by Heidi Lowe
"It's just a song, honey. I like it, and the audience seemed to also."
"Oh don't give me that crap! Just a song?" He let out a humorless laugh. "You wrote it for a woman you were fucking. So don't you ever tell me it's just a song. And don't you ever play it again."
I'd never been afraid of him in all the time we'd been together, but for the first time ever he had a sinister look about him. He looked more like Jimmy now, furious at me for being with Tiffany. Although I still didn't think he would hurt me, his threatening tone did unsettle me.
"Are you seriously trying to dictate what I can and cannot play?"
"Is it too much to ask that you don't play the song you wrote for your girlfriend?" He could never say that word without using a disparaging tone, reducing her to some dalliance that meant nothing to me. I'd never told him about Amanda, so he must have assumed Tiffany was a phase. But maybe he was the phase...
"I came home with you, went back to a job I hate. What more do you want?" I mumbled.
He wasn't supposed to hear, or rather, I hadn't said it for his benefit. But he did, and right then I knew he would explode.
"Wow, Lara, now it's all coming out. A job you hate? You came home with me, your husband, and you sound like you did me a favor."
It had always felt that way, that I'd come back to please him, not for myself.
"That's not what I–"
"Yeah, it is. You don't want to be here, I can feel it. You've been distant and cold ever since you got back."
I wished I could have argued with him, insisted that it was all in his head, but I couldn't bring myself to. He deserved to know the truth.
I wept instead.
"So it's true?" He looked like someone had punched him in the gut. He pressed a hand over his mouth, climbed out of bed, probably trying to get as far away from me as possible.
I nodded slowly, tears rolling down my cheeks. "This isn't me anymore. I don't fit in here. This isn't who I am."
"And me, what about me, Lara? What about our marriage? Our life here?"
"I don't know," I screamed at him.
"Do you love me?"
"Of course." I didn't need to think about that.
His next question pained him to say, I could see it in his face, hear it crack his voice. "Do you love her?"
I nodded. I didn't need to think about that, either.
"You're my wife." The veins looked like they would pop out of his neck when he yelled. "Mine, not hers. You knew her for all of five minutes, and now she's encroaching on our marriage."
"I haven't taken any of those pills the doctor prescribed." I didn't know why I chose that moment to come clean, because it was so off topic. Maybe it was because I hated the way he kept trying to minimize what I had with Tiffany.
He screwed up his face in confusion. "What?"
"Not one of them. I don't want to take pills just to get through the day. My condition got worse when I left her."
"So you've been lying to me?"
"I wanted to make you happy, to be the sane wife you deserve. But I couldn't take them."
He shook his head at me. "I don't even know who you are anymore."
"I do."
Lara Murray had ceased to exist the second that bus went careening off the bridge and plunged into the lake. We both knew that now.
TWENTY-SIX
Saturday, January 17, 1998
We wrapped up the show last night. The final performance, at least for me. Well, probably. It's been a hectic few weeks. With all the last minute changes, Kevin dropping out and being replaced by Grant – who couldn't act his way out of a paper bag – plus putting in extra hours at the hospital, I haven't had time to breathe. I will admit, though, that I welcomed the distraction. Welcomed, past tense.
Closing night couldn't have gone any smoother. I actually think it was my best performance of the two-week run. My English accent will never be great, but it did the job. Plus we had a full house, sold out completely. It's still hard to believe that, over the course of the play's run, more than two thousand people came to watch me play a cockney peasant. It's both humbling and frightening.
Gillian and Rob came on press night, said it was, and I quote, "magnificent."
Magnificent. I didn't think people used words like that anymore.
We usually go down to the foyer or the bar and greet some of the audience members, talk to them briefly about the play, which I usually love. But last night I wasn't feeling up to it, so I hung back in the changing room while the rest of the cast did the meet and greet. I put on some music and sat back with a glass of rose. This was how I started all of my performances, to calm my nerves.
"Tiff, you decent?" Roger called from outside the room. "There's a lady here who wants to meet the star of the show."
"I'm a little busy." I sighed, but then scolded myself inwardly for doing so. Had fame already gone to my head to the point where I couldn't even spare two minutes of my time to meet a fan? That wasn't a person I wanted to be, no matter how miserable I felt.
"Do you want me to send her away?"
"No, it's fine. Tell her to come on down."
I checked myself over in the mirror, pulled off the brown wig that had transformed me into Eliza Doolittle, then awaited my visitor.
When the knock came, it was a light, apologetic one that was barely audible. Probably a shy old lady, I thought at the time. The play just seemed to attract them.
The smile I plastered on in anticipation of seeing the stranger faded when I opened the door. All the blood rushed to my head, and my heartbeat hastened.
"Hi," Abby said, with a nervous smile.
"Hi." I could think of no other words to accompany that one, so I just gazed at her instead.
"Can I come in?"
I let her in, but kept my eyes glued to her, as though if I blinked she would disappear. I thought I'd dreamed her up.
"That was quite the performance."
"You saw the whole thing?"
She nodded. "Of course. I couldn't miss it."
"How did I do?"
"You were amazing, just like I knew you would be."
At this point I had to look away from her, to stop myself from crying. It pained me to see her, to hear her describe me that way. I was so amazing, yet she'd found it so easy to leave me.
"Did you come all the way here just to see a play? Because I'm sure Seattle has theaters." My attempt at being glib and bitchy only made me feel awful. Despite how much I was hurting, how much we'd hurt each other, I didn't want to be nasty to her. I'd loved her once...I still did.
"Seattle does have theaters, lots of them, but...it doesn't have you."
I swallowed but the ball in my throat wouldn't budge. She looked just as beautiful as I remembered, even with the longer hair. Even with the tears making her eyes watery.
"Why did you come here, Lara?" Using that name on her still didn't feel right.
"I've filed for divorce."
I checked her eyes for signs of dishonesty, but there were none.
"Divorce? I don't under–"
"Every day since leaving Oakwood, since leaving you, I felt like I was living a lie, trying to be someone I wasn't. Trying to fit into someone else's life. If I'm being honest, I felt that way long before the accident. I was content with James, I realize that now. But with you, I was truly happy. I'm not Lara Murray, I don't think I ever really was. I'm Abigail from Oakwood, the pianist at Oakwood General. I'm the woman you fell in love with."
"So what does this mean?" I needed to hear her say it, confirm it before I started rejoicing. I didn't want to jump to the wrong conclusions and have my heart broken all over again, because it was already too fragile.
And then she spoke the words I'd longed to hear, words I never thought I would hear from her when we said goodbye outside the hospital three months ago.
"I want to be with you, and only you. I love you...and I choose happiness."
Those were her exact words, and I'll never forget them. I
've replayed them over and over in my head, and even as I'm writing this I'm smiling like an idiot who just got everything she ever dreamed of.
Okay, gotta run. The lady is telling me to come back to bed. Apparently she's cold and needs my body to warm her up. I'm only too happy to oblige.
We're going to resume talking about marriage, and children, and all the things two people discuss when they're drunk on love.
The End
BOOKS BY HEIDI LOWE
Series:
My Mother's Best Friend
Justified Affair
The Neighbor
Set Dreams
Le Coeur Island
Novellas:
Crave: Nikki's Story
Crave: Faye's Story
Novels:
My Beautiful Sin (Beautiful Sin Saga, Book 1)
Sinning Again (Beautiful Sin Saga, Book 2)
Sinning Forever (Beautiful Sin Saga, Book 3)
The Queen of Miami
Strummed
Her Lesson in Love
A Scarlet Kiss
Before You Were Mine
Mega Bundles:
Girl Love: 11-Book Lesbian Romance Mega Bundle
BLURB
After the intercity bus she's traveling on crashes into a bridge, Abigail wakes up in a hospital in Utah with no memory of who she is.
Unsure of when, or even if, her memory will return, she settles into her new life in Oakwood, where she meets Tiffany, a nurse she befriends while hospitalized.
Abby knows it would be unwise to get involved with someone while her past is still a blur, so she tries to ignore her growing feelings for the beautiful woman. But as the two grow closer, and things get serious between them, Abby is finally ready to put her unknown past to bed...
Which might be a problem for James, her husband of two years. She doesn't remember him, but he certainly remembers her. And when her memory does come back, she'll be forced to choose between her old love and her new one.
Before You Were Mine is a steamy lesbian romance novel.