Wedding Ring by Emilie Richards Page A

said.
    “I couldn’t say.”
    “Do you remember the first time Kayley caught a fish here?”
    “Why are you doing this?” She faced him. In the starlight, she could still make out his face. “I remember everything. A lot more than I want to. I remember that I let her walk to the corner by herself when I shouldn’t have. I remember hearing the squeal of brakes when I hurried after her a few minutes later. I remember someone—an adult, I think—screaming. And when I got there, when I finally got there, I remember that animal Robert Owens staggering out of his car, looking down at our lifeless daughter and blaming her, blaming my beautiful little girl, for daring to wait there on the sidewalk when he was driving home so drunk he couldn’t see an arm’s length in front of him!”
    Mack was silent while she regained her composure, as if he knew how much she would hate it if he touched her or tried to take her into his arms for comfort.
    “You still blame yourself, don’t you?” he said.
    She took a deep breath before she trusted herself to speak again. “I have a long list of people I blame. I’m on it, yes.”
    “And so am I.” It wasn’t a question. “I should have been with her. The timing would have been different. When Owens swerved off the road, we wouldn’t have been standing there, and if we were, I could have pushed her to safety.”
    “No.” She turned away and looked over what was left of the pond. “I don’t blame you anymore, Mack. I know I did at the beginning. But you didn’t kill Kayley. You had every reason to think she would be safe with me. You would never have broken your promise to walk her to school if you could have avoided it.”
    “She was safe with you. And I would have let her walk to the corner alone, too, just the way you did. She’d done it before. She could be trusted. I don’t blame you for what happened. Maybe I did at first, when I was trying to find someone or something to pin it on, but neither of us was responsible. You were a wonderful mother. Robert Owens and all the people who let him get behind the wheel of a car that morning killed her.”
    She wished his absolution helped, but it didn’t. Like everything else, it couldn’t bring Kayley back.
    This time he did touch her. He reached over and cupped her nape with his hand, applying gentle pressure. His hand was large and warm, and he seemed to know exactly what he needed to do to make her feel better.
    Making love had always been that way, too. From the beginning, they had been so attuned to each other’s bodies that they only rarely had to ask each other for guidance. His touch reminded her how long it had been since that time.
    “You’ve never really understood why it’s so important to me to make sure that people like Owens get what they deserve,” she said.
    “Of course I understand.”
    “That was something we shared, right from the beginning of our relationship. We both wanted to fix the world.”
    “I’m still trying to fix it. You know what kind of cases I take on.”
    She did. Mack worked for justice wherever he was needed. In addition to representing clients who had no other place to turn, he served on the boards of several cutting edge social action agencies. His income was smaller than it could have been, because so many of his clients were poor, but she had always supported him. The money hadn’t mattered.
    “If you really understand,” she said, “then why do you complain about the time I spend with MADD? Don’t you see what Kayley’s loss has done to us? We’ve gone from being a family with everything to two people who can barely carry on a conversation. I don’t want anybody else to suffer this way.”
    He dropped his hand. She realized she had forced him to drop it by stepping away from him. She hadn’t even realized it, and she didn’t know if she regretted it.
    “Are you so concerned about everybody else in the world that you’ve forgotten you still deserve a life and