“That depends on your definition of 'all right.“ Olivia said coolly. “Nothing's any worse than usual. He's just annoyed that I'm not letting the press beat me to death, or reenacting the accident for them on tabloid TV. But give him a day or two, Mom, I'm sure hell arrange it.”
“Politics does strange things to men,” her mother said wisely. She knew better than anyone what it was like, and how much it had cost them. Even her recent mastectomy had been announced on TV, with diagrams and an interview with her doctor. But she was the governor's wife, and she knew she had to expect it. She had been in the public eye for most of her adult life, and it had taken a lot from her. And she could see now that it had already taken something from her daughter. One paid dearly for winning, or even losing, elections.
And then Olivia looked at her quietly, and wondered what her mother would say if she told her the truth. She had been thinking for days. And she knew what she had to do now. “I'm leaving him, Mom. I can't do this. I tried to leave him in June, but he wanted the presidency so badly, I agreed to do the campaign with him, and stay for the first four years if he won.” She looked at her mother unhappily. The crassness of what she'd done sounded awful in the telling. “He's paying me a million dollars a year to do it. And the funny thing is I didn't even care. It sounded like play money when he offered it to me. I did it for him because I used to love him. But I guess I didn't love him enough, even way back in the beginning. I really know now I can't do it.” She didn't owe this to anyone, not even Andy.
“Then don't,” Janet Douglas said bluntly. “Even a million dollars a year wouldn't be enough. Ten wouldn't either. No amount is worth ruining your life for. Get out while you can, Olivia. I should have done it years ago. It's too late now. It drove me to drink, it ruined my health, it destroyed our marriage, it kept me from doing everything I wanted to do, it hurt our family and made life hard for all of you. Olivia, if this isn't what you want, if you yourself don't want this desperately, get out now, while you still can. Please honey,” her eyes filled with tears as she squeezed her daughter's hand, “I beg you. And no matter what your father says, I'm one hundred percent behind you.” And then she looked at her even more seriously. It was one thing to abandon politics, another to abandon a marriage that might still be worth saving. “What about him? What about Andy?”
“It's been over for a long time, Mom.”
Janet nodded again. It didn't really surprise her. “I thought so. But I wasn't sure.” And then she smiled slowly. “Your father is going to think I lied to him the other day. He asked me if everything was all right with you, and I said it was. But I wasn't sure then.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Olivia said, putting her arms around her. “I love you.” Her mother had just given her the greatest gift of all, her blessing.
“I love you too, sweetheart,” she said as she held her daughter. “Do whatever you have to do, and don't worry about what your father says. He'll be fine. He and Andy will make some noise for a while, but they'll get over it. And Andy's young. He can always get remarried and do it next time. They haven't seen the last of him in Washington. Don't let him bully you into coming back, Olivia, unless you want to.” What she really wanted for her daughter was to be far from here. She wanted her freedom.
“I don't want to go back, Mom. I never will. I should have left him years ago …before Alex was born, or at least after he died.”
“You're young, you'll make a life for yourself,” she said wistfully. She never had. She had given up her own life, her career, her friends, her dreams. Every ounce of energy she'd had had gone into her husband's political career, and she wanted something very different for her daughter. “What are you going to do now?”
“I want to write.” She smiled shyly and her mother laughed.
“It all comes full circle, doesn't it? Do it then, and don't let anyone stop you.”
They sat and talked all afternoon, and they made lunch together in the kitchen. Olivia even thought of telling her about Peter, but in the end she didn't. She did say that she thought she'd probably go back to France, to the fishing village she loved so much. It was a good place to write, a good place to hide, but her mother warned her about that too.
“You cannot hide forever.'
“Why not?” She smiled sadly. There was nothing else for her to do now, except disappear, legitimately this time. But she wanted nothing more to do with the press or the public.
Her brother joined them for dinner that night. He was grief stricken and subdued, but at least she made him laugh once or twice, and he kept up with what was happening in Washington by phone and fax every day. It was incredible to Olivia that he could even think about that now, but even in the face of such a major loss, he was still very much like their father. It was obvious that he was consumed by politics in very much the same way as her father and her husband. And late that night she called Andy and told him that she had made an important decision.
“I'm not coming back,” she said simply.
“Not that again.” He sounded annoyed this time. “Have you forgotten our contract?”
“There's nothing in it that says I have to stay with you, or follow you to the presidency. It only says that if I do, you'll pay me a million dollars a year. Well, I've just saved you a bunch of money.”
“You can't do that,” he said, sounding angrier than she'd ever heard him. She was interfering with the one thing he wanted.
“Yes, I can. And I am. I'm leaving for Europe tomorrow morning.”
She wasn't actually leaving for a few days, but she wanted to be sure he knew it was all over. He showed up in Boston the next day anyway, and as her mother had predicted, her father entered the fray with them. But she was thirty-four years old, she knew her own mind, and she was a grown woman. And she knew that nothing would sway her.
“Do you realize what you're giving up?” her father shouted at her from across the room, as Andy looked gratefully at him. To Olivia, it looked almost like a lynch mob.
“Yes,” she said quietly, looking straight at them, “heartbreak and lies. I've experienced both of them for quite a while now, and I think I'll manage fine without them. Oh, and I forgot, exploitation.”
“Don't be so grand,” her father said in disgust, he was a politician of the old school, and not quite as lofty as Andy. “It's a great life, a great opportunity, and you know it.”
“For you maybe,” she said, looking at her father with undisguised sorrow. “For the rest of us it's a life of loneliness and disappointment, of broken promises along the campaign trail. I want a real life with a real man, or alone if it has to be that way. I don't even care anymore. I just want to get as far from politics as I can, and never hear the word again.” She cast a sidelong look at her mother, and saw that she was smiling.
“You're a fool,” her father raged at her, but when Andy left their house that night, he was truly venomous, and promised her she'd pay for what she'd just done to him. And he wasn't lying. On the day she left for France, three days later, there was a story in the Boston papers that she knew only he would have planted. It said that after her recent, tragic accident, in which three members of her family had died, she had suffered severe traumatic stress, and she had just been admitted to a hospital with a nervous breakdown. It said that her husband was deeply worried about her, and although the article didn't actually come out and say it, there was the hint of an estrangement, because of her mental state. And the article was entirely slanted to sympathize with Andy for being saddled with a nutcase. He was covering his tracks nicely. If he said she was crazy, then it would be okay to dump her. Round one for Andy … or was it round two … or ten? Had he knocked her out, or had she simply run away and saved her own life while he wasn't looking? She was no longer sure now.
Peter saw the story too, and suspected that it had been planted by Andy. It didn't sound like Olivia, even after the short time he knew her. But he couldn't check this time, since it didn't say what hospital she was in. There was no way to
find out the truth and it drove him crazy with worry.
Her mother took her to the airport on a Thursday afternoon a few days after she'd told Andy she was leaving. It was late August by then, and Peter and his family were still at the Vineyard. Janet Douglas put her daughter on the plane, and stood there until the plane took off. She wanted to be sure that she was safe, and truly gone. Olivia had escaped a fate worse than death as far as her mother was concerned, and she was relieved as she saw the plane swoop slowly overhead, on its way to Paris.
“Godspeed, Olivia,” she said softly, hoping she wouldn't come back to the States for a long time. There was too much pain waiting for her here, too many memories, too many rotten, selfish men waiting to hurt her. Her mother was happy knowing she had gone back to France. And as the plane flew out of sight, Janet signalled to her bodyguards, and walked slowly out of the airport with a sigh. Olivia was safe now.
Chapter Ten
As the month of August wore on, and faxes continued to roll in about the research on Vicotec, the tension between Peter and his father-in-law seemed to heighten. By Labor Day weekend, it was almost palpable, and even the boys had begun to feel it.
”What's happening between Granddaddy and Dad?” Paul asked on Saturday afternoon, and Kate frowned at him as she answered.
“Your father is being difficult,” she said quietly, but even her son could see that she blamed Peter for the tension between them.
“Did they have a fight or something?” He was old enough to understand, and his mother was usually pretty candid with him, although “fights” didn't usually proliferate in their family. But once in a while he knew that his father and his grandfather disagreed about something.
“They're working on a new product,” she said simply, but it was a great deal more complicated than that, and she knew it. She had asked Peter repeatedly to go easy on him. Her father had been worked up about it all summer, and at his age, it wasn't good for him. Although even Kate had to admit that her father looked better than ever. At seventy, he still played tennis for an hour every day, and he swam a mile every morning.
“Oh.” Paul was satisfied with her explanation. “I guess it's no big deal then.” He brushed off the multimillion-dollar trouble with Vicotec with an easy sixteen-year-old assessment.
They were all going to a big party that night to celebrate the end of the summer. All their friends were going to be there, and in two days they were all leaving. Patrick and Paul were going back to school, and Mike was off to Princeton. And on Monday they were all moving back to Greenwich.
Kate had a lot to do, closing her own house, as well as her father's, at the Vineyard. And she was putting some of her clothes away when Peter wandered in and watched her. The summer had never gotten off the ground for him. The double blow of nearly losing Vicotec and having to give Olivia up only moments after they'd met had been an agony for him straight through August. The worries about Vicotec had put a damper on things to be sure, and Frank's constant pressuring hadn't helped, but neither had Katie's constant clandestine involvement in what should never have been her business. She was too involved with what happened between them, too concerned about protecting her father. And there was no denying that what had happened to Peter in France had changed things. He hadn't wanted it to. He had been so determined to come back and pick up where he had left off, but that just didn't happen. It was like opening a window and seeing a view, and then boarding up the house again. He kept standing in the same place, staring at a blank wall, and remembering what had been there, even if only briefly. The scenery he had seen with Olivia had been unforgettable, and although he had never intended it to, he knew now that it had changed his life forever. He wasn't going to alter anything, and he wasn't going anywhere. He had never contacted her, except to call the hospital after her accident and get reports on her from the nurse in ICU. But he couldn't forget her either. And her accident had terrified him, just knowing she had almost died seemed like terrifying retribution. But why her and not him? Why should Olivia be punished?
“I'm sorry it's been such a lousy summer,” Peter said sadly, sitting down on the bed, as Katie put a stack of sweaters away in a box with mothballs.
“It wasn't that bad,” she said kindly, glancing at him over her shoulder from the top of a short ladder.
“It was for me,” he said honestly. He had been miserable all summer. “I've had a lot on my mind,' he said in an oversimplified explanation, and Kate smiled at him again, and then her eyes grew serious as she watched him. She was thinking of her father.
“So has my dad. This hasn't been easy on him either.” She was only thinking about Vicotec. Peter was thinking about the extraordinary woman he had met in Paris. Olivia had made coming home to Katie nearly impossible. Kate was so independent and so cool, so willing to function without him. They didn't seem to do anything together anymore, except see their friends at night occasionally, and play tennis with her father. He wanted more than that. He was forty-four years old, and suddenly he wanted romance. He wanted contact with her, he wanted comfort, and friendship, and even some excitement. He wanted to snuggle next to her, and feel her flesh next to his. He wanted her to want him. But he had known Katie for twenty-four years, and there was very little romance left between them. There was intelligence, and respect, and a variety of shared interests, but he didn't stir when he saw her lie next to him, and when he did, she usually had phone calls to make, or a meeting somewhere, or an appointment with her father. They seemed to miss every opportunity to make love, to be alone, just to laugh sometimes, or sit around and talk, and he missed it. Olivia had shown him just exactly what he was missing. And in truth, what he had with her, he had never had with Katie. There was a kind of heady excitement to everything he did with Olivia that took his breath away. Life with Katie had always been more like going to the senior prom. With Olivia, it was more like going to the ball with a fairy princess. It was a silly comparison, and it made him laugh when he thought about it, and then he saw that Katie was staring at him.
“What are you smiling at? I was just saying how hard this has all been on my father.” He hadn't heard a word she was saying. He'd been dreaming of Olivia Thatcher.
“That's the price you pay for running a business like ours,” Peter said matter-of-factly. “It's a huge burden, and a tremendous responsibility, and no one said it was going to be easy.” He was tired of hearing about her father. “But I wasn't thinking about that just then. Why don't you and I go somewhere? We need to get away.” Martha's Vineyard hadn't been the restful vacation it had been in previous years. “Why don't we go to Italy or someplace else? Maybe the Caribbean, or Hawaii?” It would be different and exciting just being there with her, and he thought maybe a trip like that would put a little life back into their marriage.
“Now? Why? It's September, I have a thousand things to do, and so do you. I have to get the boys into school, and we have to take Mike to Princeton next weekend.” She looked at him like he was crazy, but he was persistent. After all these years, he had to at least try to keep them together, “After we get the kids settled in school then. I didn't mean today, but maybe sometime in the next few weeks. What do you think?” He looked at her hopefully as she came down the ladder and he wanted to feel more for her than he did. But the agony was that he didn't. Maybe a trip to the Caribbean would change that.
“You have to go to the FDA hearings in September. Don't you have to prepare for that?”
He didn't tell her that no matter what her father said, he had no intention of going, and he wouldn't let her father go either. They couldn't perjure themselves on the remote chance that all the problems would be solved sometime before Vicotec hit the market. “Let me worry about that,” was all he said to her, “just tell me when you can get away, and I'll plan it.” The only thing on his schedule were the congressional hearings on pricing he had finally agreed to appear at. But he knew that, if he had to, he could postpone his appearance. It was more a matter of courtesy and prestige tha
n a life-and-death situation. To him, their marriage was far more important.
“I've got a lot of board meetings this month,” Katie said vaguely, and opened another drawer full of sweaters. And as Peter watched her work, he suddenly wondered what she was really saying.
“Would you rather not go away?” If that was the case, he wanted to know it. Maybe there was something bothering her too, and then he had a sudden thought that hit him like a bolt of lightning. Had she had an affair too? Was she in love with someone else? Was she avoiding him? It could have happened to her too after all, though it had never even occurred to him, and he felt suddenly foolish at the realization that she was just as vulnerable as he was. She was still attractive, and fairly young, and there were a lot of men she would appeal to. But Peter had no idea how to ask her if that had happened. She was always fairly cool, and somewhat prim, and asking her if she'd ever had an affair was out of the question. Instead, he narrowed his eyes at her as she threw some more mothballs in another box of sweaters. “Is there some reason why you don't want to take a trip with me?” he asked as bluntly as he could, and she finally looked up at him, and gave him an answer which annoyed him greatly.
“I just don't think it would be fair to my father right now. He's upset about Vicotec. He has a lot on his mind. I think it would be really selfish of us to go lie on a beach somewhere while he sits in the office and worries.” With difficulty, Peter tried to hide his aggravation. He was sick of worrying about Frank. He had been doing just that for eighteen years now.
“Maybe right now we need to be selfish,” Peter pressed her. “Doesn't it worry you sometimes that we've been married for eighteen years, and we don't pay much attention to us, or what we need, or our marriage?” He was trying to say something to her, but not set any alarms off while he did it.
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