Before and Again

by Barbara Delinsky

  And there it was, like two days ago at the farm. Edward’s version of tall and dark got to me every time. The jolt I’d felt hearing his voice became a slow thrum in my veins. I tried to shut it down, but it wouldn’t listen to me, and that, alone, was cause to resent him.

  He extended a hand to Michael and said in a voice low enough not to carry past us, “Ned Cooper. I’m with the Inn. You must be Officer Shanahan.”

  Michael shook his hand. “With the Inn?”

  I could read Michael. He definitely recognized the name. He just couldn’t place it, which put me in a bind. What to say? How much to reveal? What the hell did I know?

  “I’m heading the new management team,” Edward said and hitched his head back at the reception desk, where Joyce was talking with a woman and a man. Both were dressed for business. “They’re PR people working on damage control. I was showing them around and saw you with Ms. Reid. Is there a problem?”

  That was his story then. He was “with the management team,” which could have meant anything but was better than an out-and-out “new owner.” He had met me before and knew who I was. And, based on the “Officer” he’d attached to Shanahan, whose name he had just learned from Joyce, he knew who Michael was and, therefore, knew my legal history.

  “No problem,” Michael said. “Maggie and I meet from time to time.”

  “Not usually here, though, and not usually when Maggie has to work.”

  Edward rarely did anything without purpose. Using my first name after Michael had was a power play—like they were jockeying for position with me the pawn. I was suddenly annoyed at them both.

  “I caught the end there,” Edward said. “What are you reporting?”

  Michael shrugged it off. “Court business.”

  “She’s on my payroll, so any business of hers is business of mine. Does it have to do with her being in Rutland yesterday?” When Michael straightened, he said, “I know she was there. Most of the town does. I just know more about Maggie’s past than they do.”

  “How much?” Michael asked, the implication being that he knew more, like it was a competition.

  But Edward raised a hold-on hand and returned to the reception desk.

  “Who the hell does he think he is?” Michael hissed the instant he was gone.

  “My ex-husband,” I hissed back, and why not? He would figure it out. And I was angry, too. I didn’t want this, didn’t want any of it.

  He eyed me in shock. “Seriously?”

  “Would I joke about something like that?” My whisper was harsh. I felt a storm gathering inside and wasn’t sure I could contain it. The past week had been hell on my nerves, which were now further shredded by Edward’s pale-blue eyes—Lily’s pale-blue eyes—strikingly silver-blue eyes, both pairs.

  “I didn’t invite him here, Michael, he just suddenly showed up. I had no idea he had anything to do with the Inn, and I still don’t know the extent of whatever it is. He didn’t bother to let me know before he was coming. God knows he didn’t ask my permission. Trust me, I am not a happy camper.”

  “What’s his game?”

  “Like I know?” I asked, feeling so many warring emotions that when Edward returned, the best I could do was to bury my hands in the pockets of my coat.

  Without missing a beat, he picked up where they’d left off. “I know about the accident, the trial, and the probation.”

  “If you’re her ex,” came Michael’s smug reply, “you know a lot more than that.”

  Edward seemed about to say something, but reconsidered. He eyed me in question.

  “I just told him,” I said.

  Michael seized the upper hand. “The problem is the terms of her probation. She’s not supposed to associate with felons.”

  Edward frowned. “Who’s a felon around here?”

  “Right now, the Emory boy is pretty damned close.”

  “To being a felon? There’s been no trial.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t,” Edward reasoned. “Her crime didn’t involve the underworld. It was a driving accident, for Christ’s sake. If you take the spirit of the law, not the letter, the felon thing would never apply to her. She’s not a violent person. She isn’t a criminal. But okay, fine. The words are in the probation agreement. But a felon, by definition, is someone convicted of a crime. Chris Emory hasn’t been convicted of anything. If it happens down the road, she’ll stay away. Right now, there’s no need. I don’t recall anything in the agreement that contradicts that.” He glanced at his watch. “Hey, I have to run. My lawyer’s waiting. We’re reviewing contracts. Should I have him look at the probation agreement while he’s here?”

  There was no probation agreement in my file here. The former GM hadn’t had it, and neither did Edward. He had read it back when I first received it, but the only people outside the Massachusetts AG’s office who had copies were Michael, my lawyer in Boston, and me.

  Michael stood stone-faced.

  “We’ll talk later,” Edward told me and set off with that long stride of his across the reception area to the door that led into the Inn.

  “Arrogant son of a bitch,” Michael breathed and attacked me as if it were my fault. “You were awful quiet. Didn’t you have anything to say to him, or were you always the passive one in the relationship?”

  The words were all wrong. I was suddenly furious, both at Edward for barging into my life and at Michael for being a prick. My voice remained in the privacy range, but barely. “What would you have had me say? I have not talked with the man in four years. I did not invite him here, and I sure as hell didn’t text him just now to say I needed help. I was doing fine before either of you showed up.” I took a fragmented breath. “I am my own person, Michael. I live alone, and I live clean. If you want to report me, go ahead, I’ll hire a lawyer to defend me on the facts. Edward is right. Chris isn’t a felon. The terms of my probation say felon, not accused of a felony. And,” I barreled on, “for the record, I wasn’t passive in my marriage. Edward and I were equals. I had strengths he didn’t have and vice versa. We complemented each other perfectly, and we were happy. Had it not been for my accident—for my taking my eyes off the road for one fucking minute—we’d be back in the life we loved with our daughter Lily—and two or three other children,” I added in a broken voice. “I wanted four in all, he wanted three. That was the worst of any disagreement we had.”

  Slammed with grief, I ran out of breath, but not before silently noting another mistake we had made. Between enjoying Lily and building my career, we had put off having other children. And then, after Lily died, our bubble of invincibility was gone.

  I didn’t often think about what might have been. My chest didn’t seize up; I had that much control, at least. But composure? Slim to none. The sudden silence was too dense even for sounds of the harp to breach.

  Michael seemed startled, like he hadn’t expected an outburst from me, like my vehemence told him how upset I was but he had no clue what to do.

  I had no clue what he would do, either. In the void, though, it struck me that I might have sounded unstable, which wasn’t something I wanted my probation officer to think.

  Swallowing, I took a slow, palliative breath. “Sorry. I’m on overload. It’s been a difficult week.”

  “Him showing up? I totally get it.”

  He totally didn’t, if he thought that Edward’s showing up was all, but I didn’t have the strength to remind him of the rest. In that instant, only one matter was prime.

  “About my having been married to him, he and I need to talk. He knows that you know, but he needs to know that no one else does. No one here even knows my married name, and I want it to stay that way. I won’t be telling people Edward’s my ex, and I don’t want him to do it, either.” The message was for Michael as well, which was why I ended on a pleading note.

  He got that, at least. “I won’t tell.”

  “Thank you. It’s confidential information. It’s no one’s business bu
t Edward’s and mine. And now you.”

  “I promise,” he said, his voice distinctly personal, “but you have to promise to avoid the Emorys. I mean it, Maggie. This whole business is so frigging public. Your face is a hundred times prettier than anyone else on probation, so people remember it. Suddenly there it is in the news, and I’m getting calls from the head of the department saying, ‘What the hell? Get on top of this, Shanahan.’ That’s what I’m dealing with.”

  I nodded. “I understand.”

  His smile was too kind. “Good. Just so we’re clear.”

  We were. I understood his problem. That didn’t mean I agreed with his interpretation of my probation terms. In that, Edward had won hands down.

  * * *

  I might have followed Edward right then and demanded to know why he was here. But I was still reeling from the little flashback of his eyes and Lily’s, and didn’t think I could bear seeing either again just yet.

  Besides, I had one client, then another, then a walk-in. The last was a local bestselling author who wanted to talk about the possibility of my doing her makeup for a photo shoot in April. She was the most exciting of the three. Her genre was political suspense, which meant that she wanted to look like a hip forty-year-old from Washington, DC, rather than a crunchy sixty-year-old from Devon. We talked about makeup and hair and even clothes. By the time she left, I felt I had made another friend.

  Which, ironically, made me all the more irritated with Edward. I had a nice life here. His coming threatened to destroy it.

  * * *

  I didn’t call him that night because, frankly, I needed to not think about Edward—to pretend that he didn’t exist and remind myself of the plusses in my new life. So I went to happy hour at the studio store with a group of fellow potters, then went home and look a long walk with Jonah. After that, I returned to the cabin and, with the cats worming their way around every leg in sight, be it those of the stools at my kitchen island or mine, I cooked. I didn’t bake; my mother was the expert there, so anything I produced would be, by comparison, too salty, too dense, or too dry. Cooking was okay. I didn’t do it often and was lousy at it, mainly because the creative me balked at following directions as written. But it was fun. Having chosen a recipe online and picked up ingredients on the way home, I spent the evening with Spotify, à la Katy Perry, Coldplay, and Adele, and made a lovely mess of my small kitchen. There was therapy in cleaning it all up and the tiredness the whole adventure brought.

  I slept. I dreamed. I awoke Wednesday morning fresh from another erotic one.

  Resentful of that, I might have called Edward then—even marched myself to his office to demand that he stay out of my life—if Joe Hellinger hadn’t called. His patient was a teenage girl whose cheek had been badly burned when a chemistry class experiment blew up, and while he had done what he could with skin grafts, no way could you miss it. Laser treatments would help once she was healed, but I was able to show her how to hide the mess until it did.

  I was good at hiding things.

  * * *

  Cornelia was only partly right. Another story came along and took over the headlines. This one was about a gun incident in Florida in which five people were killed. Talk of terrorism superseded teenage hacking any day.

  But the press didn’t forget about Devon. Our weekly ran a piece about the case; it was a straightforward report of what had happened, giving Jay’s name, Grace’s name, the prosecutor’s name, even the judge’s name but no others. The rest of the media? Breaking-news reporters were replaced by magazine journalists, some of whom were friends of Ben Zwick and clearly on his revenge team. Their stories would be longer and broaden the picture to include Chris playing town hockey not very well, and Grace having come to town a dozen years earlier from no-one-knew-where. They talked with shop owners and road workers; they talked with locals eating breakfast at Rasher and Yolk, and with tourists eating dinner at the crêpe place two doors down from that. They tried to talk with me as I left work, but I waved them away each time.

  “Much better,” my probation officer said when he called Thursday afternoon. “You’re staying off the Emory grid.”

  “You warned, I listened,” I replied. I didn’t tell him I had sent Grace home the night before with a pot of beef stew, or that I had agreed to do her hair. He didn’t understand what friendship meant. I wasn’t sure a man could—well, except Kevin.

  Kevin knew how much Michael Shanahan annoyed me, and though he couldn’t do anything about the man’s visits or calls, he could do something about the press. He refused to allow them anywhere near the pottery studio—literally, all week, repeatedly, insisted journalists were “scaring off his patrons” and had Jimmy wangle surveillance patrols. That made the studio a double haven for me, which is probably why on Friday morning I tried, again, to just let myself go and give in to the past. Lily used to play with me for hours shaping bunnies, dolls, her favorite fruits, even her profile.

  Today? Nada.

  Oh, I retrieved the bin with my name on the front, and, taking an isolated workbench that faced the woods, unwrapped the paper-clay that I saved for special things. I even wedged it, like I had done Tuesday. But I kept at it so long and hard this day, that Kevin finally came up from behind, gripped my shoulders, leaned low, and said into my ear, “You’re killing it, babe.”

  I froze. With a last meek nudge at the clay, I let my hands fall. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be for my sake.”

  “Not for you, then. For her,” I said. Though my voice was shielded by the room’s sandy hum, chagrin kept it low. “I still can’t do it.”

  Kevin turned my stool and hunkered down. “It’s hard. You’re not ready. And anyway, she’s not expecting you to be ready.” He frowned. “Uh, are we talking about your daughter or your therapist?”

  I met his eyes. “Both. Lily, because there are times I think she can’t rest in peace until I do this. My therapist, because she told me I had to confront the past if I want to move on.” I read the question in his eyes. “No, I haven’t Skyped with her lately. What’s the point? She doesn’t approve of my locking things away. She says it won’t work.” I put a protective palm on the clay I had wedged. It was cool and damp, and smelled of everything I loved, but I couldn’t work it. “Maybe she’s right. I’m sure as hell not making progress here.”

  “It’s not the right time.”

  “What if I can’t choose a time?” I cried softly. “What if the choice is made for me? What if the past won’t stay packed away in a box with my name on it, just sitting on a shelf until I feel like taking it off and breaking the seal? This week has been brutal, Kev. I see reporters even when they’re really just tourists. Officer Gill is in his cruiser, only he’s not playing Solitaire, he’s watching me, I swear he is, and he doesn’t wave. I look in my rearview mirror as I drive. I pull over at the bottom of Pepin Hill to make sure I’m not being followed. And I keep seeing Edward. I saw him at the market yesterday. He was buying eggs. Why is he buying eggs at our market when he can raid the kitchen at the Inn any time he wants? Why is he buying eggs, when he doesn’t even know how to cook!”

  “He doesn’t?”

  “No.”

  “Breakfast? Eggs? Any idiot can cook eggs.” When I shrugged, Kevin said, “Maybe he wants to get to know the town. Maybe he’s lonely. He doesn’t have a girlfriend. He moved here alone.”

  Moved here alone? Well, there was another possible burr. How unpleasant would it be seeing Edward with someone else? “How do you know that?”

  “Those women who come here to play with clay? They talk.”

  “How do they know?”

  “Beats me.”

  “Maybe he’s licking the wounds of a bad relationship,” I said with a snort.

  Kevin looked skyward. “Sounds like someone I know.” His eyes returned to mine. “Have you talked with him?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Maybe you shou
ld.”

  “Maybe he’s only here for another day or two.”

  “He bought a house.”

  “Maybe for someone else. I mean, why would he want to be in the same town where I am? By the end of our marriage, we couldn’t look at each other. What does he think he’ll accomplish being here?”

  “Don’t ask me that. Ask him. You need to talk with him—you know, get it all out in the open.”

  “Talk about pain?”

  “Yeah, well, it ain’t going away by itself. It’s festering in you, sweetie. I can smell it.”

  “Smell it?”

  “Not literally.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut for a second, then, not caring that I sounded all of three years old, glared at Kevin and whispered, “I don’t want him here. I don’t want Officer Gill watching me. I don’t want to be frightened every time I see a camera. And I don’t want people talking at the post office about how Grace could have let her son do what he did, because that’s where we’re headed. People speculate, and she’s next in their sights. Do they not have anything better to do? My eyes were on my GPS when I ran that stop sign. I admitted it. Know what the rumors were—no, you don’t, because you weren’t there, but every one of them got back to me. Either I was drunk—you know, a bored soccer mom taking shots at lunch. Or I was high on something. Or I was rushing to drop off my daughter so I could meet a lover.”

  Kevin didn’t blink. “And you listened, why?”

  “I thought friends were friends,” I said, feeling the betrayal like it was yesterday. “I thought loyalty mattered. I thought other mothers would understand how it had happened.” The pottery studio wasn’t the best place for this, and my voice was low enough, but the words continued to spill, which said tons about my emotional state. “Oh, they understood all right, only they needed to convince themselves that it could never happen to them, because they were better than me. They didn’t do shots at lunch or smoke weed before getting in the carpool lane, and they sure didn’t have lovers.”