“I agree, but staying apart doesn’t have to last forever, Lynn. Once this custody motion is resolved, if you and Mitch want to see each other, there will be nothing to stop you.”
“You don’t think Ed will go running right back to the judge if he finds out Mitch and I have reconciled?” Lynn asked doubtfully. “Come on, Helen, this might never be over. Ed could keep our lives in turmoil out of spite.”
“I think you’re wrong. Frankly, I think this was a very carefully devised tactical maneuver to throw some mud in your direction and keep us so busy that we wouldn’t have time to dig for whatever real dirt Ed’s trying to hide.”
Lynn thought about that. At one time, she would never have imagined that her husband could be that devious, but recently? She simply didn’t know him anymore. “Maybe so,” she conceded. “Do we have that dirt yet?”
Helen smiled. “We’re getting very close. The investigator has found a trail of credit card receipts that don’t make a lick of sense.”
“What do you mean? Personal credit cards?”
“Personal. Company.” Helen shrugged. “Ed apparently used them indiscriminately.”
“For all those golf trips he’s been taking?” Lynn wondered.
“Smoke screen,” Helen said succinctly.
Lynn stared at her. “I don’t understand.”
“Ed may have been doing a lot of playing on those trips of his, but it wasn’t golf,” she said. “I’m just about a hundred percent sure of that.”
“What then?”
“Give me another day,” Helen said. “I don’t want to speak out of turn. I may not much like your husband these days, but I don’t want to do my own share of mudslinging without facts to back it up.”
Lynn had never seen Helen look quite so somber. “You’re not really loving this, are you? You usually look happier when you have something that can win a case.”
“I don’t mean to play some cat-and-mouse game with you, Lynn,” Helen said apologetically. “I really do want to be sure before I say anything more, okay? It’s just not the sort of thing I could wipe out of your mind if I’ve made an unfair accusation.”
Lynn regarded her with dismay. “It’s that damaging?”
Helen nodded, her expression weary. “I’m afraid so. Can you trust me just a little longer? Once I have solid proof, assuming it exists, I won’t hold back. I promise you that. You’ll know everything I know.”
“I’ve trusted you so far,” Lynn said. “I see no reason for that to change now.”
“It won’t be long. As soon as I have something concrete to share with you, we’ll talk and decide how you want to handle it from then on.”
Lynn frowned at something she heard in her tone. “This really is going to be a shocker, isn’t it?”
Helen nodded, her expression somber. “You have no idea.”
* * *
The back door to the house crashed open, scaring Lynn half to death. She ran in from the living room, only to find Ed standing there in the kitchen looking thoroughly furious. To her surprise, there was none of her usual cowering response to his anger.
She stood her ground and leveled a look at him that would have withered anyone else. “Next time knock,” she said quietly, regretting for once that she hadn’t been more cautious about locking that blasted door, as Mitch had begged her to. “You don’t have any right to walk in here anymore. I thought we’d established that weeks ago.”
“I do as long as I’m paying the mortgage,” he blustered.
“But according to the bank, not only haven’t you been paying the mortgage, you’ve been taking equity out of the house behind my back,” she retorted furiously. “Thanks for that, by the way. Not only are you seriously endangering the roof over your children’s heads, but ruining my credit rating in the process.”
He waved off her claim as if it were unimportant. “And you’re about to destroy my reputation. Watch how fast the gravy train dries up, if you accomplish that,” he threatened. “I know what you and that barracuda attorney of yours have been up to.”
“You mean the whole fighting fire with fire thing?” she asked. “You started it, Ed, the day you came after my kids and used my job and Mitch to do it. Until that moment, we still had a chance to settle this like civilized adults.”
He looked only vaguely chagrined by her charge. “The man has a drinking problem. Ask anyone.”
“He had a drinking problem right after his wife died,” she said. “He was grieving. I doubt you’ll find anyone who’s hit an emotional rough patch and hasn’t resorted to some sort of bad behavior they come to regret. If I hadn’t grown up around a drunk, I might be drinking right now myself.”
“Of course you’d defend him,” Ed said sarcastically.
She looked him squarely in the eye. “Of course I would,” she said quietly. “Especially when there’s an unjust charge leveled against him. Of all the people you know, don’t you think I’d recognize an alcoholic if there were one in my life?”
Ed flinched at that. He knew more than most what living with her father had been like for her. “Maybe so,” he conceded.
“And, while we’re on the subject of crummy allegations, do you honestly think I’d be working at Monty’s if I didn’t need the work because of your outrageous behavior toward your family? Not that I need to defend myself in the first place, because it’s a perfectly respectable bar. It’s not some low-life dive the way you tried to imply in your motion. Don’t you think Hal Cantor knows that, too? He eats in there at least once a week with some of the other judges from the area. I assume you know that, since he was there when you and Jimmy Bob were in there spying on me. That is why you came in that night, right? It’s certainly not your usual style.”
“Okay, yes, I wanted to see for myself how low you’d sunk.”
She merely lifted a brow at that. Ed raked a hand through his hair, then dragged out a kitchen chair and sat down, looking defeated.
He gave her a pleading look. “Lynn, we need to stop this before it spins out of control.”
She heard something new in his voice then, a genuine edge of desperation.
“I’m all for that,” she said cautiously. “Why this sudden change of heart? Exactly what has Helen discovered that’s made you so nervous? What have you done, Ed?”
He regarded her with unmistakable misery. “It’s not what I’ve done, at least not exactly.”
“You’re not making a lot of sense,” she told him, arms folded across her chest as she stood there waiting.
“Could you please sit down? This is hard enough as it is without your just standing over me, waiting for me to trip up or something.”
She sat down gingerly on the edge of a chair on the opposite side of the table. “What’s going on, Ed? Is it someone else? Is that what this has been about from the beginning? Were you cheating on me and got caught?”
The question hung in the air for a very long time before he finally nodded. “You’re not going to believe this. Hell, there are days I don’t even believe it myself.”
Lynn waited him out. Over all these years, she’d thought she knew and understood everything there was to know about her husband, but she’d never seen him like this. Whatever he was trying to say was clearly costing him. There had been a time when she’d have felt so sorry for him, she’d have let him off the hook, but not now.
“Lots of people have affairs, Ed,” she said, trying to give him an opening. “I never thought you’d be one of them, sinc
e you weren’t exactly passionate when it came to me. I always felt like sex was some kind of chore for you. I was young and naive when we got married, so I didn’t know any better, but I understand now that wasn’t exactly normal. Was it because there was someone else all along?”
He smiled weakly at that. “You’d probably even forgive me if I said that’s all it was, wouldn’t you?”
She’d wondered about that way back when Helen had first asked if he’d been sleeping with someone else. Would she be able to forgive him and move on for the sake of their marriage, their children? At one time the answer had probably been yes. She’d learned to live without passion, accepted that as a trade-off for the tranquility she’d found in her marriage.
Now, though, having fallen for a man like Mitch who was willing to give her up rather than hurt her, she wasn’t so sure she could ever go back to the selfish, passionless brand of love Ed had shown her.
“No,” she said softly. “Maybe once upon a time, but not now, Ed. I have more self-respect these days.”
“Good for you,” he said. Surprisingly, he sounded as if he really meant it. “I was never the right man for you. I knew that almost from the beginning, but I tried to be, Lynn.” His plaintive expression begged her to believe him. “I swear to you that I really wanted our marriage to work. It was just never meant to be.”
Now he had shocked her. “Because there was always someone else?”
He nodded.
Lynn waited…and waited some more.
“It’s Jimmy Bob,” he said eventually.
Lynn heard the words, but they made no sense to her. “What does Jimmy Bob have to do with anything?”
“He and I…” That was as much as he seemed capable of saying.
“You and he,” she repeated, even as her mouth dropped open in shock. “You and Jimmy Bob?”
“At least he was honest enough never to marry, never to drag someone else into the middle of things, but me, I didn’t want to let down my parents. You were right there, loving me, willing to take whatever scraps I handed you. I deluded myself into thinking we could make it work, that no one would ever have to be the wiser. Jimmy Bob wasn’t exactly thrilled, but he went along with it because he knew as well as I did how conservative this town can be. We both had big ambitions back then.”
“All these years?” Lynn said, unable to grasp it. “And no one guessed?” She certainly hadn’t, and she’d been living with the man.
“We were careful. We never spent time together around here. In fact, a lot of people thought there was bad blood between us. There was never a hint of suspicion around town, at least not until someone who recognized Jimmy Bob saw the two of us on a trip out of town.”
“And that person is blackmailing you,” she guessed, reeling. Suddenly so many things were making sense to her. “My God, Ed, how could you do this? All these years of lies and deceptions? The pretense of loving me? Of not being true to yourself? How could you even look at yourself in the mirror?”
He looked at her sorrowfully. “Because I’m weak. I wanted what I had, what we had. I wanted my parents to go on respecting me. I wanted to be the man people would trust just the way they had my father. I wanted you, at least in my own selfish way, and our kids. You know how it would have been if I’d come out and announced that I was gay. There are not a lot of folks in Serenity who would have coped well with that, even in some superficial way, much less trusted me with their insurance needs.” He took a breath. “So I lied, to you, to myself, to everyone.”
“Except Jimmy Bob,” she said wearily.
He nodded. “I even kept him at arm’s length in the beginning, trying to maintain the charade, but it got to be too much. And he was getting tired of it. I could hardly blame him for that. I had a decision to make and I did. I chose him. I swear to you, though, before that he and I weren’t, well, we weren’t together together, if you know what I mean. I insisted on that.”
If she hadn’t been so stunned, Lynn might have been amused by his odd code of honor.
“We went away after I’d asked for the divorce,” he told her. “That very first trip, that’s when someone saw us and somehow put the pieces together. That’s when the blackmail began and everything started to unravel.”
“Why was Jimmy Bob setting up those offshore accounts for you?” she asked. “So you could run?”
“Yes. Once the divorce was final, we planned to leave, get away from the blackmail, all of it. I was tired of hiding. I knew once everything came out, I’d never be able to face anyone here, least of all my parents.”
“I see,” she said.
“I’m sorry, Lynn. You’ll never know how sorry I am for using you like this. I think one reason I’ve lashed out at Mitch the way I have is because he’s the man I wish I could have been for you. I saw the way he looked at you and knew that never, not even once, had I been able to look at you with that much passion.”
Lynn had never felt so emotionally exhausted in her life. “I need time, Ed. I need to think about all this.”
“Can we work something out?” he asked. “I know I have no right to ask, but I’d like to keep this quiet. It’s not something I want the kids to know. I don’t want to shatter whatever shred of respect they might still have for me.”
Lynn gave him a pitying look. “Ed, don’t you know by now that your kids won’t love you any less for being gay? The only way you’d lose them is by treating them and me badly.”
“There’s that Pollyanna side of you,” he teased, though his tone was more weary than amused. “You’re living in a dream world, if you believe that, Lynn. If all this comes out, I will lose them.”
“Don’t you think it’s going to come out if you take off with Jimmy Bob?” she asked incredulously. “You’re not going to be able to have it both ways, Ed. You can continue trying to live a lie, or you can tell the world and live with the consequences. I don’t think you’ll ever be truly happy unless you choose the latter.”
“You’re probably right,” he agreed. “I’m just not sure I’m that courageous. This is going to kill my mother. And Dad’s not going to be all that happy when he figures out how I’ve damaged the business, what I’ve stolen from it and from you.”
“They’re your parents, Ed. They love you. Once they get over the shock, they’ll be in your corner. Tell them now, before they find out some other way.”
“How?” he asked. “How do you tell your parents something like this?”
“You told me, didn’t you?”
“Only because you had my back to the wall,” he said. He studied her. “Will you use what I’ve told you?”
She heard the real fear in his voice. The skepticism she’d been developing about him recently made her wonder if all this hadn’t been a huge ploy on his part. If he’d been capable of such a depth of duplicity all these years, why not one more grand act now, one designed to have her call off Helen?
“Do you plan to change your tactics and drop that ridiculous custody suit?” she asked.
“Done,” he said at once.
“Then I’ll speak to Helen. I think she’ll want to have all of us sit down and mediate this before our next scheduled court date.”
“Whatever you need,” he said at once.
“How do you intend to resolve the blackmail, Ed? You can’t live with that hanging over your head. And if you go to the police, it will all come out, anyway,” she said, almost feeling sorry for the dilemma he’d found himself in. Sure, it
was of his own making, but on some level she could understand the choices he’d made. She might not be ready to forgive him for them, but she could understand them. He’d always craved the respect that the town had bestowed on his father. In marrying her, he’d simply been living up to expectations, or trying to.
He gave her a sad look. “Thus the Cayman Islands,” he said ruefully. “Once again, I was planning to take the easy way out.”
“Let me ask you one thing, then. If you’d won this custody suit, would you have tried to take Lexie and Jeremy with you?”
“I honestly hadn’t thought that far ahead,” he said. “Jimmy Bob thought it was a tactic that might scare you into doing whatever it took to put an end to your demands and just cut me loose.”
She regarded him sorrowfully. “That’s a real pattern with you these days, isn’t it? Not thinking things through, letting someone else influence the choices you make.”
“Yeah, that’s one of those life lessons I’m going to be spending a lot of time working on,” he said.
He stood up then, took a step toward her, then seemed to think better of it and stepped back. “I’m sorry, Lynn, not just for what I’ve put you through lately, but all of it. You’ll never know how sorry. You’re a wonderful woman, and you didn’t deserve any of this.”
“I’m sorry, too,” she said.
Not for anything she’d done, but for not understanding sooner, for not seeing how much pain her husband was in, living a lie. She’d loved him blindly for so very, very long. She’d never thought there could be such a thing as too much love, but maybe she’d been wrong. Over the years she’d written off too many things, made too many excuses for him, accepted too much of the blame for the flaws in their marriage.
As he approached the door, he turned back and asked, “How are the kids?”
“Unhappy,” she said. “Scared. They miss their father, or at least they miss believing that you might actually care about them.”
“I’ve made such a mess of this,” he said, his voice filled with regret. “I will find a way to make things right, I promise.” He hesitated, took a step back into the room. “I was going to take off, let you think about all this, but I wonder, would you mind if I stick around till the kids get home from school?”
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