“But Heartsong won’t be cancelling the tour. It’ll still happen, just without me.”
He exited the parking garage and joined the traffic. “I’m sorry you’re disappointed.”
“Don’t patronize me.” She folded her arms. “Honestly, sometimes you treat me like I’m five years old.”
Maybe if she acted a little less emotionally then he wouldn’t. Which meant he had to be the calm one now. “Just tell them you have health issues.”
She huffed.
“It’s true.”
“I have people who havebought ticketsbecause I said I was going on this tour.”
“Are you seriously more concerned about the tour than you are about your own child?”
“We don’t even know if there will be a child, do we?”
This again. He drove into the street their apartment was on. He so didn’t want to continue their argument upstairs. “Look, can we talk about this rationally?”
“Excuse me? I’m being rational. This,” she pointed to her face, “is me being disappointed. I’m allowed to be disappointed, aren’t I? Or is that not what a perfect Christian does?”
A dozen things wanted to erupt from his lips. He bit them back, settling for, “Sarah, I’m concerned about you. I don’t understand why you’re so frustrated.”
“Because I’m more than just a baby incubator, Dan. And now this thing I really wanted to do is suddenly forbidden and I’m upset, okay? Or am I not allowed to be upset as well? Let’s add that to the things I’m now not allowed to do. No getting upset,” she ticked off her fingers, “no eating soft cheese, no seeing my family, no going on tour.”
Man. Arguing with her was like reasoning with a tree. “You have to let the tour go. We agreed, remember?”
“I don’t think we agreed. I think you told me this was what we’d do, and now you’re just expecting me to be the little submissive wife, just like Marguerite. Well, I’m not like her.”
That was for sure. “Sarah, come on, please—”
“I don’t want to give up the tour.”
“I know that,” he said, through gritted teeth.
“And now I have to explain to Tisha and the others, people who have put in all this work—just like me!—and then tell all my fans that I won’t be there after all.”
Irritation pricked. “Do you even hear yourself?”
“ButI’mwhom they want to see!” she yelled.
“Stop yelling, Sarah. It’s not good for the baby.”
Her fingers clenched.
“You need to get over yourself,” he continued. “All this talk about your fans missing you, that’s just pride talking.”
She gasped. And yeah, he hadn’t meant it quite that way.
“Sometimes I don’t like you very much,” she muttered in a voice he guessed he was meant to hear.
The feeling was mutual, but saying so would only inflame matters.
The diamonds on her engagement ring caught the light. He remembered the night he’d given her that ring, on a beautiful evening in Sydney, with the lights of the Harbour Bridge and Opera House glimmering on the water. Back when they were so much in love and things like living miles apart and a childless future hadn’t seemed so unbearable.
Now, they might share a bed, but she might as well be in Sydney for all the connection they had, and it felt like this miraculous answer to prayer was being battered at every turn. Why did everything have to go wrong? How had they grown so far apart? “Sarah, I love you.”
She huffed again, shook her head.
