Mary froze. She did know. She’d wondered how he was doing with it all. Because even pretending... well, she wasn’t stupid. She knew what the word ‘wife’ meant to Johnny. She knew that they had fallen into this sort of surreal act and if she wasn’t careful at times, she’d even been fooled. She swallowed the lump in her throat and searched for something intelligent to say. She nodded slowly.
“I never wanted to make your life more complicated,” she said.
Of course she hadn’t. She hadn’t planned on getting yanked back into the past and encountering him. She hadn’t planned on any of it. And maybe it would have been easier if she’d just kept her distance, but she hadn’t quite been able to do that. Then again, he hadn’t exactly pushed her away either.
“I’m almost forty years too early. There’s no fixing that,” she joked softly.
She bit her lip to keep from offering to make other living arrangements if that’d be easier. She knew that the part of Johnny that was stubborn about being a gentleman would probably argue with that. She also wasn’t sure if that was the direction this conversation was going in yet.