Praise for
LAURIE BRETON

“Don’t plan to go to bed early.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews on Point of Departure

“Breton skillfully balances the suspense and romance.”

—Publishers Weekly on Final Exit

“Breton keeps the readers guessing from the first page to the last…a great read.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews on Final Exit

“Gritty and realistic, Mortal Sin is a powerfully written story…a truly exceptional book on many levels.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews

“Breton’s way with characters—and her knack for giving her tales a twist—elevates this story above most.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews on Lethal Lies

Laurie Breton
Die Before i Wake

For Grace,

who’s more than a boss,

but also a friend,

and who puts up with me

as graciously as her name implies

whenever I’m on deadline!

Thanks to my amazing editor, Valerie Gray, for the past six years. They’ve been great! Thanks also to the members of the MIRA art department, who always give me awesome covers. And, of course, to everyone else at MIRA Books who’s involved in the process of turning words typed on a page into a living, breathing book.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Epilogue

One

I’ve always been a white-knuckle flier.

Normally the most rational of people, I have trouble trusting any law of physics that expects me to believe that a fifty-ton aircraft loaded with two hundred people is going to stay in the air because of something having to do with lift and thrust and air currents. In my narrow world view, gravity wins out every time. Every ounce of common sense tells me that the only possible outcome to such a scenario is for the plane to plummet from the sky, carrying me, and 199 other passengers and crew members, to a fiery death.

The flight from L.A. to Boston had taken about eight hours, and somewhere around Pittsburgh, we’d hit turbulence in the form of a hurricane that was battering the Northeast. I’d been forced to close my eyes to keep from seeing lightning tap dance all around the 747’s wing tips. Eventually, the thunder and lightning gave way to rain, and I relaxed a little. But it was more than the storm, more than my customary terror of falling from the sky in a ball of fire, that had my fingertips pressing permanent prints into the armrest of my first-class seat; it was the fear of what waited for us on the ground.

The plane began its descent into Boston. Beside me, Tom sat calmly leafing through an in-flight magazine as though he did this kind of thing every day. Thomas Larkin, OB/GYN, small-town New England doctor, widower, father of two and all-around heartthrob, was my new husband. And I still couldn’t believe it.

Julie Larkin. Julie Hanrahan Larkin. I kept mentally trying out the name, just to see how it sounded inside my head. What it sounded like most was disbelief. We’d met on a cruise ship, off the coast of Barbados. The trip had been a birthday present from Carlos and the girls at Phoenix, the L.A. boutique I managed. Because thirty was a significant birthday, and because the last couple years of my life had been a complete train wreck, my bighearted coworkers had thrown me a birthday bash, complete with black balloons, a male stripper and a ticket for a Caribbean cruise. They’d joked with me about finding Prince Charming somewhere on that floating palace. He would look like Johnny Depp—minus the eyeliner and the sword—and have more money than Donald Trump.

I’d gone along with the joke, even though I wasn’t in the market for a man. After the unimaginable losses of the last two years, I’d made it my mission to fill the empty void inside me with work. I had no room—or desire—for romance. After my divorce from Jeffrey, I’d expected to take a lengthy hiatus from the dating scene. Like maybe the rest of my life.

But, as John Lennon so famously said, life is what happens while you’re making other plans. Eighteen hours into the cruise, I found myself seated next to Dr. Thomas Larkin at dinner. Tom fit all the romantic stereotypes: He was tall, dark and handsome. Smart and witty and charming, with vivid blue eyes and a smile that drove like an arrow directly into my heart. Best of all, he made me laugh, when I hadn’t laughed in a very long time.

There were other things I also hadn’t done in a very long time. Following the guiding principle that what happens on the Princess line stays on the Princess line, I threw myself wholeheartedly into a shallow, scorching, unabashedly shameless shipboard romance. Ten days, I reasoned, and I’d be back in L.A., selling rhinestone bracelets to anorexic young blondes who played tennis and spent half their lives at the beach. In the interim, a little sun, sand and sex were just what the doctor ordered.

Except that, somewhere along the way, what was supposed to be no more than a shipboard fling turned into something else. And on the morning when Tom, his hair as rumpled as my bed sheets, pulled out a blue velvet box that held a single diamond solitaire, I realized he was offering me more than just marriage. He was offering me a second chance. A fresh start. And the opportunity to leave L.A., and all its sorrows, behind.

There was nothing left for me in L.A. Dad was gone. Jeffrey had moved on to bigger and better things. And Angel, the baby I’d lost, was nothing more than a sweet, painful memory. For a while, I’d been thinking about quitting my job, climbing into my beloved yellow Miata, and driving off alone into the sunset.

But Tom offered me so much more than that.

Anybody who knows me will tell you that I’m a born cynic. After all, I’m Dave Hanrahan’s daughter. He taught me pretty much everything I know, and if there was one thing Dad didn’t believe in, it was romance. Right now, he was probably spinning in his grave over the knowledge that his only daughter, high on moonlight and hormones and God only knew what else, had stood on a white-sand Bahamian beach at midnight, a month after her thirtieth birthday, and married a man she’d known for five days.

I was still having trouble believing it myself.

Beside me, Tom turned a page. “How can you do that?” I said.

Without looking up, he said, “Easy. I just lift the corner with my finger, and—”

“Ha, ha. Very funny. Aren’t you nervous?”

“Why should I be?” He flipped another page. “Seems as though you’re nervous enough for both of us.”

“With good reason. I’m serious, Tom. It’s not every day your firstborn son comes home from a Caribbean cruise with a brand-new wife in tow. What if your mother hates me?”

He closed the magazine and looked at me. He smiled, and the corners of his eyes crinkled, and my heart did this funny little thing it’d been doing since the first time he smiled at me. “She’s not going to hate you,” he said. “Even if she did, it wouldn’t matter. I’m thirty-eight years old. A little too old for my mother to be running my life. Besides, she’ll love you.”

“Why should she love me?”

He leaned and placed a kiss on the tip of my nose. “Because I love you. Stop worrying.”

Easy for him to say. He wasn’t the one who was uprooting his entire life, leaving behind friends, coworkers, career and home, to move to some tiny town in Maine, all in the name of love.

He must have seen the expression on my face. “Having second thoughts?” he asked.

God knows, I should have been. What I’d done was so out of character, I still couldn’t believe I’d really done it. In spite of being Dave’s daughter—or maybe because of it—I’d never done anything this crazy. This was risk-taking behavior, something I’d spent the last decade avoiding. This was stepping off the edge of a cliff into free fall, without a parachute or a safety net to slow my plunge. This was insanity at its terrifying, spine-tingling, exhilarating best.

The days we’d spent aboard ship had been heaven, days of sparkling turquoise water and ice cold margaritas, days we’d spent lying on matching chaises, fingers loosely clasped in the space between his chair and mine as we soaked up the sun’s rays, nearly purring with mindless contentment.

And then, there were the nights.

In light of my legendary cynicism, it seemed far-fetched that the word besotted kept coming to mind. It sounds so undignified. So junior high school. And I’m a woman who has walked a hard road to maturity. But none of that seemed to matter, because at that particular moment, as we touched down smoothly on the runway at Logan International Airport on an early September afternoon, it was the only word that came close to describing how I felt about my new husband.

Tom was still looking at me, still waiting for an answer, his blue eyes pensive, as though he wasn’t quite certain what my response might be. Was I having second thoughts?

Was he out of his mind?

I grinned and said, “In your dreams.”

Nobody was at the airport to meet us.

“I don’t get it,” Tom said. We stood with our baggage, lone islands in a sea of arriving passengers who flowed around us like salmon swimming upstream. “I told Mom what time we’d be landing. Which gate we’d be coming through. Where to meet us.” He flipped his cell phone closed. “There’s no answer at the house.”

“Maybe she’s running late because of the weather. She could’ve hit traffic. Does she have a cell phone?”

A vertical wrinkle appeared between his eyebrows. “In spite of my constant nagging, she’s too stubborn to buy one.”

Until now, I’d never seen him frown. I hoped it wasn’t an omen. I couldn’t help wondering if his mother’s failure to arrive on time was a deliberate snub aimed at me, her new daughter-in-law. Tom had described his mother as formidable. Intimidating. Difficult. All of which went a long way toward explaining the unease I’d been feeling ever since we took off from Los Angeles. I’d already built up a picture of her in my mind, one that involved horns, a tail, and sharp teeth.

But I was determined to win her over. After all, Jeannette Larkin was the woman whose DNA would be passed on to my children. “I’m sure she’ll be along shortly,” I said.

“Maybe.” But he didn’t look convinced, which did absolutely nothing to alleviate my apprehension. “You have to understand my mother,” he said. “She’s a bit set in her ways. This wouldn’t be the first time she’s done something off-the-wall just to prove a point.”

In other words, maybe my theory was right. Great. “Okay,” I said, trying to focus on the primary problem at hand. “If she doesn’t show up, how do we get home?” We still had at least a hundred miles to go.

Scanning the crowd, he said, “We’ll have to rent a car. Damn it, I knew I should’ve driven down by myself and left my car in long-term parking. But you can’t imagine how much I hate to do that. You never know what you’ll find when you get back. Scratches, dents, slashed tires, graffiti—”

I patted his arm in a gesture of comfort. “She could be wandering around the airport, lost. Maybe you should try having her paged.”

Some of the frustration left his eyes. “Right,” he said. “Good idea, Jules.”

Nobody in my entire thirty years had ever gotten away with calling me Jules. Until now. A lot of firsts going on here.

“You stay with the bags,” he said, and began moving in the direction of the American Airlines ticket counter. He’d taken just a couple of steps when a male voice separated itself from the babble and hum of the crowd.

“Tommy! Yo, Tommy-boy!”

We both swung around. The face that belonged to the voice wasn’t hard to pick out, since most of the crowd was moving in the opposite direction. Even with the aviator glasses covering his eyes, the family resemblance was unmistakable. He was a slightly younger, slightly watered-down version of my husband. Not quite as tall. Not quite as dark. Not quite as smooth.

Just plain not quite as.

“What the hell are you doing here?” There was an edge to Tom’s voice, one he smoothed over so quickly I would have missed it if it hadn’t been so uncharacteristic of the man I’d married. He shot me a brief glance before continuing. “I thought you were in Presque Isle.”

“Finished the job early. Heard you needed a ride, so—voilà! Here I am.”

Tom’s eyes narrowed, and something passed between them, some kind of animosity that they weren’t quite verbalizing. They rubbed each other the wrong way. Even I, a virtual stranger, could see it. “Lucky us,” he said.

Instead of rising to the bait, the guy laughed. He turned his attention to me, all trace of hostility gone. His smile was genuine, warm and welcoming. “And this must be Julie.” He pulled off the glasses and held out his hand. “I’m Riley. Tom’s black-sheep brother.”

Tom hadn’t mentioned that he had a brother. Judging by the sour expression on my husband’s face, he must have had good reason for that omission.

I shook Riley’s outstretched hand. “Nice to meet you.”

“Where’s Mom?” Tom asked.

“She didn’t come.”

The two brothers exchanged a look that was layered with meaning. I tried to decipher one or two of those layers, but it was impossible.

In an attempt to inject some levity into the atmosphere, I said, “Maybe we could just settle here instead of going all the way to Maine. I hear Boston’s nice in the fall.”

Tom’s frigid demeanor instantly thawed. “Christ, Jules,” he said, “I’m sorry. Don’t worry about it, honey. Mom’s just being Mom. She’ll come around.”

“Tommy’s right,” Riley said. “It’s nothing personal. It’s just that—” he slid the aviator glasses back on his face “—nobody’s ever been quite good enough for our boy here.”

The look Tom gave him could easily have frozen water. “Just cool it,” Tom said. “Okay?”

“Whatever you say,” Riley said easily, bending and picking up my suitcases. “After all, you’re the boss. I’m just a lowly chauffeur.”

In the rear seat of the Ford pickup, Tom rode in silence. I sat up front with Riley, who spent most of the two-hour drive regaling me with family stories and childhood memories. I half listened to him, made appropriate responses at the appropriate times, but for the most part, as we drove steadily northward through a drizzling rain, I simply stared out the window at the passing foliage. Was northern New England made up of nothing but trees? This had to be the most godforsaken, isolated place on the planet. What the hell was I thinking? Was it too late for me to change my mind, hop back on a plane and fly home to California?

Not that I would have left Tom behind, not for an instant. But I had myself halfway convinced that we’d gotten it backwards, that I wasn’t supposed to uproot myself and move to the end of the earth. That instead, it was Tom who was supposed to be moving his medical practice to some thriving metropolis nestled snugly in the heart of the sunbelt.

Then, finally, we left the highway. And all my doubts vanished in an instant. Because Newmarket, Maine was enchanting.

I grew up in Los Angeles. But not in the glamorous part of town where the movie stars hang out. We lived in one of the seedier neighborhoods, the kind of place where hookers plied their trade on the sidewalk two stories below my bedroom window. A zillion years ago, my dad used to be Somebody. But when the mighty Dave Hanrahan tumbled with the momentum of a California landslide, nobody even noticed. My dad’s life was one cliché after another. The bigger they come, the harder they fall. When he fell, it wasn’t pretty. Not that it was his fault. Life just goes that way sometimes. It’s that old story about the windshield and the bug. When you get up each morning, you never know which one you’re going to be that day. Here’s another cliché. Nothing lasts forever. Take that one apart and analyze it. Does losing it all hurt worse than never having possessed it in the first place?

I don’t know the answer to that question. I just know that, growing up the way I did, I used to dream about getting out of there, about leaving it behind for something better. Just like Audrey in that movie, Little Shop of Horrors, I wanted to leave skid row and move someplace that was green. Newmarket, Maine, was that green place I’d spent my childhood fantasizing about.

It was like a postcard from Currier & Ives, or a painting by Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light. The village green, shaded by elms and flanked by white-steepled churches. The picturesque little downtown shops with their mullioned windows and wooden signs. The old-style faux-gas lampposts that lined the brick sidewalks. All of it softened by raindrops on the windshield and the blurred reflections of brake lights on wet pavement.

“This place is lovely,” I said.

“It’s home,” Tom said, the first words he’d uttered in a half hour.

I turned around. Behind me, Tom met my gaze and shot me a wink. I relaxed. Whatever it was that had sent him into a snit, he was over it now. Obviously, there was some kind of long-standing sibling rivalry going on between my husband and his brother, but over the course of the drive, Tom’s customary good nature had been restored.

We left the downtown area and drove down a side street of manicured lawns and dignified Victorian homes. Just as Riley turned the car into the circular drive of a massive white house, the sky opened up, and the drizzle became a pounding downpour. There were several cars parked in the drive, including a silver Land Rover and a powder-blue Caddy of indeterminate vintage. Riley pulled up behind the Land Rover and parked opposite the front steps.

A movement at a second-story window caught my eye. The curtain was drawn aside and for just an instant, a face peered out, pale and chalky against the storm’s dark backdrop. Then the curtain dropped back into place, leaving me to wonder if I’d imagined it.

“This is it,” Tom said. “Home, sweet home.”

The house was exquisite. Even through the driving rain, I could appreciate its beauty. I’d taken a course at UCLA in the history of art and architecture, so I recognized the spindles, the balconies, the stained glass and the graceful turret as classic Queen Anne–style architecture. Set back from the street behind a wide swath of green lawn and embraced by a broad veranda, the house was flanked by ancient elms and one enormous pine tree. Hung at precise intervals from the ceiling of the veranda, baskets of pink and purple fuchsias danced madly in the wind kicked up by the storm.

“Damn crazy weather,” Riley muttered. “When I left a few hours ago, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.”

“You know what they say about Maine.” Tom fumbled on the floor by his feet and came up with a black umbrella. “If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.”

He opened his door, popped open the umbrella, and stepped out of the car. The wind immediately caught the flimsy nylon and aluminum device and did battle with it. Tom danced and ducked like a champion fencer, the umbrella twisting this way and that, before he won the battle. He opened my door and reached in a hand. “Hurry,” he said, rain streaming off his shoulders. “This can’t last long. We’ll get the luggage after it stops.”

Together, we sprinted around the nose of the pickup, skirting the broken pine branches that littered the driveway, and pounded up the steps to the veranda with Riley close behind us. As the rain hammered down on the roof above our heads, Tom closed what was left of the umbrella while I took quick inventory. My feet were drenched, my simple canvas flats probably not salvageable, but the rest of me was relatively unscathed. Except for my hair, which was famous for behaving perfectly fine until the first sign of humidity, at which point I could have been mistaken for Don King’s slightly paler twin sister. I’d hoped to meet my new mother-in-law under more favorable conditions, but there was little I could do at this point.

Besides, it could have been worse. I could’ve looked like Riley. In the twenty-five feet between the car and the porch, Tom’s brother had taken on more water than Lake Michigan during spring runoff. His hair was plastered to his head. Rivulets of water trickled down his cheeks and his neck. He swiped at his wet face with a coat sleeve that only made it worse. Then he shrugged, pulled off the aviator glasses, and shook himself dry like a golden retriever who’d just returned from a dip in the duck pond.

Behind us, the front door creaked open. “Better get inside,” said the woman who stood there, “before the wind blows you away.”

Either I’d misunderstood, or Tom had greatly exaggerated his mother’s imperfections. It wasn’t possible that the graying, matronly woman who greeted us could be the dragon lady he’d described. Nothing about her—from the tightly permed salt-and-pepper hair to the pink pantsuit adorned with rhinestone kittens—fit with the image of the she-devil that I’d been carrying around inside my head. This was Tom’s mother, the terror of the town? The woman who was so hardheaded and difficult? The one who’d blown me off by sending Riley to meet us in her place?

No way.

Over her shoulder, I shot Tom an inquiring glance. He just shrugged. Jeannette Larkin stepped back to study me, and I tried to imagine what she saw when she looked at me: a young woman nearly a decade younger than her son, a little too tall, a little too thin, with dark, frizzy hair and bony knuckles. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that I fell far short of Jeannette’s expectations of a daughter-in-law. Still, I boldly returned her assessment, hoping she’d find me acceptable. For Tom’s sake, if nothing else.

“How was your flight?” she asked.

Relief coursed through me. I’d apparently passed the initial inspection. “Rough,” I admitted. “Very rough.”

“Jules doesn’t like to fly,” Tom said, moving smoothly to my side, “and this storm didn’t help her nerves any. Here, honey, let me take your coat.”

“I’m a bona fide phobic,” I clarified, shrugging off the jacket and surrendering it. “Flying’s at the top of my phobia list, followed closely by anything that slithers.”

Footsteps sounded overhead, and two little girls in matching white sundresses thundered down the stairs. Amid cries of “Daddy! Daddy!” they flung themselves at Tom.

He scooped up the youngest and tossed her over his shoulder. She squealed in protest. The older girl buried her face against his side and clung to him with both arms, as though fearful he’d disappear if she loosened her grip.

Tom lowered the little one to a more comfortable position against his hip and said, “Did you really miss me that much?”

“You were gone forever, Daddy. Did you bring us any presents?”

The older girl pulled her face away from her father’s side just far enough to peer up hopefully at him.

“Presents?” he said, wrinkling his brow as if in puzzlement. “Well, gee, I don’t know. We’ll have to check my luggage. Maybe somebody dropped something in there while I wasn’t looking.”

The younger girl giggled, but the elder daughter narrowed solemn eyes and said, “Oh, Daddy, stop being silly.”

“Guess I can’t put anything over on you two, can I?” He adjusted the little girl against his hip, placed an affectionate hand atop the older girl’s head, and turned to me with a grin. “Jules,” he said, “I’d like you to meet my daughters, Taylor and Sadie. Girls, this is Julie.”

I’d thought meeting Tom’s mother was nerve racking, but this was ten times worse. So much was riding on it. I’d already heard a great deal about his daughters. Like any proud father, Tom had talked nonstop about his girls. Whenever he mentioned their names, his eyes lit up and his voice softened. A blind and deaf person could have seen that these two little girls were his life. If we were going to have any kind of successful marriage, Taylor and Sadie needed to accept me.

“Hi, girls,” I said. “I’m so glad to finally meet you.”

Taylor just stared at me, clear challenge in her eyes. Seven years old, she was the spitting image of her father. She had Tom’s dark hair, his narrow face, and his blue eyes, which right now were studying me with a wariness I understood better than most people would. It was the same wariness I’d shown toward the various women my father had brought home over the years. Not quite welcoming, not quite trusting. The word stepmother had such negative connotations, and Taylor was no fool. She’d adopted a “wait and-see” attitude that I found totally understandable.

Four-year-old Sadie, on the other hand, was as guileless and open as a six-week-old pup. There was no trepidation in her eyes, just avid curiosity and a willingness to accept me for what I was, her dad’s new wife. The two girls couldn’t have been more different if they’d come from different parents. Not just in attitude, but in looks. Although I searched Sadie’s face for any trace of resemblance to Tom, I didn’t find it. Taylor might have inherited her father’s dark good looks, but Sadie, with her peaches-and-cream complexion and her blond curls, must have taken after Tom’s late wife.

She smiled shyly and buried her face against her father’s shoulder. “Hi,” she said.

Life hadn’t been easy for these little girls. They’d been so young when they lost their mother. According to Tom, Elizabeth’s death had hit both girls extremely hard. Even now, two years after their mother’s death, Sadie still had nightmares, and Taylor had trouble trusting new people. It hadn’t been easy on Tom, either, playing both mother and father while trying to maintain his medical practice and his sanity. He’d freely admitted to me that without his mother’s help, he wouldn’t have made it through.

That was one of the things that had drawn me to Tom. After the initial attraction, of course, when I first saw him sitting in the next chair at the dinner table and felt the jolt all the way to the marrow in my bones. But it was the subsequent conversation, the hours we spent together, that cemented my feelings. They say every woman seeks out a man like her father to marry. On the surface, Tom Larkin and Dave Hanrahan were as far apart as the poles, but there were a few things they did have in common. I’d lost my own mother at a young age, and I’d spent my childhood watching Dad struggle to raise me alone. I believe it takes a special kind of man to do that. So I knew where Tom was coming from. And I respected him for it.

Because I’d been through it myself, I knew I needed to tread carefully with Tom’s girls. I couldn’t expect to just jump in and take over where their mother had left off. Sadie might let me get away with it, but Taylor would never allow such a thing. She was old enough to remember, old enough to resent anyone who tried to take Elizabeth’s place. If I hoped to win Taylor over, if I hoped to mold us into a family, I’d have to practice patience.

But I didn’t have to rush. There was plenty of time for that. After all, we had the rest of our lives.

Wind battered the house in a relentless siege. Pine cones and debris rapped at the windows. Somewhere at the rear of the house, a loose shutter banged. But the place held fast. It had been built during an era when homes were designed to withstand a little wind, a little rain. That was a good thing, because we already had three inches of rain, and it was showing no signs of letting up. With wind gusts up to seventy-five miles per hour, the ancient pine that towered over the house creaked and moaned like an arthritic old man. I hoped to God it stayed upright; according to the radio Jeannette kept running in the kitchen, trees had been uprooted all over the county, and if it fell, that pine tree would go straight through the roof. Power lines were down everywhere. Twelve thousand people in the state were already without electricity, and that number was expected to rise.

But indoors, we were cozy and warm. Although we hadn’t lost power, Tom had brought out the candles, the matches, the flashlights, and he’d lined them up on the kitchen counter, just in case. Dinner was roast pork, with steamed asparagus and tiny red potatoes swimming in butter. After an initial hesitation, I forgot manners and just chowed down with my customary enthusiasm. I have what people euphemistically refer to as a healthy appetite. The first time Tom witnessed it, at the buffet table aboard the Island Princess, he’d been floored by the amount of food I was able to ingest without gaining an ounce. He actually found it charming that I have the appetite of a stevedore. I find it annoying that no matter how much I eat, I still look like Olive Oyl, Popeye’s seriously anorexic girlfriend.

Conversation around the dinner table was light and innocuous; Tom and I were asked about the cruise, about how we’d met, about our moonlight wedding and how we’d known so quickly that we were meant for each other. I was just reaching for my third potato when his mother dropped the bomb.

“You haven’t told us anything about your family, Julie,” she said with a smarmy smile. “I’d love to hear about them.”

I hesitated, my fork hovering over the serving dish, and met Tom’s eyes. My husband knew it all. I’d told him everything, the good, the bad and the ugly, and I wondered whether I should regale his mother with the whole sordid truth or a slightly sanitized version thereof.

Beneath the table, Tom slid his foot over to touch mine. His reassuring smile gave me strength. I glanced around the table at all the expectant faces, all these people waiting with bated breath for the life story of the anonymous woman who’d quite literally blown into their lives on the winds of a hurricane.

I speared the potato and put it on my plate. “Well,” I said as I sliced it in two and slathered it with butter, “I’m pretty much alone in the world. Or I was, until I met Tom.” I gave him a shaky smile, and he returned it full force. “I was divorced about a year ago. Before I married Jeffrey, there was just my dad and me. My mother, in her infinite wisdom, left us when I was five years old. Dad died six months ago. Liver cancer.”

I didn’t bother to elaborate. I didn’t tell them that Dad had died of a broken heart and too much boozing. Let them read between the lines if they wanted to. I’m all for honesty, but some skeletons are better left in the closet.

I ate a bite of potato. “My father was…” I trailed off, wondering how on earth to describe Dad in words that normal people would understand. People who’d never had the privilege of knowing him, with all his quirks and oddities. “Very independent. A freethinker. A little to the left of center.”

The girls watched me with wide eyes. Jeannette’s brows were drawn together into a small frown. Probably wondering if there were some family history of severe mental illness that was about to infect her future grandchildren. Directly across the table, Riley seemed curious, waiting. “He was a musician,” I said.

“Ah,” Riley said, as though that explained it all.

“A musician?” Jeannette said. “How interesting.”

Having grown up as Dave Hanrahan’s daughter, I understood only too well that interesting was a euphemism for horrifying. I speared another piece of potato. When I saw the affection and approval in Tom’s eyes, I decided to go for broke. Dabbing my mouth with my napkin, I said, “He was pretty well known at one time, until his career went south and my mother left him. When his career tanked and his band broke up, my mother ran off with the drummer. At that point, his life sort of fell apart.”

That was a polite way of putting it. The truth was that after my mother left, Dad drank himself to death. It took him twenty-seven years, but Dave Hanrahan was nothing if not persistent. The day she walked out the door, he decided that life was no longer worth living, and he spent the rest of his days proving the validity of that theory.

“Good Lord,” Jeannette said, looking as though she’d swallowed a persimmon.

I knew that my life—or, to be more accurate, my father’s life—sounded like a train wreck. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded, but I could understand Jeannette’s horrified expression.

Beneath the table, Tom’s ankle looped around mine. Riley appeared intrigued, so I directed my next words at him. “All the money disappeared. We barely survived. But he was a great dad. The best.”

“Are you going to tell us?” Riley asked. “Or are you keeping his identity a secret?”

“No secret,” I said. “His name was Dave Hanrahan.”

Riley’s face changed, the way it often does when people first hear my father’s name. “Get out of here! The Dave Hanrahan? The front man for Satan’s Revenge?”

“That would be my dad.”

“The guy who wrote ‘Black Curtain’? Oh, man. Tommy, remember how we used to play that record over and over and over? That guy was the epitome of cool. We all wanted to be him.” Riley braced his elbows against the table and leaned forward eagerly, his eyes focused on me, everything and everybody else forgotten. “You must’ve had an amazing childhood,” he said. “Hanging around with all those musicians. Listening to their music. Their stories.”

I opened my mouth to answer him, but I never got the chance. The lights blinked and, from outside, there arose a massive splintering sound, a roar so deafening that it sounded like a freight train passing through. The ground actually shook, and if I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn that the earth itself had opened up and revealed the gateway to Hell.

Then the window behind me imploded.

Two

“It’s not that big a deal,” I said. “Really.”

“You’re lucky to be alive.” With intense concentration and quick, efficient hands, Tom dabbed antiseptic on the gash on my cheek while I tried not to wince. “Another six inches, and—” He closed his eyes and muttered something indecipherable. Darkly, he added, “I knew I should’ve cut down that damn tree last spring.”

He capped the bottle of antiseptic, picked up a Band-Aid, and held my chin in his hand to size up the injury. “It’s too old,” he said, turning my head to the left, then to the right. “Too brittle. Too dangerous.”

“It was just a limb.” A big one.

“Next time, it’s apt to be the whole tree. Damn thing took ten years off my life.”

“I’m fine. Honest.”

“You talk too much. Hold still.” He tore open the Band-Aid, peeled off the paper backing, and gently applied it to my cheek. Sitting back to admire his handiwork, he said, “There. You’ll probably live to talk a little longer.”

I gave him a radiant smile and said, “My hero.”

He grimaced. Crumpling the Band-Aid wrapper, he said, “Some welcome you got. If I were you, I’d run as fast as I could back to Los Angeles.”

“What? And miss all the excitement around here? Surely you jest.”

Humorlessly, he said, “It’s usually a lot more boring than this.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I think I’ll stick around for a while and see for myself.”

He shoved the bottle of antiseptic back into his first-aid kit. “Tomorrow, I’m calling the tree service and having that pine cut down.”

“It seems a shame. It’s probably been standing there for a hundred years.”

“And I’d like to make sure that you’re standing for another hundred.” He closed the lid on the kit and zipped the cover. “The tree goes. Don’t even bother to argue.”

“I suppose you’re saying that because you believe a good wife always obeys her husband.”

Some of the somberness left his face. The corners of his eyes crinkled as he said, “Do you have any idea how tempted I am to say yes?”

I smiled. “But you’re refraining.”

“For now, anyway. We may have to revisit the issue at a later date.”

“Nice save.”

“I thought so.”

The sound of rattling glassware and cutlery drifted in from the kitchen. “Now that I’m all better,” I said, “I should be helping your mother clean up the mess.” We’d left the dining room littered with pine needles, broken branches, and rain water. Shattered glass was everywhere. On the floor. On the dining table. Tiny slivers of it embedded in what was left of our dinner.

“You’re excused from kitchen duty tonight. Doctor’s orders.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Tom? You do realize that you’re an obstetrician?”

“You have a complaint, file it with the AMA.”

Outside, the chain saw had finally stopped its high-pitched whine. Now we could hear a rhythmic hammering as Riley boarded up the broken window. In the moments after the tree limb had made its unceremonious and unexpected foray into the dining room, chaos had reigned. The girls had been semi-hysterical. Jeannette had tried to calm them while simultaneously herding them away from the broken glass. Riley had thrown on a pair of snowmobile boots and a yellow slicker and rushed outside, flashlight in hand, to assess the damage. Meantime, Tom hovered over me like a mother hen, frantically cataloguing and documenting every scratch and bruise. For a man who spent half his life in the delivery room, he’d gone surprisingly pale at the sight of blood. Or maybe it was just the sight of my blood that frightened him.

Once Sadie and Taylor were convinced that nobody was seriously injured and the house wasn’t in imminent danger of collapsing around them, Tom’s mother had bribed them by promising that if they went upstairs and got ready for bed without argument, they could forego their baths for tonight. That was all it took. We hadn’t heard another sound from them.

Until now. They came padding into the living room wearing flannel pajamas and matching Miss Piggy slippers. Taylor had a book in her hand and a sly expression on her face. “We’re ready for our bedtime story,” she said.

“Say good-night, then, and run along to bed,” Tom said. “I’ll be right up.”

“No.” She held the book in both hands and teetered back and forth from one foot to the other. “We want Julie to read it to us.”

Tom and I exchanged glances. “Do you mind, Jules?” he said.

Did I mind? This was an opportunity for bonding, and I wasn’t about to pass it up. “I’d be honored,” I said, standing and taking Sadie by the hand. “Come on, girls. Let’s see what you’re reading.”

The book was Where the Wild Things Are, one of my own childhood favorites. Upstairs in their bedroom, Sadie slipped beneath the covers and I settled beside her to read, while Taylor perched on the edge of her own bed a few feet away. Both girls were engrossed in the story, but after a few minutes, I could see that Sadie was having trouble keeping her eyes open.

“Enough for tonight,” I said. “Time for bed.”

“We’re supposed to say our prayers now,” Taylor informed me. “Before you tuck us in.”

“Oh,” I said. “Right. Of course.” Nothing would have made me admit to them that I wasn’t familiar with this particular bedtime ritual. Dave Hanrahan had nursed a lifelong contempt for anything that smacked of religion, a result of his uptight Catholic upbringing. Dad had attended Our Lady of All Saints School until eighth grade, and the nuns had traumatized him for life. So there’d been no praying in our house. But I’m an obliging soul, and I’ve learned to fake it if I have to. When in Rome, and all that jazz. I could handle a little praying. It might even do me some good.

Taking a cue from the girls, I knelt beside Sadie’s bed, my stepdaughters beside me in their flannel jammies, their oversized Piggy feet stuck out behind them. Hands folded, I closed my eyes and tried to look pious. In unison, they spoke the words of the prayer:

“Now I lay me down to sleep

I pray the Lord my soul to keep

If I should die before I wake

I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

“Amen,” Taylor said.

“Amen,” Sadie echoed. Her eyes popped open and she exclaimed, “Oops! I forgot!” Bowing her head again, she added, “God bless Daddy, and Grandma, and Uncle Riley, and Mommy up in heaven. And—” She opened her eyes, glanced at me, and smiled. “And Julie,” she finished. “Amen.”

A tiny crack appeared in my heart. Maybe winning over Tom’s daughters wouldn’t be so hard after all. They were such precious little girls, and so very needy. And they seemed to genuinely like me.

I pulled back the covers. Sadie scrambled beneath them, and I tucked them up tight under her chin. She lay there beneath the blankets, a dreamy smile on her face, and said, “Are you my mommy now?”

Time stood still. While my heart beat in the silence, I glanced across the empty space between beds to Taylor, who seemed to be holding her breath, awaiting my response.

I lay a hand atop Sadie’s head, felt the cool, soft tickle of baby-fine hair between my fingertips. “Your mom,” I said, “will always be your mom.”

Sadie yawned. “Even though she’s not here any more?”

“Even though. I would never try to take her place. How about for now, we’ll just say we’re friends, and leave it at that? Okay?”

She gave me a sleepy nod and rolled over, burying her face in her pillow. I stood and crossed the room to Taylor, who lay beneath her own covers. Tucking the snow-white bedspread tightly around her, I said, “All set?”

She nodded. I reached out to touch her cheek, then hesitated. I didn’t want to rush things with her. Instead, I simply said, “Good night.”

As I turned to go, she said, “Don’t get too used to being here.”

I paused, not sure I’d heard her correctly. Turning, I said, “Excuse me?”

Her eyes, so like Tom’s, held none of his warmth. Instead, they were glacial. “I said you shouldn’t get too used to being here. Grandma says you won’t last any longer than any of the others.”

I told myself she was just a little girl. Only seven years old. There was no real malice in her words; she was just repeating what she’d heard. But when I thought about the hostility on her face, I wasn’t so sure. Children were capable of cruelty, and Taylor was an intelligent child. She knew she’d upset me. That had been her intention. I’d seen the satisfaction in her eyes before she reached out and turned off the bedside lamp, leaving me to find my way in complete darkness.

I could almost forgive her for her animosity. After all, she was just a child, and she’d suffered an irreparable loss. I could still remember how I’d felt when my mother left us. The fear, the guilt, the knife-edged sense of betrayal. The years spent wondering if it was something I’d done that had driven her away. It had taken me a very long time to get over it—as much as anyone gets over that kind of loss—and I’d sworn that no matter what happened in my life, I’d never, ever do that to a child.

Taylor’s mother hadn’t run away like mine had, but Tom’s daughter had to be feeling some of the same emotions that I’d felt. Death was the ultimate betrayal. And for a girl to lose her mother at such a young age—a mother whose absence would be keenly felt at all life’s most poignant and significant junctures—the loss was immeasurable.

We all grieve in different ways. I’d walked in Taylor’s shoes, and I couldn’t fault her for how she’d chosen to grieve her terrible loss.

But Tom was right. This was some welcome I’d gotten. Wondering just who were these “others” that Taylor had referred to, I headed downstairs to find my husband and demand some answers.

I heard them arguing as soon as I reached the ground floor. They weren’t exactly trying to be quiet. “She can’t stay,” Jeannette said. “You know that as well as I do.”

“I don’t know anything of the kind.” My husband sounded agitated. Furious.

“You don’t know anything about her. For all you know, she could be a gold digger. I cringed when I heard that pathetic story she told about her impoverished childhood. What if she married you for your money?”

Heat raced up my face. Normally, I was adamantly opposed to eavesdropping. But, damn it, this was me they were talking about. Wild horses couldn’t have dragged me away. I crept a little closer to the kitchen door and pressed myself against the dark paneling of the hallway.

“That’s ridiculous,” Tom said.

“You’re a doctor, Tom. She probably took one look at you and decided you were her meal ticket.”

Wearily, my husband said, “I make a decent living, Mother, but I’m hardly in a league with the neurosurgeons of the world. I’m a small-town baby doctor.”

“The perception’s still there that doctor equals money. I just can’t imagine what you were thinking. What happens when she finds out—”

“Finds out what? That I’ve been eaten up by loneliness ever since Elizabeth died? I can’t believe you’d begrudge me a little happiness. Julie’s amazing, Mom, and you’d see that if you gave her half a chance.”

“What about your girls? They need you, Tom. How can you justify stealing what little free time you have away from them to give it to some stranger?”

“They need a mother!”

Sounding hurt, she said, “What do you think I’ve been doing for the past two years?”

Tom’s voice softened. “I know what you’ve been doing,” he said, “and I truly appreciate all you’ve done for us. But it’s not the same thing. The girls need stability, an intact family.”

“It’s not going to work. You know it as well as I do. It’s not too late to have this marriage annulled. I’m begging you to end it before it gets messy. Send her back where she came from and move on with your life.”

Indignation had me holding my breath. Send her back where she came from. What did this woman think I was, a FedEx package?

Tom’s voice again: “She has a name, Mom. It’s Julie.”

“Fine. Send Julie back where she came from, back to L.A., to her hippy-dippy life and her fond memories of her wastrel of a father.”

In a deadly quiet voice, Tom said, “I’m only going to say this once, Mother, so you’d better listen. I don’t give a damn whether or not you like her, but Julie is my wife and, by God, you’ll treat her with respect. If I hear one more negative word about her—”

A sound behind me tore my attention away from the sparring in the kitchen. Riley stood at the foot of the stairs, water dripping off his yellow slicker. I’d been so caught up in the drama being played out in the next room that I hadn’t even heard him come in the front door. I had no idea how long he’d been standing there, or how much he’d overheard. Our eyes met, but neither of us said a word.

“Forget it,” Tom said in disgust. “This discussion is over.”

“Where are you going?” his mother demanded.

“Out. I need to cool off before I say something I’ll regret.”

“For God’s sake, Tom, don’t be an idiot. There’s a hurricane going on out there.”

“And it’s a welcome reprieve from what’s going on in here!”

A door slammed, and a moment later, I heard a car engine start up. My gaze still locked with Riley’s, I saw something there that I didn’t want to see, something that looked remarkably like pity. Without saying a word, I stalked past him to the staircase and fled upstairs.

I closed the bedroom door and slumped against it, my chest heaving with suppressed fury. The luggage standing neatly by the foot of the bed seemed to mock me, and I wondered if I should even bother to unpack. To his credit, Tom—who’d vowed to cherish me until death—had stood up to his mother for me. How long would he be able to stand up to her before she wore him down? I was crazy about my new husband, but if this was the direction my marriage was headed, how long would it be before I decided I’d made a colossal mistake?

I lifted my overnight bag to the bed, unzipped it, and pulled out my pajamas. Stomping into the bathroom, I tossed the pj’s on the toilet seat, started up the shower, and began to strip.

I came to an abrupt halt when I caught sight of my reflection in the eight-foot-long bathroom mirror. I looked like the Wild Woman of Borneo, my cheeks flushed with fury, my eyes wide and wild. Even my hair seemed to be in on the act, standing electrified, as though I’d stuck my finger into a light socket.

How dare she call me a gold digger? The woman didn’t even know me. And she’d already tried to turn Tom’s daughters against me. What kind of monster would poison a child’s mind like that?

I had half a mind to march back downstairs and tell the woman exactly what was what. I’d never been one to mince words or to retreat from a fight. If there was one thing I’d learned firsthand from my dad, it was that quitters never win. Dave Hanrahan had been the poster child for how not to live your life. He’d allowed a run of bad luck, a few lousy decisions, and the hazy comfort of alcohol to destroy his future. Because I’d been witness to his slow and painful deterioration, I’d vowed that I would never let life defeat me the way Dad had. No matter what, I stood up for myself and for what I believed in. And I never, ever backed down.

But, damn it, the woman was Tom’s mother.

And I was the woman who wore Tom’s wedding ring.

Scooping my hair back from my face with both hands, I let out a ragged breath. None of this was his fault. I couldn’t blame Tom because his mother was a monster. He already knew that. He’d been living with the woman for nearly forty years. That was punishment enough for a lifetime. How could I justify giving him the added burden of lunatic behavior?

So I didn’t go back downstairs. For tonight, I’d let it go. Today had been stressful for everyone. Maybe tomorrow, in the clear light of day, things would look different. Maybe tomorrow, after things settled down, Jeannette would see the error of her ways.

But as I stood in the shower, steaming hot water pounding down on my shoulders, I wasn’t at all sure it would happen. Tom’s mother seemed so unyielding that I wondered if there was more going on here than I was privy to. Was there some deep, dark secret that Tom hadn’t bothered to tell me? Was it possible that Jeannette’s train had simply run off the tracks? There’d been something in that look Tom and his brother exchanged at the airport, something about their mother that remained unspoken but understood by both of them. I couldn’t help wondering if a woman so determined to deprive her son of happiness might be a little unbalanced. Would a sane, rational woman attempt to poison the minds of her grandchildren because she didn’t want their father remarrying? No matter how I looked at it, there was no rational explanation for her behavior.

One thing I did know as I stepped from the shower and toweled my hair dry: I’d never felt so alone in my life. Not even after my baby died and the world became a barren, empty place. This was far worse. The world after Angel’s death had been indifferent to my pain; I’d experienced none of the malevolence, none of the deliberate and focused hatred, that I felt here in this house.

I was wrapped in my fluffy white chenille robe, yanking a brush through my wet hair, when Tom came back. He closed the bedroom door quietly behind him. Brush in hand, I paused between strokes. Our eyes met: his uncertain, mine accusing. “Hi,” he said.

“I heard you,” I said bluntly. “In the kitchen. Arguing.”

He grimaced. “How much did you hear?”

“Enough.”

“Jules,” he said, “I’m so sorry.”

“That makes two of us. I don’t understand, Tom. Make me understand.”

“I don’t know what to say. My mother’s overprotective. She’s always been that way.”

Overprotective? Was that what he called it? If so, we might as well be speaking different languages. “I can think of a few other adjectives that fit even better,” I said. “How about mean? Spiteful? Vicious? Just for starters.”

“I don’t have a response for you, Jules, because you’re right.” He raked slender, pale fingers through his dark hair. “I knew things would be a little awkward. I knew she wouldn’t be happy about our marriage. But I never thought she’d be insulting to you.”

“She called me a gold digger! And my father a wastrel!”

“And if you were paying attention, you know that I stood up for you.”

“Yes. You did. And I’m grateful. But if this is the way she’s going to treat me, I’m not sure how long I can refrain from giving her a large piece of my mind.”

“Aw, honey.” He took a step toward me. “She’ll adjust. Just give her a little time.”

“That’s not everything, Tom. There’s more.” I told him what Taylor had said to me, the terrible things his mother had taught her, and he winced as if in pain.

“Christ, Mom,” he muttered, rubbing his face with his hands. “What the hell are you thinking?”

I hated to see him this way. Hated even worse knowing I was the one who’d put that look on his face. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t want to tell you, but I thought you should know.”

“I swear to God, Jules, I had no idea I was bringing you into this kind of nightmare. I wouldn’t blame you if you walked away. It would kill me, but I wouldn’t blame you.”

“I’m not going anywhere. I take my marriage vows seriously. For better or for worse, remember? I’ll do whatever it takes to win her over. If that doesn’t work, then I’ll just have to learn to live with her. Somehow.” The picture that painted in my mind was bleak enough that I had to shove it aside.

“I’m not sure it could get much worse. This isn’t fair to you. It’s unacceptable. If Mom keeps this up, she’ll have to live somewhere else.”

Aghast, I said, “You can’t throw her out, Tom. She’s your mother.”

“And you’re my wife! There’s another vow you should remember: forsaking all others. Yes, she’s my mother. But you’re my family now. You and the girls. If she’s determined to come between us—” he scowled “—or between you and my daughters, I won’t allow it.”

I wasn’t sure if I felt better or worse. It was a comfort to know that Tom was solidly in my corner. On the other hand, I didn’t want to be responsible for the dissolution of his family. Wishing I could avoid asking, but knowing I couldn’t, I said, “Tom? What did your mother mean when she told Taylor I wouldn’t last any longer than any of the others?”

My husband rolled his eyes. “All those others,” he said. “All the screaming, swooning hordes of women I’ve dated since Elizabeth died.”

This was one thing we hadn’t talked about, not in detail. His sexual history. Mine. We’d been too busy falling for each other to get around to the topic of our collective romantic past. At first, we hadn’t thought much about it. Once we were married, it didn’t seem to matter.

But now, suddenly, it did. “Have there been screaming, swooning hordes?” I asked.

“Come on, Jules. Do I look like Jon Bon Jovi to you?”

In my book, he looked far better than Jon. Which was saying a lot. But he was deliberately missing the point. “I’m serious, Tom. How many were there?”

He crossed the room to me and took my hand. “Elizabeth’s been dead for two years.” He tucked a strand of wet hair behind my ear. “I haven’t lived like a monk. I’ve dated a few women. None of them stuck around. None of them stuck around because I wasn’t serious about any of them. I swear, Jules, you’re the only one who ever screamed or swooned.”

Coyly, I said, “I don’t seem to recall any swooning.”

He leaned over me and buried his nose in my hair. “You smell so good. What’s that scent you’re wearing?”

“Strawberry. It’s my shampoo.”

“Don’t ever stop using it.” His chin brushed my temple, his five o’clock shadow grazing my skin. His breath warm on my ear, he crooned softly: “Julie, Julie, Julie, do you love me?”

“Stop,” I said weakly. It was a private joke between us, that hokey old Bobby Sherman song. “Please stop.”

“You know you love it. So tell me, Jules, is the honeymoon over yet?”

I toyed with a strand of his hair and said, “Not quite yet.”

“Then why are we wasting time? Hand over your weapon.”

I gaped at him stupidly until he pried the hairbrush I’d been brandishing from my fingers. “You could do a lot of harm with that thing,” he said, “depending on where you’re aiming it.”

“Ouch.”

“Exactly. So what do you say, Mrs. Larkin? Time to end the foreplay and cut right to the main event?”

I flashed him a huge grin and said, “I thought you’d never ask.”

It was hours later and inky dark when his cell phone rang. Peeling his naked body away from mine, Tom fumbled on the nightstand until he located the offending object. He cleared his throat and said, “Dr. Larkin.” Listened a moment, then said, “Yes, of course. Not a problem.”

I raised my head and looked at the clock, then hooked an arm around him and pressed my cheek against his sleek, broad back. Leaning into me, he said, “How far apart are the pains?” A pause. Then, “All right. I’ll meet you at the hospital.”

He hung up the phone and turned to me. “Sorry, Jules. Gotta go.”

Sleepily, I said, “It’s two-thirty in the morning.”

“Might as well get used to it. Life would be a lot easier if babies were courteous enough to plan their arrivals between 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.” He kissed the tip of my nose and left the bed. I listened as he dressed in the darkness, then walked to the window and peered through the blind. Quietly, he said, “Looks like the storm’s over.”

“Be careful anyway.”

“Always. Go back to sleep, Jules.”

When I woke again, the blinds were open, the sun was pouring in, and the clock read 8:37. I rolled over and spied the note propped against Tom’s pillow. Didn’t want to wake you, it read, you looked so beautiful asleep. Make yourself at home. Mi casa es su casa. Literally. Oh—if you want to go anywhere, the Land Rover’s all yours. Keys are hanging in the kitchen. Can’t wait to see you tonight. Love, T.

Smiling, I lay back against the pillow. I must’ve been dead to the world, because I’d never heard him return, never heard him leave a second time. It must have been the fresh Maine air or something. I got up, showered and dressed, then headed downstairs, anticipating a run-in with the dragon lady. But the house was deserted, silent, the morning sun flooding the kitchen with warmth. My new mother-in-law must be a cog in the wheel of the American workforce. Or else she’d fled the house because she didn’t want to deal with me any more than I wanted to deal with her. Wasn’t that the way with most passive-aggressive types? They tended to avoid conflict. And being nice to my face, then talking trash behind my back, was classic passive-aggressive behavior.

Or maybe she was just a two-faced bitch.

With some satisfaction, I pondered that possibility before telling myself to let it go or it would spoil my day. And what a day it was! Abundant sunshine and cloudless cerulean skies. Not a hint of the storm that had raged a few hours earlier. Except, of course, the damage it had left behind. With a bowl of Cheerios in hand, I flung open the French doors that led to the patio and stepped outside. The lawn was littered with branches, leaves and assorted debris. A small tree had been uprooted, and it lay forlorn, felled by the storm’s fury. I found a wooden chair that wasn’t too wet and sat down to eat my breakfast. A pair of bright yellow birds flew past, darting and swooping and twittering before they disappeared in the branches of a massive elm tree. I thought they might be goldfinches, but I wasn’t sure. On the ground beneath the bird feeder, a cluster of sparrows pecked at spilled seed.

Around the corner of the house, a chain saw started up, its obnoxious whine tearing a jagged hole in the smooth fabric of the morning. Startled by the noise, the sparrows scattered. I finished my Cheerios and went back inside to put the bowl and spoon in the dishwasher. Then I went in search of the chain saw.

It wasn’t hard to find. The noise level was appalling. In Riley’s capable hands, the lime-green monster sang its own peculiar aria, the whine working its way up and down the scale. Dressed in a Hard Rock T-shirt, jeans, and safety glasses, Tom’s brother finessed the saw with smooth, efficient motions. The branch that had fallen was as big around as my waist, and the chain saw protested loudly as he sliced it into neat, foot-long segments. I stood watching him until he became aware of my scrutiny. Then he took a step back, turned off the chain saw, and removed his safety glasses.

Birdsong filled the sudden silence, and for an instant I felt awkward, remembering what he’d witnessed last night and wishing he hadn’t. “Sleep well?” he said.

“As well as can be expected.” I raised a hand to shade my eyes from the bright sun. I knew we were both thinking about our last meeting. I might as well bring it into the open instead of dancing around it. “Your mother,” I said, “doesn’t seem to like me.”

Fiddling with the pull cord to the chain saw, he said, “You did seem to bring out the worst in her.”

“It’s a talent,” I said.

He balanced the butt of the saw against his booted foot. “I wouldn’t let her get to me if I were you.”

“I don’t intend to. I’m indomitable.”

He studied me with blue eyes very much like Tom’s. And the corner of his mouth twitched. “Yeah,” he said. “I can see that.”

“So where, exactly, is she this morning? Your sainted mother?”

“She’s at work. Tessie’s Bark and Bath.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Tessie’s Bark and Bath?”

He grinned. “Mom’s a dog groomer.”

“And I’ll bet she frightens the poor things into submission.” Changing the subject, I pointed to the pile of wood he’d cut. “This pine branch is enormous. What’ll you do with all this wood?”

“Split it. Stack it. Come winter, it’ll keep the house warm.”

“Winter,” I said. “That seems like such a foreign concept. I’m a Southern California girl. I’m used to sunshine. The beach. I’ve never done winter. Does it really get as cold as I’ve heard?”

“Take whatever you’re expecting and multiply it by ten. February may be the shortest month, but it’s also the coldest. And the darkest. You’ll want to buy an extra-warm coat. Fur-lined boots. Thick gloves. And a wool scarf. That is, assuming you’re still here come February.”

I shoved my hands into the pockets of my jeans. “Are you saying there’s some reason I might not be here?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“She’s not going to drive me away, Riley.”

“I didn’t say that, either. It’s just—”

“What?”

His blue eyes studied me, but I couldn’t decipher what was going on behind them. “Nothing,” he said. “I have to get back to work. This tree won’t get cut up by itself.”

I stepped away as Riley fired up the chain saw. He adjusted his safety goggles, nodded to me, and went back to cutting.

I suspected I’d been snubbed, although I wasn’t wholly certain. But I was definitely starting to feel as if I’d stepped through the looking glass and into some otherworldly dimension where everything was a little off center.

But I didn’t allow myself to wallow in it; I had no sympathy for people who sat around bemoaning their fates. Pity parties aren’t my style. I had far too much to do. Since I’d decided against making a run for it, I needed to unpack and try to find space for all my things in Tom’s bedroom. Our bedroom, I reminded myself.

I headed back to the house, rummaged through my purse for a notebook and pen, and sat at the kitchen table to make a list of what needed doing. I’m a compulsive list-maker. I simply can’t seem to stop. Jeffrey used to make fun of me because of it, but list-making helps me keep my life organized and running on track. If I didn’t make lists, I’d never remember anything. I use them in both my private and business life, and my friends and coworkers always point out how utterly organized I am. I just smile enigmatically and accept the compliment, while mentally thumbing my nose at my ex-husband. What can I say? Sometimes even a mature woman has to let her inner child out once in a while.

First on the list: Go to bank. I’d already closed my bank account and had the balance transferred electronically to Tom’s account, but I still had to drop by the bank and fill out paperwork to make it official. I’d managed to put away a small amount of money in savings, and the sale of my Miata had added a couple thousand to that. I’d hated selling my car, and I’d nearly cried when the used car salesman drove it away. But Tom had said that come winter, the sports car would be useless in the snow, and he’d promised to replace it with a brand-new four-wheel-drive SUV of my choice. So I’d caved. My life in California was over. Big changes were taking place. If I intended to live year-round in Maine, I needed to start acting like a Mainer. I would drive the SUV, even if my heart did secretly ache for a two-seater sports coupe.

Items two, three and four on the list were more housekeeping stuff: Get a Maine driver’s license, Apply for a new social security card, and Notify credit card company of new name and address. Item five was more generic: Contact old friends I’ve lost touch with. People I talked to once or twice a year, exchanged Christmas cards with. Old school chums, friends of my dad, people Jeffrey and I used to socialize with. A couple of great-aunts. People I had little in common with, but that I didn’t want to lose complete contact with.

I paused at number six. Chewing absently at the cap of my Bic pen, I pondered. At some point, Tom and I needed to figure out where to store my household belongings, which were in a moving van headed east on an Interstate highway somewhere between California and Maine. My entire life, packed into a green-and-yellow box truck. The ETA was next Sunday; I expected it would take me some time to go through everything and decide what to use, what to keep in storage, and what to discard. But we hadn’t yet discussed where the boxes and furniture would go in the interim. Number six: Talk to Tom about storage! I underlined it, then circled it several times in heavy black ink just in case there was any chance I might miss it next time I looked.

I thought about putting Find a job on the list. I’d been working since I was fifteen. No slacker, I’d worked my way through college, then bounced around the L.A. job scene for a couple of years before I landed at Phoenix. There, I worked my way up the ladder to store manager. I’d always been a high-energy person, and it seemed odd to have no place I needed to be every morning at eight, hi-test cup of java in hand.

But looking for a job now would be pointless. Tom and I had talked it over, and in January, I was going back to school to get my master’s degree. I’d been thinking about it for some time now. Although I’d loved my job at Phoenix, I didn’t aspire to a career in retail. Actually, to my surprise, I’d realized that what I most wanted to do was teach. My degree in business management hadn’t prepared me for that particular career choice, so it was time to hit the books again. Tom had been extremely supportive, reassuring me that he was fully capable of supporting me financially while I trained for a new career.

When my list was as complete as I could make it, I went back upstairs to unpack. The master bedroom suite had been designed with his-and-hers walk-in closets. I opened the door of the left-hand closet and found Tom’s clothes, his suits and shirts and pants, arranged by color and hung with care, evenly spaced a half-inch apart. His shoes were lined up neatly on two shelves. Some fancy contraption built into the wall held his neckties, hung with a meticulousness that prevented any one tie from touching any other. Good God. I hoped he didn’t expect me to share his neatness fetish. I generally took off my clothes and flung them. If I managed to hit the chair instead of the floor, I figured I was doing exceptionally well.

Because snooping in my husband’s closet seemed like an invasion of his privacy, I closed the door and moved to the other closet. Not so much as a dust bunny inhabited its vacant space. Ditto for the bureau drawers. Tom kept his underwear and socks—stacked with razor-sharp precision—in the upright dresser. The bureau must have been Elizabeth’s territory. I was a little surprised to find no evidence that she had ever lived here. No clothes, no knickknacks, no wedding photos, no froufrou female stuff. At some point after her death, Tom had removed all her belongings. Now that I thought about it, I’d seen no evidence of her presence anywhere in this house. Downstairs, photos of the girls were displayed here and there: school photos as well as candids of them with Tom, and with their grandmother and their uncle Riley. But not a single likeness of Elizabeth graced the house.

I wondered why this made me uneasy. It seemed odd that a man who’d loved his wife, a man who’d spent years with her and made babies with her, would keep no physical reminders of her after she was gone. No little personal objects, no mementos of any kind. It was as if the moment Elizabeth was gone, Tom had tried to pretend she’d never existed.

Had their marriage been unhappy? Tom hadn’t mentioned any problems with his first marriage, so I’d simply assumed theirs had been a satisfactory union. On the other hand, I hadn’t bothered to ask. For all I knew, they could have been on the verge of divorce when Elizabeth died. If there were problems, that might explain why all trace of her was gone from the house.

Trying to rationalize away my unease, I told myself I was probably just identifying too closely with Tom’s late wife. More than likely, my subconscious was wondering what would happen if I died. Whether I, too, would be erased from this house as though I’d never set foot inside it.

Because that thought bothered me more than I cared to admit, I distracted myself with unpacking. It didn’t take long; I’d traveled light. Most of my clothes were packed away on that moving van. Until they arrived, I’d manage quite nicely with the jeans and casual shirts I’d brought with me. I’d packed only one “serious” dress, and I doubted I’d be needing it here; I couldn’t imagine that, as the wife of a small-town Maine doctor, I’d have many formal social engagements.

I managed to fill one bureau drawer, and I hung the rest of my clothes in the closet. They looked pathetic hanging in all that empty space, as did my toiletries, lined up on one end of the massive white marble bathroom counter. I sneaked a peek in one of the medicine cabinets. Empty. I opened the other and found Tom’s toiletries—razor, toothbrush, deodorant, aftershave—all shelved neatly, again carefully spaced so that no two objects touched. I closed the cabinet, looked at my cluster of mismatched items cluttering up the counter, and decided to move them to the empty medicine cabinet, where my neatnik husband wouldn’t be forced to look at them every time he walked into the room.

It was an improvement. I closed the mirrored door on my hair care products and perfumes, returning the powder room to its formerly immaculate state. Because I had no excuse to kill any more time up here, I headed back down to the kitchen. I still had the whole house all to myself. Except for Riley, but he was still outside, wielding the chain saw with its ferocious growl.

I took the keys to the Land Rover from the hook in the kitchen, let myself out the screen door, and marched over to where my brother-in-law was working. He shut down the saw and watched me approach. “Can you give me directions? I need to go to Tom’s bank, the DMV, and the social security office.”

He swiped at his brow with a shirtsleeve, picked up a bottle of water, and took a long swig. “The bank’s downtown,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “First National Bank on Main Street. You can’t miss it. Social security office is in the federal building across the street from the bank. Second floor, above the post office. The nearest DMV office is in Portland.”

I thanked him and headed across the lawn to the driveway. It wasn’t until I got into the Land Rover that I discovered it was a stick shift. Crap on a cracker. My Miata had been an automatic. Yes, I know what you’re thinking. Bright yellow, automatic, four-cylinder convertible. You’re thinking, chick car. I plead guilty as charged. But I liked driving an automatic, and I was a disaster with a stick. Jeffrey had tried once to teach me how to drive his five-speed Corolla, but the lesson had been a catastrophe I didn’t want to repeat. The shifting part I got down without much trouble. It was the clutch, the dreaded clutch, that was my downfall.

In theory, I understood how it worked. The clutch goes to the floor, the car starts, the clutch comes up slowly as the gas pedal goes down. When it catches, you give it more gas and ease the clutch the rest of the way up. It sounds so simple, but a crucial piece of the puzzle, the kinetic understanding of when to ease up on the clutch and when to press down on the gas, had thus far eluded me. I could probably manage to drive the damn thing, but it would be a herky-jerky, humiliating experience.

My options ran the gamut from A to B. A, I could stay home, tell Tom that I couldn’t drive a standard shift, and see what happened. Or, B, I could teach myself to drive the car, no matter how humiliating it might be.

I thought about my determination not to let life defeat me. Thought about my dad, who had. Thought about how I’d survived the death of my newborn, and the subsequent death of my marriage. I was a strong woman. An intelligent woman. A determined woman. I’d survived the loss of everyone I loved, then moved on and started life over with Tom. I’d moved three thousand miles away from home to be with him. If I could do all that, I could drive this damn car.

I took a breath, pressed the clutch to the floor, and turned the key. The engine roared to life. So far, so good. I locked the seat belt into place, made sure the shifter was in first gear, then slowly, smoothly, eased up on the clutch with my left foot while stepping on the accelerator with the right.

The car lurched forward and came to a rocking, shuddering halt.

A trickle of sweat ran down my spine. I started the engine again. Concentrating hard, again I eased up on the clutch. This time, I gave it a little more gas than I had the first time. When I felt the car begin to roll, I stepped down hard on the gas pedal and let up on the clutch. The engine roared, and I actually managed to move forward a couple of feet before coming to a stop so abrupt that if I hadn’t been wearing my seat belt, the windshield and I would have experienced a close personal encounter.

I was not having fun. I wiped sweat from my eyes and bit down on my lower lip. Concentrate, I told myself silently. Just concentrate. You can DO this. I let up on the clutch and pressed the gas, and the car jerked and shuddered so hard my teeth clacked together.

“Fuck,” I said, thumping the palms of my hands against the steering wheel. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“Having a little trouble?”

I flushed crimson when I saw Riley standing there. “Go away,” I said. “I really don’t need a witness to my mortification.”

“You’re thinking too hard. You don’t drive a car by thinking. You drive by feel.”

Slumped over the steering wheel like a beach ball with a puncture wound, I said, “Then I believe my feeling apparatus is faulty.”

“No, it isn’t. Slide over.”

“I thought you had work to do.”

“It’ll still be there when I get back. Go ahead. Scoot over.”

I climbed awkwardly over the gearshift and plunked down hard on the passenger seat. Riley slid in behind the wheel, started the car, and together we listened to the purr of the engine.

“You can’t think your way through it,” he said. “You have to turn off your brain and tune into the vehicle. Become one with the car. Feel what it’s feeling.”

“How new age-y. Will we be hearing Yanni playing in the background anytime soon?”

“It has nothing to do with any new age bullshit. Close your eyes.”

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t worry, I’m not a serial killer. Just do it.”

“You know, your family might be a little unusual…but you certainly aren’t boring people.” I closed my eyes and waited for what would happen next.

“Instead of thinking,” he said, “I want you to use your other senses. Hear the sound of the engine. Feel the vibrations. Let the car tell you what it wants.”

“Whatever you say, Yoda.”

“Stop being a wiseass and pay attention. We’re going to take a little spin around the block, and you’re going to feel how I drive the car. Without filtering it through your left brain thinking mechanism. No talking. Just feel.”

Eyes squeezed tightly shut, I gamely settled back against the passenger seat. This little experiment was doomed to failure, but I was a good sport, and it wasn’t as though I had anything to do that wouldn’t wait.

But a funny thing happened on the way to failure. As we cruised the suburban streets of Newmarket, Maine, population 8,931, I began to get a sense of what he’d been trying to tell me. Experiencing the motions of the car, listening to the up-and-down hum of the rpm’s, I thought I understood. Just a little.

Until he pulled over. “Your turn,” he said.

He left the shifter in neutral and the parking brake on, and we swapped places. “Remember what I said,” he told me. “Don’t think. Just feel.”

“Do I get to keep my eyes closed while I drive?”

He reached around behind him, found the seat belt, locked and tightened it. “No.”

“I sort of figured you’d say that.”

I made a couple of false starts. “When you feel it start to catch,” he instructed, “synchronize your left and right foot. Don’t think about it. Feel it catch, feel the car start to move, feel how much gas it needs, and follow through.”

Right. Like that was going to happen. But this time, I actually got the car moving. No shuddering, no jerking. Just a smooth ride down the street. I shifted at the proper time, with a minimum of disturbance, and Riley nodded.

“You’re a good student,” he said.

“I do all right once I’m moving. It’s the stopping and starting that bother me the most. Where to?”

“Keep going straight.” Apparently without fear of imminent death, he slumped comfortably on his tailbone and stretched out his legs. “I’ll tell you when to turn.”

“All righty then.” I upshifted until I reached cruising speed, then sneaked a glance at him from the corner of my eye. “So,” I said. “What’s the story with you and Tom?”

I could feel his eyes on me, but I kept mine on the road. “What story?” he said.

“Don’t be oblique. It’s obvious to anybody who isn’t deaf, dumb and blind that there’s some kind of bad blood between the two of you.”

“Maybe you should be asking Tom.”

“Tom’s not here,” I said brightly. “So I’m asking you.”

Riley casually pressed the button for the car window. A little too casually, I thought. The window lowered with a soft hiss and he turned his face to the fresh air. “There’s no bad blood,” he said, scrutinizing the passing scenery. “We just don’t always see eye to eye. Maybe you’ve noticed that we don’t have a lot in common.”

Looking at him, with his torn T-shirt, wrinkled jeans and shaggy hair, I thought of my husband. Thought of his buttoned-down neatness, his trim haircut, his meticulously clean fingernails with the cuticles pushed back to reveal the white half-moons. Thought of his closet, the clothes hung with such precision that he could have measured the distance between them with a ruler. “Yes,” I agreed, “I think it’s safe to say that your styles don’t quite mesh.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“What’s another way?”

He thrust his arm out the window and held it there, his palm open to deflect the wind as we drove. “Tom,” he said, waggling his fingers, “was always the golden boy. Star quarterback, class president, head of the debate club. National Honor Society. Prom king. Everybody loved him. Everybody knew he’d go far. He played basketball. Soccer. Golf, for Christ’s sake.”

“Golf?” I said skeptically.

“Stupidest game ever invented.”

“And what did you play?”

“The Doors and Kurt Cobain, for the most part.”

It explained a lot. “So you were one of those anti-establishment types.”

Riley drew his arm back into the car. “I was a loser. That was my assigned role in the family. While Tom was out running touchdowns and winning awards and getting laid by every blue-eyed blond cheerleader in sight, I was sitting in my room with the curtains closed, smoking weed, contemplating my teenage angst, and plucking minor chords on my Gibson.”

“It must’ve been hard,” I said, “growing up in his shadow.”

“It was torture. Everyone thought he was God. That he could do no wrong. I was always being compared to him, and always falling short. I wasn’t perfect like he was. I was actually capable of making mistakes. I wasn’t interested in the same things Tom was. Athletics bored me to tears. I was into music. I wasn’t a clone of my brother, and it made people uncomfortable. They didn’t understand me. Because I wasn’t like Tom, I must be defective in some way.” His voice held no bitterness; he was simply stating facts. “It never occurred to anybody that there was nothing wrong with me, that I just needed to be me.”

“So you rebelled.”

“I smoked and drank and raised hell. I totaled a couple of cars, got into fights, got kicked out of school two or three times. I didn’t go looking for trouble, it just seemed to follow me around. Which, of course, made my faultless older brother look even better. If they’d only known.” When he smiled, his eyes crinkled the way Tom’s did. “Tommy wasn’t anywhere near as perfect as Mom wanted to believe.”

“Oh?”

“Don’t get me wrong. He wasn’t a bad kid. Just a normal one. He did his share of wild and crazy things, only he was smarter than me. He never got caught. But everybody—the entire town—had him on a pedestal. It wasn’t any easier on Tommy, growing up here, than it was on me. That’s the big drawback to living in a small town. Everybody knows you, or at least they think they do. You get a certain reputation, a label, and it sticks. The perfect kid. The troublemaker. In a small town like Newmarket, those labels are the kiss of death, because people wear blinders. They see exactly what they expect to see, and nothing more. Most of them wouldn’t know the truth if it hit ’em upside the head.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why should you be? You had nothing to do with it. It all happened a long time ago.”

“Maybe so. But a lousy childhood sucks, no matter who or where you are. How did Tom deal with it?”

“He played the game, the same as I did. Except that it was a different game he played. After Dad died, as far as Mom was concerned, it was Tommy who’d be our savior. He was the good son, the one who always did exactly what was expected of him. It was actually easier on me, because I was the invisible one. Everybody’s attention was so focused on Tom that most of the time, they forgot I was even there. I did pretty much whatever I wanted. Tom was the one who toed the line. He graduated with honors, went to college on a full athletic scholarship. Continued on to medical school. Married Elizabeth, started his own practice, and started raising a family. He’s almost forty years old, and he’s still doing what Mom wants him to do.”

“Not necessarily,” I pointed out. “He did marry me.”

“His one act of rebellion. I have to admit I was impressed when I heard what he’d done. It was so out of character. Turn left at the next intersection.”

Following his directions, I lost speed during the turn. The car shuddered and nearly stalled, but I feathered the accelerator and pulled out of it. Riley nodded approvingly.

“And you,” I said, once I’d upshifted again, “it looks as though you’re still playing your assigned role, too. Bad boy. Prodigal son.”

“We humans are most comfortable with the roles we find most familiar.”

“There’s another little ditty I’ve heard: Familiarity breeds contempt.”

“I manage to sleep quite nicely at night, thank you, in spite of being the black sheep of the family.”

“Good for you,” I said, not sure I really meant it. Riley was the classic underachiever, and I identified with him more closely than I wanted to admit. It wasn’t necessarily an admirable trait. “Can I ask you something else?”

“I doubt I could stop you if I wanted to.”

“Tell me about Elizabeth.”

Silence. It stretched out for an endless five seconds before he said, “Why?” There was something in his voice, something that hadn’t been there before, but I couldn’t identify it. “Shouldn’t that be Tom’s job?”

It was too embarrassing to admit that my husband had told me virtually nothing about his first wife. Instead, I left Tom out of the equation. “I want to hear what you have to say about her. For starters, why aren’t there any pictures of her in the house?”

“I’m the wrong person to ask. I don’t even live there anymore. I have my own apartment, upstairs over the carriage house.”

“It just seems odd. If only for the sake of the girls, there should be something. But it’s as though she never lived there.”

“The Lord and my family both move in mysterious ways. I gave up years ago trying to figure either of them out.”

“Then tell me about her. What was she like?”

“She was the ideal life partner for my brother, so much like him it was nauseating.”

“In what ways?”

“She was perfect. Maybe a little too perfect. Smart, pretty. Not in a glamorous way. More a Katie Couric than a Sharon Stone. Elizabeth was the quintessential freckle-faced girl-next-door. She was a cheerleader in high school, one of those girls you love to hate, except that in her case, it was impossible. Nobody could hate Beth. She was sweet, in a genuine way that softened the heart of even the hardest cynic.”

“So you liked her.”

“Everybody liked her. Just like Tom, she was universally loved, and placed on a pedestal by the good citizens of our fair city.”

Wondering how I could possibly measure up to this paragon of virtue, I took a deep breath and tightened my fingers on the steering wheel. “Did she and Tom have a good marriage?”

I could feel his eyes on me again. “Julie,” he said, “you’re barking up the wrong tree here. I can’t answer that question. Nobody knows what goes on inside somebody else’s marriage.”

“Of course not. But you must have an opinion, based on what you witnessed. Did they seem happy together?”

Riley shifted position and stared out the window. “I’m probably not the person most qualified to judge.”

“Oh? Why is that?”

“I guess you could call it a conflict of interest.” He turned away from the window, and when his eyes met mine, I saw something in them that looked an awful lot like resentment. “You see, before my brother stole her away, Beth was engaged to me.”

Three

The accounts manager at the First National Bank of Newmarket was friendly and efficient. Millicent Waterhouse had gone to school with Tom, and she had nothing but good things to say about Newmarket’s dashing young obstetrician. “You’re a lucky woman,” she told me as I filled out paperwork. “As far as I’m concerned, Tom Larkin is the best thing that ever happened to this town. I was thrilled when he came back here to start his practice. He could’ve made more money just about anywhere else, but he chose to come home instead, and nobody around here has forgotten that.”

I glanced up from my clipboard and gave her a bland smile. “Is that so?”

“You’d better believe it. When Tom came back, old Doc Thompson was getting ready to retire. Nobody was sorry to see him go. He was a cranky old curmudgeon, and he usually smelled like a stinky old cigar butt that’s been sitting in a dirty ashtray for three days.” Millie’s eyes twinkled. “But Tom’s nothing like Doc Thompson. He’s patient and kind, he always smells nice, and he just puts you at ease. He delivered both of my youngest kids, and when my sister started going through early menopause, he explained everything to her and helped her decide whether or not to take hormone replacement therapy.”

This was the Tom I knew, the charming, kindhearted patron saint of mothers-to-be, menopausal sisters, and bent-but-not-broken thirty-year-old women in need of rescuing. Not the Tom that Riley had described, the man who’d come back from college, medical degree in hand, and proceeded to steal his brother’s fiancée. There had to be more to it than that. Tom was a good man, a man with strong ethics. I couldn’t imagine him crossing that fraternal boundary.

Finally managing to escape from the loquacious Millicent, I crossed the street to the federal building and took care of my business at the social security office. The DMV, thirty miles away in Portland, would have to wait for another day. Maybe, if Tom could get a few hours free, we could combine that with car shopping, as I suspected the selection would be greater in a larger city. Wandering up and down Newmarket’s block-long main street, I inspected the window displays and played tourist. A teenage girl feeding coins into a parking meter smiled at me. An elderly man with a buff-colored Pomeranian on a leash sat on a bench outside the barber shop. I passed an old-fashioned apothecary shop with a soda fountain. Two doors down, showcased in the window of The Bridal Emporium, was an elegant ivory satin-and-lace vintage wedding dress that shot a pang of longing straight through me.

Of their own volition, my feet slowed and then stopped. I stood before that plate-glass window, admiring the dress, for a long time. This was my one regret. I’d been married twice, yet I’d never had a wedding gown. Like most adolescent girls, I’d spent endless hours imagining what my wedding would be like when I finally met my prince. Whenever I’d pictured it, I was wearing a dress like this one. But fate had other plans in mind for me. Jeffrey, ever the romantic, had dragged me off to city hall to get married on our lunch hour. I should have known right then and there that the marriage was doomed. On the other hand, my wedding to Tom, on that beach in the Bahamas, had contained nearly all the elements of my teenage dream: the breathless bride, the handsome groom, the heartfelt and intensely personal vows. It was exotic, romantic, almost perfect. The only thing missing was the dress.

When I’d looked my fill, I moved on, to Lannaman’s bakery. If I’d previously doubted the existence of God, the smells emanating through the screen door were enough to make me reconsider. I went inside and bought a half-dozen assorted doughnuts and two chocolate éclairs. The doughnuts were for the girls, a blatant attempt at bribery. The éclairs were for Tom. They were his favorite dessert, and I intended to save them for later, during a private moment together, as I had a few dessert ideas of my own.

Carrying a cardboard bakery box tied with string, I was about to cross the street to my car when I noticed the bead boutique. I’d missed it on the first go-round, although I wasn’t sure how I had overlooked the mouthwatering window display of Chinese turquoise. I’d never been able to resist turquoise. The shop entrance was around the corner, tucked into an alcove. When I opened the door, a bell tinkled overhead. The woman behind the counter was unpacking boxes of merchandise. She glanced up, said, “Good morning,” and returned to her work.

As a bead shop pro, I didn’t need a road map to find my way around. The shop was organized by material and by color. I went directly to the turquoise gemstones that were hung on nylon strings along a side wall. I lifted a string of round beads, weighed its heft in my hand, rubbed my fingers against the cool, polished stone. No two natural stones are ever identical, and there are often subtle variations in color, shape and smoothness. Sometimes consistency is important in a piece. At other times, a little diversity makes life more interesting.

“They’re on sale right now,” the proprietor said, without looking up from her work. “Thirty percent off all gemstones.”

I checked the tag. The price was reasonable for a small shop in an equally small town. I was mentally calculating the thirty-percent discount when a voice from beside me said, “I like the turquoise, but with your coloring, have you considered the leopard jasper? I think it would be smashing.”

I glanced up. The woman who’d spoken had a narrow face, with green eyes and dark auburn hair tied back in a ponytail. “I’m partial to jasper,” she explained, then held out her hand. “Claudia Lavoie.”

“Julie Larkin.”

Her handshake was firm. “Yes,” she said. “I know who you are. I saw you get out of the car and I followed you in here. I recognized the Land Rover. You’re Tom’s new wife.”

A little nonplussed, I said, “That would be me.”

“Nice to meet you. I hear you had a little excitement over there last night.”

“Excitement? Oh, the tree. Wow. News travels quickly around here.”

“The chain saw was a pretty big clue. Riley filled in the rest for me. I’m your next-door neighbor. I live in terror that one of these days, that entire tree will fall—in my direction.”

“Your worrying days are over, then, because Tom told me last night he’s having it cut down.”

“That’s a relief. If it went through my greenhouse and murdered my babies, I’d have to kill him.” She smiled to show me she was just kidding. “You should stop in sometime. I’m always home. Except when I’m not.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“I’m serious, you know. People always say these things to be polite. I’m happy to report that I’ve never been polite. Or, for that matter, politically correct. If I didn’t mean it, I wouldn’t make the offer. Please come. Dylan—my four-year-old—has spent the last few days with his dad. I’m used to having him home with me, and my afternoons have been long and boring. Besides, I make a mean margarita.”

“In that case,” I said, “I’ll be sure to stop by.”

“Drop in anytime. If the car’s in the driveway and I don’t answer the door, come around the back. I’m probably in the greenhouse.”

I watched her leave, the bell over the door jangling cheerfully as she exited the store. I’d have to ask Tom about her. Unless he told me she was some kind of psycho, I’d probably take her up on her offer. She seemed a nice enough person, and I had a sneaking suspicion that Team Julie would need a cheerleader or two in order to balance things out.

Back on task, I selected two strings of turquoise that I really liked. And then, just because I could, I chose another string—of the leopard jasper.

When I got back to the house, Jeannette’s Caddy was parked in the driveway, and the chain saw was silent. Grabbing up the bakery box, I took a deep breath and girded my loins for the inevitable confrontation.

My mother-in-law was at the kitchen counter, mixing a meat loaf. The girls sat at the table, hunched over coloring books, scribbling away purposefully. I held the bakery box aloft and said brightly, “I come bearing gifts.”

All action stopped. Taylor dropped her purple crayon and examined the box with interest. “What’s in it?”

“Doughnuts.”

Sadie scratched the tip of her nose and said solemnly, “I like doughnuts.”

I felt not even the merest twinge of guilt at my blatant attempt at bribery. I was willing to pay whatever price it took to unlock the doors to their little hearts. I set the box on the table and lifted the cover to reveal an assortment of doughnuts. The coloring books were instantly forgotten. Their faces painted with identical expressions of delight, both girls craned their necks to see what was in the box.

Behind me, my mother-in-law cleared her throat. “Tom doesn’t allow the girls to eat sugar.” Her tone implied that I, as Tom’s wife, should already know this salient fact. “Besides, it’s only a couple hours to supper. You’ll spoil their appetites.”

I stiffened. It was at least three hours until supper. God forbid I should spoil their appetites. God forbid a single grain of sugar should pass their lips. The girls looked crestfallen, and suddenly that guilt, heretofore absent, reared its ugly head.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I had no idea.”

Jeannette covered the meat loaf pan with foil and put it in the refrigerator. Untying her apron and pulling it off over her head, she said, “As long as you’re here, I need you to run to the grocery store and pick up a few things. You’ll have to take the girls with you, because the babysitter’s sick. I’d do it myself, but I have to go back to work. I have a shampoo and clipping at four-fifteen. Late in the day, but not much I can do about it.” She folded the apron with precise motions, tucked it into a drawer, and reached up to smooth her hair. “If I’m not back by five, you might as well go ahead and put the meat loaf in the oven. Potatoes are already peeled and in the fridge. They just need to be put on to boil.” Her eyes, peering at me over the rim of her glasses, were skeptical. “You do know how to cook?”

What idiot couldn’t boil a potato? Did she really think I was that incompetent? “Of course,” I said, an ingratiating smile glued firmly in place. “I’m much more than just a pretty face. What do you need at the store?”

“I’ll give you a list. Girls, pick up your crayons and coloring books and take them upstairs. And put them away. I don’t want to come home and find them strewn around your room.”

“It’s not fair,” Taylor said. “I want a doughnut!”

“Yeah,” Sadie said, taking a cue from her older sister. Tiny fists planted on her hips, she echoed, “It’s not fair!”

“Life isn’t fair,” my mother-in-law snapped, “and you shouldn’t expect it to be. The sooner you learn that, the better off you’ll be.”

Yikes. Glad I wasn’t on the receiving end of her cutting comment, I carefully arranged my face in the most neutral expression I could manage. The girls made a few more token protests, but it was obvious that in this house, Grandma ruled. So while Jeannette wrote out a list for me, the girls put away their toys.

Afterward, I got them settled in the backseat of the Land Rover and, as I drove away from the house, I marveled at my amazing transformation from big-city career woman to small-town mom, complete with husband, two kids, and an SUV. I felt a little like Barbie, after she and Ken had built their Dream House somewhere in American suburbia. The only thing needed to complete the picture was a large, hairy dog.

I slowed for a red light. It turned green before I reached it. I stepped on the gas, and forgot to shift gears. The car stalled halfway through the intersection. Muttering under my breath, I pumped the accelerator, popped the clutch, and took off, tires squealing on the pavement.

From the backseat, Taylor said, in a tone that was far too accusatory for a seven-year-old, “Why are you having so much trouble driving?”

I glanced in the rearview mirror. Her eyes were narrowed with suspicion. Whatever happened to children being seen but not heard? “I’m not having trouble,” I said through gritted teeth. “I’m just a little rusty.”

“My mom never had trouble driving it.”

I checked the mirror again. This time, my stepdaughter looked smug, and far older than her seven years. Why was it that she always made me feel as though she were the adult and I the child? I took a breath and forced myself to be civil. “This was your mom’s car?”

A smile flitted over her face. The little wretch had hit a nerve, and she knew it. “Yes,” she said. “And Mom was a good driver. Sadie never got carsick when she rode with Mom.”

Mild panic assailed me as I imagined myself cleaning vomit from the backseat of a very expensive Land Rover. “Sadie?” I said in alarm. “Are you carsick?”

“I’m not sick,” Sadie piped up. “I love to ride.”

In the mirror, Taylor was grinning. Gotcha! her face seemed to say.

I reminded myself again that I was the adult, and far too mature for the kind of retaliation I was contemplating. I had other, more important things to focus on. Like the fact that the car I was driving belonged to a dead woman. A dead woman who happened to be my predecessor. Thanks, Tom. It would’ve been really nice if he’d bothered to drop a hint.

I wasn’t sure why it gave me the willies. Did I think Beth’s spirit was still hovering around, clucking in disapproval as I stole her husband, laid claim to her children, and burned out her clutch? It wasn’t as though she’d died in the vehicle and was therefore doomed to haunt it for all of eternity. Although, come to think of it, I was sure Tom had told me his wife died in an accident. If that was true, and if this vehicle really had belonged to her, then what had she been driving?

Maybe she hadn’t been driving at all. Maybe she’d been a passenger in somebody else’s car. Tom hadn’t gone into any detail about her death. I could tell it bothered him to talk about it; the wound was still a little too fresh to start picking at the scab, so I hadn’t pried. But I had to admit I was curious.

I glanced in the mirror again. Sadie was staring out the window, humming under her breath, some tuneless little ditty that kept repeating itself, over and over. Or maybe that was just Sadie’s interpretation of how the song went. Taylor had tired of toying with me and was now focused on her Game Boy. The self-satisfied look on her face confirmed what I already knew: She was going to be a challenge. But one way or another, I’d win the war. After all, I’d once been a seven-year-old know-it-all. To paraphrase an old country song, I’d forgotten more than she would ever know about being a brat. The kid didn’t stand a chance against me.

I eventually found the grocery store—the town was too small for it to stay hidden for long—and I pulled into a parking space. Just to satisfy my curiosity, I opened the glove compartment and rummaged around until I found the auto registration. I told myself I wasn’t snooping. After all, the vehicle belonged to Tom and, as his wife, that meant it was half mine. Besides, if I got pulled over for some infraction, I’d need to know where the registration was. I had a right to snoop.

I could rationalize until the cows came home, but in the end, it didn’t matter. The registration didn’t answer any of my questions, because the car was registered to Tom. It might have been Beth’s vehicle, as Taylor had said, or my stepdaughter might have been needling me. It was impossible to tell. The only way I’d know would be to ask Tom.

I shoved the registration back into the glove compartment and slammed it shut. “Okay, girls,” I said briskly. “Let’s do this!”

For a weekday afternoon, the store was busy. Lots of harried housewives and elderly people pushing their shopping carts up and down the aisles. Zippy muzak, designed to move shoppers along at the optimum pace for picking and choosing, blared out of overhead speakers. I checked Jeannette’s list. It was extensive, but not detailed. Standing in front of the milk case, I pondered all the choices, wondering what brand my mother-in-law usually bought. Did I dare to ask Taylor? If I did ask, could I trust her answer? Would she tell me the truth, or try to sabotage my already shaky relationship with Tom’s mother by pointing me in the wrong direction?

I wouldn’t put it past her. The kid was sly, and I’d once walked in her shoes. I could remember a time or two when I’d done just about anything I could to get rid of my father’s latest girlfriend. I hadn’t cared how obnoxious I was, hadn’t cared how childish some of my stunts were or how much trouble I might get into afterward. All that mattered was the end result: one more irritating woman out of our lives. One more opportunity for our nuclear family—that would be Dave and me—to remain intact. I’d been a real piece of work. And Taylor was so much like me it was scary.

From her perch high in the cart, Sadie kicked her legs and said, “Can I have orange juice?”

Orange juice hadn’t been on Jeannette’s list. I weighed the relative merits of garnering brownie points with Sadie against the pain of being reprimanded by my mother-in-law for the second time today, and decided to make the ultimate sacrifice. After all, I’m one tough chica. Just ask my friend Carmen. She’s told me that so often, I’ve started to believe her. I knew I could stand up to Jeannette Larkin and whatever she dished out. This was a simple matter of survival. “You tell me what kind of milk Grandma buys,” I told Sadie, “and I’ll let you have orange juice.”

Without hesitation, she pointed. “That one.”

My bribery skills were being honed to a fine edge. I opened the cooler door and took out the milk, grabbed two miniature bottles of OJ, and consulted my list. Next item: cat food. As descriptions go, it was beyond vague. There were eight trillion brands of cat food on the shelves, enough to take up one entire side of the pet food aisle. Was I supposed to guess? Did she want dry food or canned? Enough for one cat, or several? Were we talking kitten chow, or something specially designed for geriatric felines? I was clueless, especially considering that in the twenty-four hours since I arrived at Casa Larkin, I hadn’t seen any evidence that a cat actually lived there.

I was about to ask Sadie for clarification when I looked around and realized Taylor was nowhere to be seen. “Sadie?” I said, mildly alarmed. “Where’s your sister?”

She shrugged with childlike unconcern. “I don’t know.”

Great. This was all I needed. Tom’s mother already hated me. I couldn’t wait to hear what she’d say if I lost her grandchild.

With my heart thudding and visions of an Amber Alert dancing through my brain, I wheeled the cart around the corner of the next aisle. There, at the far end, was my missing stepdaughter, deep in conversation with some blonde who looked more like Julia Roberts than Julia Roberts.

I mentally cancelled the Amber Alert. Taylor and I were going to sit down later this afternoon and have a long talk about sticking together in public places. Pedophiles and serial killers lurked around every corner, even in small towns like this one. “Who’s that lady your sister’s talking to?” I asked Sadie.

Her head swiveled around. “Auntie Mel!” she shrieked so loudly they probably heard her in the next county. I struggled to regain my hearing, relieved to know that Taylor hadn’t been about to waltz out of the store hand in hand with some fabulous-looking stranger. Before I could stop her, Sadie had scrambled out of the cart and down to the floor. I stood glued to the spot as she ran the length of the aisle and wrapped herself ecstatically around the woman’s legs.

“Hey, yourself,” almost-Julia said, sticking a roll of price tags into the pocket of her teal-colored smock with the red-and-white Shop City logo stitched just above the breast. She gave me a long, assessing glance, then turned her attention back to Sadie and said, “How are you, baby doll?”

“I’m wonderful! When are you coming to visit?”

“I don’t know, hon. I’m pretty busy. But I’ll call your Gram one of these days soon and we’ll make plans.”

I maneuvered my cart to a stop. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Julie Larkin.”

The look she gave me was glacial. Crouching down, she hugged both girls and said, “Why don’t you girls run over to the bakery and see what Yvette has for you? I’m pretty sure she just baked a new batch of chocolate-chip cookies. Tell her I sent you.”

The girls hugged her and disappeared, their homing instinct infallible when it came to cookies. I propped a foot on the undercarriage of my shopping cart and said, “Tom doesn’t allow the girls to eat sugar.”

Almost-Julia stood up to her full five-foot-zero. “Yes,” she said, her expression challenging me to do something about it. “I know.”

Ah. A fellow subversive. We had something in common. “And who are you?” I asked, since she’d failed to provide me with a name, rank, or serial number.

“Melanie Ambrose. My sister used to be married to your husband. Before he killed her.”

“Come again?”

“You heard me. Tom Larkin murdered my sister.”

She was obviously deranged. While I gaped at her, an elderly man who smelled of sweat and pipe tobacco took an inordinate amount of time picking out a box of breakfast cereal. When he’d finally moved on, I said, “I don’t understand what you mean. Beth died in an accident.”

Melanie cocked her head to one side and looked at me with a sad, knowing smile. “Really? So that’s what he told you?”

“Well, I, uh—” I struggled to remember whether he’d used those exact words or whether I’d simply inferred them. For the first time, I wasn’t sure. “I think.”

“That lying sack of shit. Beth didn’t die in any accident. That’s just his guilt talking. He doesn’t have the cojones to speak the truth.”

My fingers tightened on the handle of the shopping cart. “Oh? And just what is the truth?”

“You want to know the truth? I’ll tell you.” Her pretty face twisted into a skeletal grimace of a smile. “Congratulations on your marriage. I hope you survive it.”

Four

I slid the meat loaf into the oven and set the timer. The girls, still on a sugar high, were in the living room watching SpongeBob SquarePants. I turned on the burner under the potatoes, opened the bakery box, and took out a jelly doughnut. If I kept this up, pretty soon the box would be empty. Nibbling, I mentally wandered back to what Melanie Ambrose had told me. Two years ago, on a lovely moonlit summer night, Beth Larkin had driven her Land Rover—the same Land Rover I was now driving—up onto the Swift River Bridge, where she’d proceeded to remove her shoes and her glasses, leaving them on the front seat to weigh down the suicide note she’d written before she left the house. Then she’d climbed barefoot and half-blind onto the bridge railing, leaned forward, and taken a header off the side.

Jesus Christ. How was I supposed to respond to that?

Like a mother grizzly with her cub, I’d steadfastly defended my husband. In part because he’s the love of my life, and in part because I firmly believe that each of us is responsible for our own happiness, or lack thereof, and have no right to blame our failings on other people. Anybody who chooses to deal with their problems by jumping off a bridge surely has mental health issues that are not the result of anything another person may have done—or not done—to them. After mounting a defense of Tom so brilliant it would have made F. Lee Bailey proud, I grilled Melanie for more details. Of course, she couldn’t pinpoint a single concrete reason that would have led Beth’s unhappiness back to Tom. No, she admitted, he wasn’t an alcoholic or a drug addict. No, he didn’t beat his wife. Nor, as far as Mel knew, did he run around behind her sister’s back. All she really had to go on—and it was pretty damn flimsy evidence—was that her sister had been deliriously happy for the first few years of her marriage to Tom. Then, as time wore on, Beth’s demeanor changed. She became withdrawn and distant. She started keeping secrets. She stopped participating in life, became more of an observer, wearing her unhappiness around her like a heavy, black cloak.

And, of course, somehow this was Tom’s fault.

This sounded to me like classic symptoms of clinical depression, but there was no point in suggesting to Mel that her sister suffered from mental illness. It would only exacerbate her already considerable pain, and she wouldn’t believe me anyway. Her sister was dead, and she needed somebody to blame it on. As Beth’s husband, Tom was the nearest and most likely target. And as Tom’s new wife, I was firmly rooted in the enemy camp.

So I let it go. But it gnawed at me, this newly gained knowledge that not only had Tom’s first wife chosen to take her own life, but that he’d lied to me about it. Or, at the very least, if he hadn’t lied, he hadn’t been fully forthcoming. It bothered me. It bothered me a lot. I’m a very open person. I say what I think and I think what I say. My candor is legendary among my friends and acquaintances. I don’t hide things from the people I care about; my life is the proverbial open book. Tom’s, it seemed, wasn’t. As much as I hate seeing people toss around psychobabble buzzwords like so much confetti, I had to admit that I was seeing a significant amount of dysfunction in this family. And if there was one thing I was familiar with, it was family dysfunction.

Tom and his mother arrived home at the same time, with Riley, who might not sleep here but appeared to eat all his meals here, straggling in a couple of minutes later. I already had the dining room table set, the girls washed up and their hair combed, and was just finishing dinner preparations when the rest of the family came in. Jeannette checked to make sure I had everything under control, then disappeared upstairs, presumably to remove the odor of wet doggie from her person. Riley headed to the sink to wash his hands. Tom came directly to where I stood at the stove, checking the potatoes for done-ness.

He planted a kiss on the back of my neck and murmured in my ear, too low for anybody else to hear, “I missed you today.”

Turning around, I wrapped my arms around him. He pressed me back against the oven door and kissed me the way a woman wants to be kissed by the man she loves. I drew in the warm scent of him, leaned into his body and kissed him back.

“Christ on a crutch,” Riley said from across the kitchen. “Why don’t you two just get a room?”

Tom drew back and gave me a wink. “We already have one upstairs.”

“Then go up there if you have to play kissy-face. Although you two might be wildly enthusiastic about your sex life, the rest of us have appetites we don’t want ruined.”

“Jealousy,” Tom told his brother. “It so doesn’t become you.”

Rolling his eyes, Riley wandered off to somewhere, leaving us alone in the kitchen. “Tom,” I said, “we have to talk.”

The now-familiar furrow between his eyebrows—the one I’d never seen until we arrived in Newmarket—put in an appearance. “If it’s a problem with my mother—”

“It’s not about your mother. It’s something else. But it can wait until after we eat.”

“Should I be worried?”

“As in am I about to pack my bags and run back to L.A.?”

“As in precisely that.”

I rested a hand against his abdomen, felt it rise and fall with his breathing. “Stop worrying,” I said. “There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of me leaving you.”

“Hold that thought,” he said as the girls bounced into the kitchen. “We’ll discuss it in more detail later.”

Supper was over, the table cleared, the dishes washed, the girls read to and tucked into their beds. Tom and I were finally alone. Perched cross-legged on our bed, my hands clasped around my ankles, I watched my husband’s mirrored reflection through the open bathroom door as he peeled off his dress shirt and dropped it into the hamper. His body was lean and sinewy, with nice shoulders, well-defined muscles and a narrow line of dark hair that ran from breastbone to navel. My breath quickened at the sight of all that male pulchritude. He opened the medicine cabinet, took out toothbrush and toothpaste. “What’s in the bakery box?” he said.

“Éclairs. I bought them to soften you up.”

He uncapped the toothpaste and turned on the faucet. “I thought you liked me better hard.”

“Ha, ha. Very funny.”

“If you think that’s funny, you should see my summer stand-up act in the Adirondacks.”

“I’m sure it’s a scream and a half.”

I waited until he was done brushing his teeth, watched him as he leaned over the sink and splashed cold water all over his face. New as it was, this kind of familiarity still felt odd. Awkward. A little too intimate. I turned my face away from his reflection and said, “Tom?”

He put away his toothbrush and toothpaste, wiped down the marble counter, and tossed the washcloth into the hamper. Still shirtless, he leaned against the door frame, towel in hand. “What?”

I took a deep breath. Might as well jump right in with both feet. “Why didn’t you tell me the truth about Beth?”

I’d caught him by surprise. I could see it in his eyes. He finished drying his hands and returned the towel to its hook in the bathroom. “What truth?” he said.

“Oh, for the love of God. You know what truth. She killed herself.”

His gaze was cool. “Yes,” he said. “She did.”

“It would have been nice if you’d bothered to tell me. It was a little disconcerting, hearing it from someone else.”

He shoved both hands into the pockets of his pants. “Who told you?”

“Her sister, Melanie.”

“And I bet she told you exactly what she thinks of me. That I’m just as responsible for Beth’s death as if I’d shoved her off that bridge railing myself.”

“That might have come up somewhere in the conversation. She’s clearly not one of your biggest fans. Damn it, Tom, why didn’t you tell me?”

His expression remained emotionless, as if I were a stranger. “The time just never seemed right.”

“She was so smug about the fact that you’d lied to me. As though it corroborated her ridiculous accusations. I felt like a fool.”

“I didn’t lie to you. I just didn’t tell you everything.”

“In the end, what’s the difference? I still ended up looking like a fool. Damn it, Tom, she blindsided me.”

“What the hell do you want me to say, Jules? Maybe I should’ve turned to you that first night and said, Hi, I’m Tom. My wife was so miserable living with me that she killed herself. Say, can I buy you a drink? That would’ve gone over really well.”

“I’m not saying you should have dumped it in my lap during the first five minutes of our acquaintance. But somewhere between dinner that night and our wedding, you might’ve found the time to tell me.”

“I might have. I chose not to. You know, Jules, the world doesn’t revolve around you. Other people have feelings, too. Talk about being blindsided! Instead of confiding in me, my wife—the woman I loved, the mother of my children—decided to jump off a bridge. How the hell do you think that made me feel?”

The guilt was instantaneous. If I thought this was difficult for me, I could only imagine how hard it must be for Tom. He had to live with it every day for the rest of his life, the knowledge that Beth didn’t love him or their children enough to keep trying.

“I’m just a man, Jules,” he said. “I’m not perfect. Sometimes you scare me. Your expectations are so high. I can’t possibly live up to the image you have of me.”

I slid off the edge of the bed and crossed the room to him. The hurt in his eyes tore at my insides. I rested a hand against his chest, felt the strong, steady beat of his heart. “I’m sorry,” I said, embarrassed by the tears I was fighting back. “It must have been awful for you. I’m so very, very sorry.”

“Aw, Jules.” He wrapped his arms around me and rested his chin on top of my head. “That’s the real reason I didn’t tell you. It was just too damn hard to talk about it. And the last thing I wanted was your pity.”

“Pity is not something I feel for you. Trust me.”

“I have my pride. Maybe that’s wrong, but I can’t help it. I’m a man. I don’t like to show weakness, and I don’t like to complain. No matter what life throws at me, I deal with it.” His arms tightened around me. “And of course, I know that for the most part, I’ve been lucky.”

It was true. Tom had been blessed with a fine mind, a handsome face, a healthy body and an education that not everybody could afford. Two beautiful daughters, an extended family who loved him, in spite of their differences. A lucrative and satisfying career, a lovely house and a new wife who would walk over hot coals for him.

The only fly I could find in that particular ointment was the first wife who’d killed herself.

But that was then. This was now. A new beginning, a new life. Tossing aside logic and operating strictly from emotion, I stretched up on my toes and wrapped my arms around his neck. Tonight, Tom needed comforting. Regardless of our differences, we were husband and wife. I’d agreed to stand by him, in good times and bad. And the kind of comfort he needed tonight, only I could offer.

He raised his head, looked into my eyes, and smiled.

And I took his hand and led him to the bed.

They say that make-up sex is the best kind.

It must be true, because that night there was a poignancy to our lovemaking that hadn’t been there before. We’d weathered a storm together and, perhaps because it reminded us of the fragility of life and the uncertainty of relationships, it had brought us closer. Left us more attuned to each other.

Our marriage was solid. I had no doubts about marrying Tom; this was a forever thing. We’d had a little spat, but that was an inevitable result of couple-hood. It might be the first, but it wouldn’t be the last. Marriage isn’t a static thing; it’s a fluid entity, one that involves continual adjustments and constant negotiations.

Tonight, we’d foregone all that in the name of something more primal. It wasn’t until later, after the éclairs were gone and Tom was sleeping silently beside me, that I realized we’d never gotten around to discussing Riley’s accusations. We hadn’t gotten around to discussing much of anything. The aforementioned make-up sex had taken precedence over everything verbal. We’d let our bodies do the talking for us.

Which wasn’t a bad thing, but I didn’t want it to become a habit. Although our coupling was delicious, sex can’t solve every problem, and trying to use it as a problem-solving mechanism only leads to bigger problems down the road. Some issues need to be talked out or they fester and grow. Sometimes, guidelines need to be drawn. Not every problem can be resolved with a quick—or not-so-quick—roll between the sheets.

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