The Heirloom Murders - Kathleen Ernst [16]
“How are you?” he finally asked.
Chloe pulled her hands free again, reached for the tiny pitcher of cream, and carefully poured a generous dollop into her coffee. “I’m good.”
Markus pushed his mug aside and placed both palms on the table, leaning closer. “All right, look,” he said quietly. “You don’t want to chat. So let’s just say what needs to be said.” He paused, raking his own fingers through his hair. It was a gesture both forgotten and so viscerally remembered that for a few seconds Chloe couldn’t breathe.
Markus held her gaze. “I screwed up.”
“Yeah. You did. Big time.”
“I made a mistake—”
“A mistake?” Chloe hissed. She didn’t want to touch his hair anymore. “You asked me to move to Switzerland, Markus. I turned my life inside out to do that. We were happy together for over five years. Then I had a miscarriage, and three days later, you told me to pack my bags. It was inhumane. And you call that a mistake?”
Tess returned, deposited their plates, marched away again.
Markus swallowed visibly. “You have every right to be angry—”
“Damn straight.”
“There’s no excuse for what I did. The only explanation I can give is that … well, I panicked.”
Chloe regarded him coldly.
“We’d never even talked about having a family. I didn’t even know you were pregnant, and—”
“I didn’t know I was pregnant either,” Chloe snapped. An elderly, frizzle-permed woman at a nearby table turned her head, eyeing them with interest. Chloe forced her voice down a few decibels. “Did you think I’d gotten pregnant on purpose? You thought I was trying to trap you or something? Was that it?”
Markus sighed heavily, picked up his fork, put it back down. “I didn’t know what to think.”
“How could you even consider that I’d do something like that?” The odors of coffee and melted cheese seemed suddenly sour, making Chloe feel nauseated.
“Chloe, I—”
“You know what? I’m outta here.” She wriggled from the booth.
Markus scrambled after her, and grabbed her wrist. “Please don’t go. Just hear me out.”
Chloe jerked her arm free. For a few moments they stood like that, face to face. Chloe contemplated hitting him, telling him to kiss her ass, walking away forever.
Instead she sank back on the bench. The elderly woman hitched her chair to one side, so she’d have a better view.
Markus slid back onto his seat. “I’m sorry. I know that sounds empty. I know it doesn’t change anything. But I’ve needed to say it. I treated you horribly, and I’m very sorry.”
Chloe looked out the window. On the street below a man in a red car was blocking traffic while he tried to parallel park in front of the hotel. Chloe watched as he see-sawed gingerly back and forth for several minutes before giving up and driving on. Finally she looked back at Markus. “Why now? All this happened a year ago. Is there a reason you’re here right now? Because your timing sucks, Markus. It really sucks.”
“I saw mention of your hire in the ALHFAM magazine.”
Damn professional journal. Editors had no right to publicly spew people’s personal information, even in the living history, farm, and agricultural museum community.
“It seemed like it was meant to be. I’d already been talking with Claude—you remember Claude?”
“I remember Claude,” Chloe said through gritted teeth. Claude was Markus’s boss at Ballenberg, the huge open-air museum in Switzerland where he worked. And where she had, once, worked also.
“We’d been talking about me coming over here, doing some fieldwork. Many Swiss emigrants ended up in Wisconsin—there are still some old-timers in New Glarus, and Monroe … we were hoping someone might even still have some old-breed livestock.” His eyes sparked with the enthusiasm she remembered. “Genetically, finding a new population here would mean—”
Chloe glared at him as understanding dawned. “You prick! You didn’t come here to talk to me, you came here to look for goats!”
Markus sobered. “All I meant was that I was able to get Ballenberg to pay my travel expenses, and approve a two-month leave.” He leaned back and studied her.