Other Bell Bridge Books Titles by Alicia Rasley
A Regency Holiday
The Year She Fell
Until Death
by
Alicia Rasley
Bell Bridge Books
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.
Bell Bridge Books
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Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61194-347-4
Print ISBN: 978-1-61194-326-9
Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.
Copyright © 2013 by Alicia Rasley
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
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Cover design: Debra Dixon
Interior design: Hank Smith
Photo credits:
Scene (manipulated) © Mikhail Kokhanchikov | Dreamstime.com
:Eduj:01:
Dedication
To Theresa Stevens and Lynn Coddington, for the friendships!
Chapter One
JUST CALL ME the ex-widow.
I don’t mean my dead husband has come back to life. No, I’m the ex-wife of the man who died. It’s not much of a role. I didn’t have to answer all the sympathy cards, and I didn’t have to go home after the funeral and eat my way through goodies the neighbors left. I didn’t have to mourn. But I’m afraid I did anyway.
I was so ex that Don’s current widow had the attorney tell me not to come to the funeral. I was supposed to stay home when my husband was buried. Because he wasn’t my husband anymore. Because the day the divorce was final, I was supposed to stop caring.
Maybe she was right. If I came, I would secretly be chief mourner, even if she was the one in the black veil standing by the coffin. I’d loved him longer, and I’d loved him better, and I’d loved him more. I knew that, and she knew that. Even he knew that. The greatest heartbreak of all is that it didn’t matter to him.
So I’ll understand if you think I was just bitter when I decided that she murdered him.
The last time I saw Don was on a Monday, two days before he died. That was, two years and two months after he fell in love with Wanda, and almost twelve months after our divorce. Eleven months and twenty-six days after he remarried. Not that I was counting.
I’d put it behind me, or resolved to, over and over again. So I was pretty calm when he came by to drop off Tommy’s sweatshirt. He hung around long enough that I finally offered him coffee. Now why did I do that? Did I sense he wanted to talk to me but couldn’t say so? I wasn’t always good at reading him—I mean, when it came to Wanda, I really was the last to know—but I’d long ago learned to say, “We need to talk,” when it was Don who really needed the talk.
I’m sure that was it. It sounds better, anyway, than “I really wanted him to stick around long enough to meet the hunky new neighbor I powerwalk with every afternoon at five.”
Oh, all right. There was also that little voice that sang, “Seduce him, seduce him.” Really, it’s a credit to the nuns who educated me that all I did was offer him some coffee.
He came in and sat down and gazed around his former living room. A decade ago, we’d built this rustic timber-framed house overlooking the river, recycling beams from an old barn. Every room was the result of negotiation between the traditionalist (me, natch) and the modernist (Don). I must have won most of the arguments, as Don didn’t have any trouble leaving it behind.
So maybe as he looked around, Don remembered the spot near the French doors where we always put the Christmas tree. Or the photos on the piano, Tommy and Don and me on the beach, Tommy and Don in White Sox caps . . . But all he said was “How’s business?”
I said, “Okay.” During the divorce, I’d started a company with a friend, offering financial and marketing services to the software startups that had turned our Indiana town into the Silicon Cornfield. If it were anyone but Don asking, I’d describe my newest client’s new product, a smartphone-linked e-commerce package. But with Don, it would sound pathetic, like I was showing off how well I was doing without him. I was, perhaps, a bit too worried about sounding pathetic around Don. He probably thought I was rude instead.
“Umm, where’s Tommy?”
“He’s on the youth trip to Chicago this week, remember?” Suddenly, I was fiercely glad that I was the mother, or “the primary parent” as the judge called me during the divorce hearing, because I didn’t have to be reminded of something so important to my son that he bit his fingernails down to the quick in anticipation. And I didn’t want to have his absence be the default in my life. Here I was, feeling liberated and relaxed (except when I was worrying Tommy would fall off the Sears Tower) because I had a kidless week. Don wouldn’t ever know how the pain of missing Tommy made the pleasure sharper. Something about the maternal bond makes me understand masochism. The pain makes me know how much I love him.
Doesn’t work that way with husbands. Especially ex-husbands. The pain just reminded me of what a fool I was to go on loving.
After another exchange like that, I got impatient. Truth is, I was a bit bored. If we were going to risk communicating (no risk for him, maybe, but I’d pay for it with a sleepless night), I wanted more action and adventure than this tortured small talk offered. (That was maybe why that “seduce him” voice kept singing.)
During those months I was trying to win Don back, I’d become something of a crisis junkie. Back then there was some primal energy running through me, when I would scream, “But I love you! And Tommy loves you! How can you give us up?” and he would scream back that he was dying and only she could save him. It was a dangerous sort of fun, like Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor ripping at each other on the screen. Almost sexual.
But this exchange was tedious and not at all sexual. I knew I was supposed to probe until he grudgingly spilled the secret he wanted to spill. But now I didn’t want to bother. Good thing we weren’t still married, or he’d have to find another dance partner.
Finally, when he was silent, all small talk exhausted, secret still unspilled, I felt a crawling need for escape. “That’s it? Well.” I rose. “Thanks for coming by.”
“Meggie, wait.” Aha. The sphinx speaks.
I perched my newly firm hip on the arm of the couch. (Yeah, I know, it’s not fair. For years Don kept after me to lose weight. Then he left, and the prospect of being single and twenty pounds overweight galvanized me. This was all part of my Brave New Self: unattached and unafraid. Not to mention unflabby.)
This time I didn’t interpret his silence for him. I didn’t say, “Are you worried about business? Is Wanda betraying you with some bouncer at her favorite bar?” I didn’t say anything at all.
All of a sudden, he said, “I just feel so bad about you. The last few years. How you got hurt. I think about it all the time.”
“Don, come on. Even I don’t think about it all the time.”
He gave me a rebuking look. Here I had spent decades trying to get him to talk about his feelings, and now that he was doing it, I was di
smissing them. Oops. There I go, interpreting him again.
“I guess what I’m saying is I feel—” he sorted through a few alternative emotions, discarding them one after another. No, I’m not interpreting here, really. They were practically written on his face. Guilty? Nah. Ashamed? Nah. “I just feel bad about it.”
Don made an agonized face. I was reminded (no wonder he divorced me, the repository of such memories) of that old hotel in Dublin when he was straining on the rickety toilet and it crashed, depositing him in a puddle on the floor. Same agony.
“I wish I hadn’t hurt you. But you know how I felt about Wanda.”
“Mmmm.” Yeah, I knew how he felt about Wanda. In fact, the best thing about his leaving was I didn’t have to hear anymore him counting all the ways he loved her.
“And I couldn’t give it up, you know? It felt like my last chance at happiness.”
Past tense. I felt. It felt. I couldn’t. Where’d that come from? Was all his lust/love for her in the past? Last I heard, all the gushy stuff was in present tense. I opened my mouth to point this out. But Hera, the goddess of betrayed wives, must have been listening. The phone rang—my business partner Barb.
I lowered my voice, but not too far. “Uh, Bobby?” That wasn’t quite a lie. Way back in high school, she once confided, she used to go by that nickname. “I can’t talk now.”
“Who’s there?” she demanded. “Not Don! Well, heck. Let me make you blush. Testicles.”
That made me laugh, not blush. I glanced at Don and thought that was just as good. “I’ll call you later. I promise.”
Don was looking stony as I hung up. “If you need to return that call, I can leave now.”
“No, no. Finish your coffee. Want some English trifle?”
Mollified, he followed me to the kitchen. As I handed the trifle bowl over, he slid open the drawer where we once kept the silver. He stared into it. Dish towels. “Where is the silver?”
“I reorganized.” I took a spoon from the new location, next to the dishwasher, and he dug in, giving the dish towel drawer a stricken glance. For a man who switched houses, wives, and sons in a single week, Don wasn’t real comfortable with change.
“Don? You wanted to tell me something.”
With a sigh, he took the dish to the sink and rinsed it. Lucky Wanda. I’d trained him well. “Actually, I wanted to ask you something. What was the name of that psychiatrist we went to? And his number?”
The question wasn’t what I expected. I shut my mouth, found the doctor’s name in my address book, and jotted the number on a sticky note. “Michael Warren, MD.” I didn’t come right out and ask. I could be passive-aggressive too. Casually, as if I didn’t care, I said, “Some insurance problem, I guess.”
“No. Wanda’s having second thoughts. About the prenup.”
Believe it or not, that prenup had been my idea. Back when their marriage was only his fondest dream and my worst nightmare, I wrote Don a well-reasoned analysis of what I termed his midlife crisis. What, I asked without the slightest malice, would a glamorous (if trashy) twenty-five-year-old step-aerobics instructor, who until recently hung out with the ring-in-eyebrow set, want with a forty-two-year-old real estate developer? If she loved him and not his money, she’d sign a prenuptial agreement.
I thought she’d refuse in some pretty pouty way—“But, hunky” (that, he told me once with a soft rotting smile, was what she called him) “you mean I have to prove my love?”—and he’d have to wonder if he’d been duped like those other rich guys whose blonde trophy wives later run off with their personal trainers.
But Wanda was smarter than that. She signed, and whatever reserve Don had melted away. She loved him. Not his money.
Here it was a year later, and she was ready to renegotiate. I wondered if she thought this all up herself, or if she attended a seminar on how to succeed as a trophy wife. “Wouldn’t an attorney be better to write up a new agreement?”
“We—I don’t want a new agreement. But we have to deal with . . . the implications.”
Suddenly, I was tired of it all, of him and his midlife idiocy and that simple sly girl who’d made me hate myself for a while there. “You mean you want the good doctor to tell her no. Just like you wanted him to tell me you were filing for divorce.”
He was stricken again. “It’s just too hard. I don’t like the hurt. But the doctor puts things in a way that it didn’t hurt.”
Right. Michael Warren, M.D., the man with the magic mouth, who made me realize why you might want to kill the messenger. I hadn’t forgiven him for his wise counsel at the end there: Try to get out with some dignity. Believe me, you’ll be glad of that later, that you weren’t as big a fool as you might have been. I brightened, thinking of how he might put it to Wanda. “Yeah, Dr. Warren did have a knack for conveying bad news.”
Don nodded eagerly. “That’s what I thought. He was tactful.”
As an elephant. I glanced at the clock, saw that it was almost five, and decided against cutting the conversation short. “Yep, tactful Mike Warren. Did you see in the paper that his wife died last year?” That was one of the new hobbies that had come with turning forty. Now I read the obituaries, right after my horoscope.
“His wife? I didn’t know he had a wife.”
I refrained from pointing out in six months of weekly counseling sessions, he must have noticed the photo on Dr. Warren’s desk, the one with him and a pretty red-haired woman laughing on a Ferris wheel. “The obituary said she died of cancer.”
“Hmmm. Maybe I shouldn’t bother him.” He looked around disconsolately, as if I moved the door as well as the silverware.
I couldn’t let him go, not before Vince arrived. “Come on, it’s his job. He probably gets solace from helping others.” And from brutally disabusing them of their precious illusions. “I’m sure he’d be glad to see you again—” and I can only excuse the next line because it was 4:59 pm and Vince was due any second—“happy in your new marriage.”
Don didn’t notice my gritted teeth. In fact, his appreciation for my goodwill would have gone on and on had Vince not knocked. I flung open the kitchen door. “Vince! Sweetie!”
Vince saw Don and assimilated the situation. “My darling!” Okay, he overdid it, kissing my hand in that oh-so-Euro way. But Don was fooled. I figure a man who goes weak when a girl calls him “hunky” has probably lost his sense of subtlety.
He looked at Vince—dressed in a worn old t-shirt that showed his biceps and track shorts he’d actually run in at IU—and became dignified. “I don’t mean to keep you from your date.”
“No, no,” Vince said magnanimously, stepping outside. “I’ll be waiting at the corner, Meg. Doing my warmup.”
“Warmup?” Don said as the door closed. “Is he a comedian?”
“For walking. He blew out his knee in the Olympic trials—” thank you, God, for letting me say that “—and he’s limited to walking for a few months. Fine with me, because I don’t like to run.” This sounded more like a matter of choice than fear for my internal organs.
He regarded me icily. “I didn’t know you were seeing anyone.”
I shrugged modestly. “Just a few guys. I guess I see Vince the most.” Sure I did. He lived next door. Him and his boyfriend, Hal.
“He’s kind of young, isn’t he?”
Another gift from heaven. “It’s such a change. His energy level is amazing. Last night I suggested renting a video, but he insisted on going dancing.” Well, he and Hal went dancing. I stayed home and did a James Bond festival—all Sean Connery, except for one slutty little interlude with Pierce Brosnan. Daniel Craig, well, he promised never to tell.
Don didn’t reply. All he did was look around the kitchen moodily, and I wondered if this was the first time he really understood that I wasn’t his anymore, wasn’t loyal old Meggie, waiting in case
Don got over his midlife crisis and came back.
I almost felt bad for pretending Vince was a lover. Almost.
But there wasn’t much more vindication to wring from this encounter. Move on, Dr. Warren had said as the divorce approached. Act as if you don’t need him, and it’ll come true.
Time for it to come true. “Hey, Don, I have to get to Vince. Anything else?”
Don rose and said, all no big deal, “Oh, yeah, if you get any legal papers, just ignore them.”
“About the prenup?” Suspicion shot through me, and I grabbed him and yanked him around. “Don’t tell me she wants Tommy’s money too?”
He shook free. “She doesn’t even know about Tommy’s money. No big deal. It’s just, you know, if anything happens to me, you won’t be too surprised. Not that anything is going to happen to me,” he added hastily. “I mean, if you read about some lawsuit in the business journal. It’s about that Netmore Millennium campus addition. “
The Netmore campus was an office park for our local software billionaires. It had been our first big development, back when the billionaires weren’t even millionaires, and the new millennium seemed as remote as the Civil War. “Netmore?”
Don shrugged. “Other side went for a TRO to stop construction. So you might get served as ex-treasurer of Ross-Munssen, just to provide some information. You know, about our deals with Netmore.”
It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him. I mean, I didn’t trust him, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was, he was being cagey, and I didn’t like it. “Maybe I better take this to an attorney, just to make sure.”
“Suit yourself. It will be thrown out of court quick. I just got Mills and Shumer on retainer about it, and they’re not intimidated by that restraining order. They’re ready to flood the court with discovery requests, and the other side won’t be able to keep up and will just give up. I got it covered. No worries. So forget about it.”
“Gee, Don, thanks a lot.”
Until Death Page 1