The One in My Heart

by Sherry Thomas

  He flinched.

  “Our life in New York isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty good. She has great friends there and a solid support system. You don’t sound as if you’ll be retiring anytime soon. If the two of you get back together, Zelda will be the one expected to relocate, since her studio is much easier to move across the pond than a TV production.

  “And then what? We don’t live in fairy tales and true love cures nothing. It’s more or less inevitable that someday she’ll suffer another episode. You’ll feel as if you lost control over your life again. You’ll feel like a failure again. And where does that leave her? Stuck with a man who can only see her illness?”

  Larry’s lips moved, but he made no sound. My stomach twisted at how stricken he looked, but a fierce protectiveness burned in me. This man had his chance and he blew it. What made him think he could just waltz back into her life and pick up where they’d left off?

  “I want to believe I have changed,” he said at last, his voice cracking a little.

  My fingers clenched together. “And you would bet her well-being on that?”

  He had no answer for me. We started walking again. The insubstantial snow continued, leaving no evidence behind of having ever been there. I looked up once to see a curtain flutter in the house. Was that Mrs. Asquith, looking out? Or was it Bennett?

  “I have a business trip to Manhattan in early May,” Larry said, as we neared the house. “I was hoping to have dinner with Zelda, Bennett, and you. I suppose you’d prefer that I didn’t contact her at all.”

  “I’d prefer that before you did anything, you ask yourself whether it would be good for her—or only good for you.”

  We climbed up the wide, shallow steps leading up to the front door. Under the portico I stopped and turned to Larry. “I’m sorry that nothing I said was anything you wanted to hear.”

  “The fault isn’t yours,” he said sincerely, if wanly. “I have only myself to blame.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again, suddenly exhausted. “Thank you for showing me the garden. It was very kind of you.”

  WHEN WE WALKED BACK INTO Mrs. Asquith’s drawing room, it was already time for Bennett and me to say our good-byes. Mrs. Asquith presented my fake boyfriend with an elaborately wrapped gift.

  “Happy belated Christmas, my dear young hooligan.”

  “Not again,” said Bennett, shaking his head even before he undid the wrapping paper to reveal a hardcover notebook.

  Mrs. Asquith chortled. “You ingrate. Something from the best stationer in London isn’t good enough for you nowadays, is it?”

  Bennett stuck the notebook into his messenger bag and hugged her. “You bought this on High Street for a quid fifty, you old liar.”

  “What was that about?” I asked when we were in the car, being driven to the airport.

  “Long-running gag. She gives me one every time she sees me, for me to record my sexual shenanigans—then submit for her perusal, of course. When I was younger I used to cut out passages from vintage porn, paste them in, and send the notebook to her.”

  I smiled a little at Mrs. Asquith’s gleeful perversity. “Did you tell her about how scarce your sexual shenanigans have been lately?”

  “No, I told her about our encounter with my parents.” He paused for a beat. “And I tried to persuade her to let me listen to her heart, but she wouldn’t have it. Said she didn’t trust a young man with a taste for old ladies.”

  Had I been there, I’d probably have laughed out loud at Mrs. Asquith’s snark—it was still funny in the retelling. But a sober undercurrent to Bennett’s words caught my attention. “Why were you trying to examine her? Is she okay?”

  “Not as robust as she’d like us to believe. And asking for spoilers to a TV show?” He frowned. “That’s not like her at all. She hates spoilers.”

  He pulled the notebook out of his bag and flipped through the empty pages. The scent of crisp, new paper perfumed the warm interior of the car. He traced a finger along the edge of the notebook, then turned his face to the window, lost in thought.

  The sedan cut smoothly, almost soundlessly across the countryside, the fields and riverbanks of which were still green after a long winter. In the silence my conversation with Larry began to replay in my head, my own voice echoing, every syllable harsh and unforgiving.

  In Mrs. Asquith’s garden I’d felt as righteous as a mother lion protecting her cub. But now that moment of adrenaline had passed, I began to see that my instinctive growling and teeth-bearing had been but another manifestation of the fear in my heart, the one constant emotion that undergirded everything in my life.

  Except this time the fear could no longer be shut in and locked away. This time the fear had been in control of me, throwing words like grenades toward Larry de Villiers.

  Near the airport traffic turned knotty. We had to rush through the terminal to make our flight. It was only after we were airborne, with the fasten-your-seat-belt sign turned off, that Bennett asked me, “So, what do you think of Larry?”

  I chose my words carefully. “He seems to care about Zelda still. And he seems to be a kind and considerate person.”

  Bennett raised a brow. “So you told him to stay away from Zelda?”

  Flaw 2: I’m afraid he sees through me.

  I didn’t bother to issue a denial, but only shrugged.

  “Ladies and gentlemen”—a flight attendant’s voice came over the PA system—”we have a passenger in need of medical attention. If you are a physician, please press the call button nearest your seat.”

  Bennett pressed his call button. “On a plane this size, there’s probably more than one doctor.”

  As if to contradict him, a flight attendant materialized almost immediately and asked him to come with her. I craned my neck to follow their progress, but she pulled the curtain behind her and blocked the view into coach class.

  I fidgeted in my seat, half of my mind going around in circles with Larry and Zelda, the other half worrying about what was happening at the back of the plane.

  After a very long twenty minutes, Bennett returned. “Is everything okay?” I asked.

  “Uh-hmm. A little girl was traveling with a cast on her foot. The foot swelled from the low pressure in the cabin and cut off circulation to her toes. So we pried her cast open. I’ll check on her again, but for now she’s fine.”

  I exhaled. “That’s good to know.”

  He switched on his in-seat entertainment system and brought up the movie menu. “I’m curious. What did Larry say that set you against him?” he asked, still looking at the screen.

  “I don’t know that he’d want me to repeat our conversation,” I said, as much out of a desire to not face probing questions as out of concern for Larry and Zelda’s privacy.

  “Remember I’m Mrs. Asquith’s favorite young hooligan. At this point I’d say I know a lot about Larry and Zelda’s relationship, probably more than you do.”

  My lips twisted. Why did he have to be so well connected to my life? “I didn’t like how he micromanaged her illness or how he just up and left.”

  He turned toward me. His eyes met mine in a green, level gaze. “Don’t you think that despite your objections, the choice of whether Zelda and Larry de Villiers will get together should be left to them?”

  I made no reply. Part of me wanted to explain my actions, but a different part said that it would be no use. He couldn’t possibly understand.

  “I won’t presume to know how you feel,” he said. “I can only tell you what I know: Moira suffered from fairly debilitating depressions—the can’t-get-out-of-bed kind.”

  “She did?” His Lolita-esque love affair was turning out to be nothing like what I’d imagined.

  “All her life—since she was a teenager. She never hid it from me. In fact, before I left Eton, she told me that she wasn’t well. But, of course, I thought she was down because she missed me. I thought the moment I showed up she’d be fine. Better than fine.

  “I showed up. Bu
t the stress of dealing with my parents only made things worse. Even after they left, she didn’t get better. I was ignorant and impatient. I pushed her to go out, to invite people over—I didn’t understand depression then, didn’t know that it had a power of its own. I thought she just needed cheering up.

  “Then, when I did understand, I panicked. I’d given up everything to be with her, and she was too lost in this bleakness to care that I was there.”

  But I saw a picture of you guys around that time, I almost said, at a picnic table with Rob and Darren and a bunch of other people. You looked happy.

  I knew as well as anyone did that depression wasn’t a uniform experience. Some days were more manageable; some days a woman in the grip of clinical depression laughed and enjoyed herself. But that didn’t mean she’d seen the light at the end of the tunnel. The next day she could very well be in a pit of despair again, with no way out—and no way for someone who loved her to reach in.

  “I almost left,” said Bennett. “Almost threw in my towel and admitted I got in way over my head.”

  Shock slammed into me. “When was this?”

  “About two months after I got to Berkeley.”

  Somehow I’d come to view their relationship as a gradual decline, the thrill and sexual fascination of the initial attraction slowly dissipating over time. I’d never thought of the rough patches they must have overcome along the way. “But you stayed.”

  “I didn’t leave—there is a difference. And I didn’t leave because, one, I didn’t have any money; two, I didn’t have anywhere else to go; and three, I was too proud to have my new life collapse so soon after I told my parents that they were too bourgeois to understand the depth and intensity of my great transcendent love.

  “So I hung around, essentially. I found a job, made sure she ate, and cleaned up her house because I didn’t know what else to do. And then she got better and our life got back on track. I mean…you’ve been there; you know the cycle.”

  I tried to imagine him in the role I knew all too well: that of the caretaker, the one who worried, prayed, and waited. “This shatters the mental image I had of you guys boinking like bunnies once you got to California.”

  He smiled slightly. “Don’t worry. We more than made up for the initial lack of boinking.”

  That smile did possibly illegal things to me. My fingers tightened on the blanket on my knees. “Of course you did.”

  He looked at me for a second before he said, “Larry de Villiers is a man of action. My dad and my brother are both men of action. Men of action feel themselves responsible for everything under the sun and find it excruciatingly difficult not to take charge and attack all the issues head-on. My mom had to divorce my dad before he understood that she really meant it, that he had to back the fuck off and let her handle her own life. To Larry Zelda’s problem was his problem. He’d have gone about it the way he’d gone about every other problem in his life, full-tilt and damn the torpedoes. And when he realized it wasn’t a problem he could solve, no matter how much he threw himself at it, he still had to do something, even if that something was a permanent break he’d always regret.

  “I, on the other hand, was a kid. Moira and I had a totally different dynamic—I was never the one expected to make everything all right. In the end, that was what made the difference—that I managed to stand not being in charge of our destiny long enough to have a say again.”

  He shrugged. “Of course, this would be a better story if Moira and I had actually stayed together until the end. But my point is, we don’t know everything that happened back then. Maybe Larry quickly realized he’d made a mistake—but couldn’t do anything because, ironically, he was a man of action and he’d already married someone else.”

  “You are very understanding,” I murmured.

  “Only because I’ve made every mistake in the book—and a few more besides.” He was looking at me again, in the way he had that made me feel unbearably transparent. “Someday you should tell me what it’s like to have never set a foot wrong in your life.”

  I snorted.

  The next moment I gripped his arm. “Moira—I assumed earlier that she’d died from cancer. She—it wasn’t anything related to her depression, was it?”

  “No. And it wasn’t cancer either. She died from double pneumonia.”

  I expelled a breath and let go of him. “I see.”

  He seemed as if he wanted to say something more, but after the space of a few heartbeats he glanced down at his watch. “I’d better go take another look at that girl before I start a movie.”

  I stared for some time at his empty seat before I put on my earphones and selected a movie for myself. But in my mind’s eye I kept seeing the photograph Google had found, all those happy people at their cheerful potluck dinner.

  The lives of others were like icebergs, largely hidden from view, even for someone standing only a short distance away.

  “Is the girl okay?” I asked when Bennett came back.

  “Fast asleep,” he answered, pressing start on his movie.

  “She’s lucky you happened along.”

  He looked at me, surprised. “Thanks.”

  Just as I was lucky, too, that you happened along.

  But I did not say that to him. I resumed my movie and put those words away, along with everything else I never said to anyone.

  Chapter 11

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON I WAS in the office when my phone trilled. Bennett. My pulse accelerated—he rarely called.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey, Professor. When were you going to tell me you had breakfast with my dad back in Italy?”

  Preferably after I’d fully processed everything that had happened over the weekend. In ten years or so.

  “Fairly soon,” I answered. “He’s amenable to getting together in the city. Zelda’s birthday is coming up. I haven’t had a chance to talk to her yet, but when I do, I’ll ask her to invite your parents to her party. That way you’ll see each other again on neutral territory.”

  “Sounds good. So, what did he say? Did he give a reason why he wanted to meet with you?”

  “He didn’t come out and say it, but he wanted to make sure that I didn’t have any grand romantic delusions about you.”

  “Of all the things he could worry about,” Bennett murmured. “And if you did, was he going to set you straight?”

  “That’s not how I perceived his intentions. Your estrangement came about because of a woman. It makes sense that now that he and you are crossing paths again, he’d want to know what kind of impact he could expect from me.

  “I’d take it as a good sign that he wanted to see me alone, to have a better sense of you via our ‘relationship.’ You do understand it was impossible for him to get a read on you, right?”

  He didn’t reply.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Is it too early in the day for putting you in your place?”

  He laughed softly. “No, it’s all right. Anytime is a good time for that.”

  Neither of us said anything for a second. I missed him, I realized. And I wasn’t used to the sensation that part of me was now somewhere across town—or rather, I wasn’t used to feeling like that for anyone who wasn’t Zelda.

  “Anyway, if you come to Zelda’s birthday party as my significant other, that means we’re taking our ‘relationship’ public.”

  “That’s fine with me.”

  “Well, there’s a small wrinkle. Zelda’s party is two days after my friends’ Annual Boyfriend Roundup. Everybody who has a boyfriend is supposed to bring him to the roundup—or risk getting expelled from the group.”

  That was me being melodramatic. If they found out, my friends would give me grief, but not kick me off the island—especially since in time they’d learn that he was a fake boyfriend. But I wanted a legitimate-sounding excuse to get together with him again—one that could be considered a natural tangent of our mission.

  “So I’ll be looked over like a prize hog at a county fair.”


  “Pretty much. You up for it, Porky?”

  “Sure.”

  I had to give the man credit—even a real boyfriend might have shied away from the roundup. “It’s on, then.”

  “What about Valentine’s Day? Want to go for dinner somewhere?”

  On a date? “Are your parents going to be there?”

  “No. But wouldn’t it look a bit odd to Zelda if we didn’t?”

  I struggled with it—the idea of the two of us alone for an entire evening was as formidable as it was pleasurable. “Don’t worry about Zelda. I’ll make up a plausible enough excuse.”

  “Well, I can’t deny you are really, really good at that.”

  Was it an accusation? His tone was without a hard edge anywhere, but for some reason I felt an impulse to defend myself. I tamped down that irrational desire. “Make sure you’re free for the Boyfriend Roundup and Zelda’s birthday party.”

  “Text me the dates and the times and I’ll finagle my schedule.”

  “I’ll do that. Take care.”

  “You too,” he said.

  There, a friendly but businesslike good-bye. Exactly as it should be.

  I was about to hang up when he asked, “And how are you, by the way? Feeling any better?”

  I had never, as far as I remembered, admitted to feeling anything but normal in front of him. And really, was it a fake boyfriend’s place to be concerned about my actual well-being?

  I’m not better, if you must know. I want you with the kind of covetousness that might bring down plagues. And I’m afraid my fear is getting out of hand. It might be taking over the driver’s seat—or maybe it took over a long time ago and I didn’t even know. I’m fucked-up, Doctor. All fucked-up.

  “A little tired,” I replied. “I’ve been awake since half past three this morning. But other than that, I’m good.”