steamed and sweltered, and the speed of pedestrians walking down the streets grew slower and slower with each rising degree. The tenor of the crowds changed like the tides: one weekend it seemed everyone who had come to Newport was under thirty—drinking fruity cocktails and making out in the streets—and the next weekend Thea found herself surrounded by rich Wall Street retirees. For relief, they signed up for cruises and boat rides, or they left the congestion of Newport for the cooler vistas of Aquidneck Island’s nature reserves and parks.
    On an especially hot Saturday evening, Dani had invited Thea and a few of the baristas to her house in Middletown—her way of saying “thank you” to the baristas who normally had her regular order ready even before she walked through the coffee shop door. Her home, occupied by herself and her two teenage children, was a small but comfortable bungalow on a hillside near a Christmas tree farm.
    On Dani’s deck, Thea leaned back in her chair and sighed with pleasure. It had been a long week. She was glad for the chance to get away. The air was oppressively hot, and the citronella torches did little to ward off the mosquitoes, but the sky was turning a gorgeous orange pink. She would slip an extra twenty in Jules’s paycheck at the end of the week to thank him for manning the shop tonight.
    Dani slid into the chair beside her, biting a corn chip in half. “Glad you could make it,” she said to Thea.
    â€œIrina’s been staying later and later at