Trouble Me: A Rosewood Novel

by Laura Moore

  Without my family, I would not be the person or writer I am today. I love you.

  ALSO BY LAURA MOORE

  Believe in Me

  Remember Me

  In Your Eyes

  Night Swimming

  Chance Meeting

  Ride a Dark Horse

  Read on for an excerpt from

  Book One in Laura Moore’s

  exciting new Silver Creek series.

  Coming soon from Ballantine Books.

  “ANNA, IT’S me. David’s dead. He passed two days ago.”

  “Oh, Tess! I’m sorry. Where are you?”

  “At my parents. I needed to see them to break the news, and there was stuff I had to arrange—”

  “Can you come over? Giorgio is covering tonight’s event—a birthday party for a ninety-year-old stockbroker who still plays ice hockey with his great-grandchildren and takes them out on his yacht every summer in Newport. It’s only thirty people, so he told me to take the night off.” Giorgio Bissi was the manager of La Dolce Vita, the events-planning company where both Anna and Tess worked—rather, where Tess had worked until two months ago.

  “Thanks. I’d love to. It’s been rough.”

  “I can’t even imagine.” Anna’s voice was a well of sympathy. “Come as quickly as you can. There haven’t been too many delays on the lines lately.”

  Having grown up in the same neighborhood in Astoria as Tess, Anna knew to the minute how long the subway ride and then quick walk would take to the brownstone apartment on 74th between Second and Third Avenues, where Anna lived with her boyfriend, Lucas, an associate at a law firm who logged insanely long hours.

  Forty-five minutes later, Tess was outside Anna’s building, shivering slightly in the chilly early November evening. Distracted as she was, she’d left her parents’ house without thinking to take her coat or gloves. She pressed number three and Anna’s voice came over the intercom.

  Tess said, “It’s me,” and was buzzed inside the small entry hall illuminated by a shiny brass chandelier and matching wall sconces. A large rust-colored floral arrangement set on a long side table marked the arrival of autumn. Tess climbed the winding staircase, her steps ringing hollowly on the marble stairs and, reaching the third floor, found Anna standing in the open doorway to her apartment. Anna enfolded Tess in a fierce hug.

  “God, Tess, I’ve missed you. I’m really sorry about David’s death. But to be honest, I’m even sorrier about the hell you’ve been through. Here.” Anna took her hand as though Tess were her baby sister. “Come into the living room. I’ve opened a bottle of wine and made us something to nibble on. You’ve lost so much weight.”

  Anna Greco, Italian American like Tess (though her family came from Naples, whereas the Casaris hailed from the Trentino), was in charge of menu planning at La Dolce Vita and was attending cooking school, pursuing her dream of one day opening her own restaurant. When it came to obsessing about food, Anna was without rival.

  For the past two months, food had been the last thing on Tess’s mind. And though she’d noticed that her clothes were starting to feel loose, she couldn’t actually remember the last time she’d bothered to look in a mirror.

  Tess let herself be led into the living room, with its vintage Kilim rug and burnt-gold-velvet sofa and the pièce de résistance, an ornate Murano chandelier that Anna had inherited from her grandmother.

  Anna released her hand. “Sit. Eat. I’ll just get the glasses and wine.” A platter, artfully arranged with paper-thin slices of salami, prosciutto-wrapped asparagus, and mushroom-and-goat cheese tarts, was centered on the mirrored coffee table. Each bite would be delicious; Anna was constitutionally incapable of preparing bad food. For her friend’s peace of mind, Tess hoped she’d be able to swallow a mouthful.

  She sank down on the sofa in the room she knew so well and felt a wave of disorientation wash over her. It was so strange to be here, to be back in New York. Since receiving the phone call from her estranged husband, David Bradford, two months ago—the first she’d heard from him in twice that long—telling her that he was in Boston, in the hospital, and that the doctors wanted to operate on his brain, Tess’s world had narrowed to the confines of Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital. She’d arrived just as the nurses were preparing to bring David to pre-op so the doctors could remove the meningioma the MRI had revealed. Only later did Tess learn that the tumor was recurrent, and that David had first undergone treatment a decade earlier.

  Lying in the hospital bed, David had raised his light gaze to meet hers and uttered a single word: “Sorry.” Before she’d even digested that that was all David was going to say, he’d closed his eyes, shutting her out and once again leaving her with no answers. Then the nurses had transferred him to the gurney and had wheeled him away.

  Confused and sick at heart, Tess had hoped that after his operation she’d be able to question David and perhaps learn something that would allow her to make sense of the man who’d so briefly been her husband.

  But when she next saw him, David lay in a coma, unresponsive to any stimuli.

  The sound of Anna’s heels clicking on the parquet floor brought Tess back to the present. She straightened and relaxed her hands, which she’d unconsciously been wringing.

  Carrying two wineglasses and an open bottle of Sangiovese, Anna sat down next to Tess, poured the deep red wine into the glasses and passed her one.

  “Here,” she said.

  Tess accepted the wine gratefully. At least now she had something to fill her hands; she wouldn’t be able to glance down at the faint mark encircling the ring finger of her left hand. For some reason, most likely her eternal, naïve optimism, Tess had continued to wear her wedding band, even after David had walked away from their marriage six months earlier without a backward glance. She’d removed it yesterday for good. How soon would it be until the mark, too, was gone?

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Mixed with Anna’s concern was a hint of eagerness.

  Tess didn’t blame her. Her curiosity was natural. Were they to switch places, she’d have had just as much trouble resisting the urge to hear all the horrific but no less juicy details. And as Tess’s co-worker, Anna had been given a front row seat from the very beginning of Tess and David’s whirlwind romance, the setting a swank cocktail party at a Fifth Avenue duplex with windows on Central Park, which La Dolce Vita had been hired to cater.

  The party was intended to launch the political career of some mucky-muck, and the first floor of the apartment had been crammed with lavishly dressed socialites and Armani-suited powerbrokers. Tess had been passing hors d’oeuvres among the guests when David had stepped in front of her silver tray. David Bradford had been as impeccably attired as the other men. With his thick, sandy-blond hair and laughing eyes, he was far better looking than many of them. Tess, however, would never have gone beyond the instant acknowledgment that he was a very attractive man. It was David who’d appeared smitten, struck by the proverbial lightning bolt. After being offered a lobster puff by Tess, he’d ignored the other guests in order to speak with her, stationing himself at strategic points throughout the vast apartment to intercept her as she passed. Later he’d teased that it was her bow tie that had made him fall in love with her on the spot. Looking at it, he’d imagined himself in ten years regaling their children with the tale of how he’d fallen in love with their mother because of her pink-and-purple-polka-dotted bow tie. That was David through and through: outrageous yet sweet.

  But now he was gone and Tess remained bewildered, unable to sort truth from fiction, unable to comprehend why he’d bothered to pursue her in the first place. Why he’d bothered to tell her he loved her. Why the need for so very many lies.

  “The most important thing is that the doctors assured us that David didn’t suffer,” she said quietly. She was repeating herself, she knew. She’d probably resort to that stock phrase for a long time to come.

  “So did he just … die?” Anna said awkwardly. “I mean, I know
you told me when you first called from the hospital that he’d had an aneurysm during the operation and had gone into a coma. Is that what killed him?”

  “No. He contracted pneumonia.”

  “Oh.” Anna paused. “Gosh.”

  Tess nodded. “Apparently pneumonia is a common illness in coma patients and very hard to prevent. The doctors did what they could, but the pneumonia took hold so quickly. While I sat beside him day after day, watching as the doctors and nurses came in to check his vitals and perform their tests to detect any sign of responsiveness, I don’t think I fully understood that the coma hadn’t simply robbed David of consciousness. It had stolen his strength, his ability to fight.”

  Anna knew just how good a fighter David had been. Once the marriage had started to deteriorate with the same dizzying speed with which it had been born, Tess would come over here to Anna’s—she couldn’t burden her parents with the news that her very short marriage was already on the rocks, not when they’d suffered so much. She’d spent hours on this very sofa, crying from the latest spite David had unleashed while Anna paced the room and cursed him with an eloquence that would have made a marine blush.

  “It seemed like they’d only just confirmed the pneumonia and then he was gone,” Tess continued. “Passed. I don’t think there’s any other way to describe it.”

  “It’s all so hard to believe. David was so active. All that running he did. And those weights.” Anna was of the philosophy that there was one and only one reason to run and that was to catch a cab. Gyms were also to be avoided like the plague. That she could also eat with the appetite of a truck driver and still look like Monica Bellucci was grossly unfair. Tess forgave her because Anna was the most loyal friend in the world. “At least he didn’t suffer at the end,” Anna finished.

  Again that worn, empty phrase. But what else was there that anyone could say?

  “No, he didn’t. And honestly, Anna, by that point it was a relief to let him go and not to have to watch him lie in that dreadful nondeath.” Raising her glass, she drank deeply to banish the vision of the tubes inserted into his body and the wires attached elsewhere that had served to keep David in that terrible state for far too long. Although now painfully aware of how little she’d known or understood her husband, Tess was certain of one thing: David would have hated being dependent on those machines to keep his heart beating—no matter what his parents wished to believe.

  Though she managed to push aside the image of her husband lying unmoving and unresponsive in his hospital bed, it was replaced by another one almost equally distressing, that of Edward Bradford, turning to her minutes after the hospital staff had confirmed David’s death. His patrician face had been pale with grief, but his blue eyes had blazed, lit with pain and rage. Withdrawing a white envelope from the inside pocket of his gray wool suit, he’d thrust it like a weapon at her.

  Uncomprehending, she’d stared at the envelope and then up at his angular face. “What’s this?” she’d asked.

  She’d witnessed Edward Bradford’s disdain before, but now it seemed etched into his skin. His thin lips vanished in a sneer. “This is yours—the money I promised you. You’ve fulfilled the bargain. You stayed by my son’s side. Take it and go.”

  The money. The absurd offer David’s father had made to give her a million dollars if she stayed by David’s side until he had recovered sufficiently to leave the hospital. Edward Bradford had insisted she agree to his insane idea even after she’d made it clear that David had had every intention of divorcing her, that he had told her he’d contacted his lawyer with instructions to begin the proceedings before he’d walked out of her life four months earlier. As calmly as she could, she’d explained to Edward Bradford that she had to get back to New York and her job at la Dolce Vita.

  But then the surgeon had come into the waiting room with the news. The operation to remove the meningioma had not been successful. During the operation, David had suffered an aneurysm. He was in a coma. The doctor’s prognosis was bleak. With such a severe hemorrhaging of the brain, he had about a 25 percent chance of survival. But from the doctor’s tone Tess had understood that he didn’t expect David to beat those odds. As the surgeon had spoken, she’d looked over at Madeline Bradford and seen something she recognized. Her expression held the same desperation, echoed the same mute pain, that Tess had seen in her own mother’s face when they visited Christopher at the private facility where the Casaris had been forced to place him when they could no longer care for him at home.

  Then and there, Tess abandoned any plan to return to New York. Even with the hurt David had inflicted during their short marriage, she couldn’t leave him when his life hung in a balance weighted toward death.

  Though the Bradfords had made their dislike of her abundantly clear, they obviously believed her presence might help David. They were wrong, but she couldn’t bring herself to add to their anguish by leaving. She had enough savings to live on for a while, and she had only to ask and Anna would arrange to have her stuff moved out of the shoe-size apartment she’d rented after David had hied off for parts unknown and stow it in her old bedroom in her parents’ brick row house on 46th Street.

  Edward Bradford’s absurd and insulting offer of money hadn’t entered her thoughts.

  And yet she’d taken the check, not tearing it into so much confetti as she’d longed to do—if only to erase the contemptuous look stamped on his face. The man had judged and condemned her the second he’d learned that his son had married her—a nobody from Astoria. In his mind, her job as a waitress was barely a step above that of a stripper or pole dancer.

  She’d taken the check Edward Bradford had all but thrown at her. But as soon as she returned to New York, she’d gone to her parents’ neighborhood bank and arranged to have the money put into a special account to help pay for her brother Christopher’s care. The million dollars meant nothing to Christopher, yet he needed it more than anyone she knew.

  Edward and Madeline Bradford would never know what she’d done with their money, and Tess was glad. Their knowing wouldn’t change their opinion of her or their belief that somehow she’d tricked their son into marrying her.

  Perhaps with David’s funeral, Madeline and Edward Bradford had found peace. And if their hatred of her provided some release from the grief of losing their only child, well, so be it. Tess would never see them again. Tonight at Anna’s, she’d be taking the next step in her plan to get as far away from everything that had happened in the last year as she could.

  Anna picked up the tray and offered the assorted appetizers to Tess, then put it back down on the coffee table with a sad sigh when Tess gave a shake of her head.

  “I’m glad that David died without pain,” Anna continued. “I only wish he hadn’t inflicted so much on you. I know it’s terrible to speak ill of the dead, but I don’t know whether I can forgive what he did to you. How could he have not told you about the tumor? I still can’t believe he married you without ever uttering a word about it.”

  If only that had been the only secret David kept to himself, Tess thought. As it was, everything about their marriage had been based on a lie. The biggest one being that David had never loved her.

  That’s what she got for believing in fairy tales, for believing for even a minute that a dashing, cosmopolitan journalist would fall in love at first sight with a working girl from Queens, sweep her off her feet, and propose marriage weeks later. How could she have thought that she and David would make it, that they would enjoy a happily ever after?

  Most likely it was because the David Bradford she’d known during those first months had been the most charming man she’d ever encountered. The most determinedly persuasive too. It was only later, after she’d agreed to elope with him and they’d settled into his SoHo loft that, with the suddenness of a light being switched off, his charm had been replaced by a cutting cruelty. Both extremes, his charm and his hostility, had been equally devastating.

  She took a sip of wine to wash away the b
itterness. “I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve stopped asking myself why he did the things he did or what he said and left unsaid about his life. I might go crazy otherwise. But at the hospital in Boston, his mother told me that David’s first brain tumor had been benign and that the treatment for it had been successful. He’d only been nineteen at the time, Anna. My guess is that when he started experiencing symptoms again, he simply refused to consider the possibility that the cancer had returned. And not being aware of his history, I didn’t think to suspect his headaches of being a sign of something far more serious.”

  During the weeks she spent by David’s hospital bed, Tess had talked to the nurses and doctors, receiving a crash course in malignant brain tumors. Now she recognized how deeply David had been in denial about his condition. The symptoms had been there even during the few months they’d been married. When the headaches he suffered became more frequent and intense, he’d refused to make an appointment with a doctor, blaming her instead and saying that living with Tess was enough to give anyone a migraine. When his mood swings led to vicious outbursts, he’d claimed that the stress of looming deadlines for the articles he was writing was the cause, that and the fact that the woman whom he’d married had turned into an uptight nagging bitch. That would be his cue to storm out of the loft, sometimes not to return until the next day. When he did finally return, his clothes would reek of alcohol and perfume.

  “And so what were his parents like?” Anna asked.

  She shrugged uncomfortably. “Okay, I guess, considering that I represented an unpleasant surprise. I thought his mother was beginning to soften toward me somewhat near the end.” Though not enough to persuade her husband that Tess should be allowed to attend David’s funeral, she added silently. The hurt of being barred from the ceremony was still fresh.

  “What was David thinking, not telling his parents that he’d married you? What a creep. Absolutely incredible.” Anna’s tone was scathing.