In the pause which followed, she saw from his expression that the core root of their shattered romance was still alive inside him. As if to register his disapproval, as well as her refusal to try to convince him otherwise, she drank some more of the wine.
Rathe, for the first time, did likewise. “Is this why you asked me here, Alice? To go over all this again?”
The truth was that they had never really gone over any of it, not with any honesty on either side about how it had all made them both feel. Alice had wondered more than once whether she should contact him, but something had always held her back. She had never known precisely what it was, but she had a feeling that it was her own personal sense of shame at abandoning the man she had professed to love at the time when he needed her
