LITMIR.BIZ

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stacks of plates at her older sister. “Do you think I should give him another chance?”

      “Yes,” Stephanie said without hesitation. “I think a man who loves you enough to lie to protect you isn’t all bad.” But what about a man who was having an affair and lying to his wife; was he doing that to protect her too, and did that suggest that he loved her? Stephanie shied away from the thought, unable or unwilling to follow it to its logical conclusion.

      Joan leaned over and kissed Stephanie quickly on the cheek. “I’m glad you came home. If you weren’t here, I’d have kicked him out. I’m going to give him a second chance.”

      “Just tell him: No more lying.”

      A heavy Sherpa fleece blanket settled over Stephanie’s shoulders, making her jump. She was sitting on the back step, staring out across the rolling snow-white fields. She looked up to find her father standing beside her. He was tamping tobacco into his battered pipe. Fragments of the brown leaf flaked off and settled on the white snow, looking like tiny questions marks.

      “This was always your favorite place when you were a child,” Matt Burroughs said. “Whenever you were in trouble, I always knew where to find you. Sitting on the step.” He lowered himself gently beside his daughter. She lifted the blanket off her shoulders and draped it around his too, sharing it. They sat together in silence while Matt packed the bowl of his pipe, but they both knew he wouldn’t light it in her presence. “Are you in trouble now?” he asked softly.

      Stephanie allowed her eyes to drift. There was the tree where the old tire had hung, and the tumbledown barn where they’d played when the weather was freezing, and if she followed the narrow path through the trees, it would end up at the tiny pool where she’d first learned to swim. This was a place of innocence, a place where she’d always been happy. And with the thought came the awareness that she wasn’t happy now; she wondered if she would ever be happy again.

      “I hope you won’t be disappointed,” she whispered, feeling like a teen again. “I think I’m pregnant.”

      Matt put the unlit pipe between his lips and nodded slightly.

      “Did Mom tell you?”

      “Your mother has many wonderful gifts, but reticence is not one of them,” he murmured, “and don’t you dare tell her I said so.” He glanced sidelong at his daughter. “You will always be that seven-year-old girl running wild through this garden, chasing the skunk just to make it spray, because you were one of the few people in the world who loved the smell. You will be forever ten, coming to me with the injured cardinal cupped in your hand. I will always remember you in your Communion dress, and your prom dress, and your graduation gown. I will never be disappointed in you. You’ve always made me proud, sweetheart. Always.”

      Stephanie rested her head on her father’s shoulder and remained silent, unwilling to trust herself to speak.

      “Do you want to talk about it?”

      Stephanie drew in a deep lungful of the icy December air. “The father’s name is Robert Walker. He’s sixteen years older than I am and runs a small production company in Boston. And he’s married. With two children,” she added.

      “Still married?” Matt asked quietly.

      “Still married. I know this goes against everything you’ve taught us and everything you believe in, Dad. But I fell in love with him. I allowed myself to fall in love with him, because he told me—and, in his defense, he genuinely believed it at the time—that his wife was no longer interested in him.”

      “But he didn’t leave his wife?”

      “No. No, he didn’t.” She sighed. “Last weekend I told him he had to choose.” She shrugged. “And he chose me. Told me he’d leave his wife after Christmas, that we’d be together. There was about forty-eight hours, Dad, when I was never happier.”

      “Let me guess,” Matt said, not looking at her, squinting out at the snow-capped field, now losing definition as the world drifted into night. “The wife shows up?”

      “The wife shows up.” She turned to look at her father. “How did you know?”

      “Must have been something fairly dramatic that drove you back home on Christmas Eve. I can’t think of anything more dramatic than that.”

      “She showed up yesterday. And then Robert turned up a little later.”

      Matt Burroughs’s lips curled in a tight smile. “That must have been awkward.”

      “You have no idea. I found out that she still loved him. And talking to her made me really understand what my future with Robert would be like. So . . . I made him go back to his wife.”

      “How did he feel about that?”

      Stephanie blinked in surprise. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask him. I suppose I thought since they both know there’s a problem, surely they can work together to figure it out—get some counseling or something.”

      “And now?”

      “I don’t know what to do. If I’m pregnant, I’ll need to keep in touch with him.”

      “Why?” Matt asked seriously.

      “Because . . . ,” Stephanie began and then stopped. She’d no idea why. “It just seems right. For me, for him . . . and for the baby.”

      Matt nodded. Then he asked Stephanie what she had been asking herself for months. “Does he love you?”

      “I think so,” she said eventually.

      Matt stood up and fixed the blanket over his daughter’s shoulders again. Then he leaned down and kissed the top of her head. “There are some questions that are like math problems. There should be no equivocation: only one answer—in the positive or the negative. So, I’ll ask you again: Does he love you?”

      The twilight cast long shadows on the snow, turning the pristine whiteness to gray. The familiar lines of the backyard were disappearing into the gloom. High and clear in the cold air, she heard a child’s voice, raised in delighted laughter, the sound pure and innocent. When you are a child everything is so simple, so easy. You believe what people tell you: Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. And they are all lies. That is the ultimate betrayal of childhood. And is it any different for adults? When a man stands at the altar and promises, in front of witnesses, that he will love and honor the woman by his side for the rest of his life, it is probably a lie . . . whether he knows it or not.

      So, last Saturday, when Robert had stood in the street and said, “I love you. I want to be with you. To marry you. Will you marry me?” had he been lying? She didn’t think so.

      She nodded firmly. “Yes, I believe he loves me.”

      “Do you love him?”

      Yesterday, she would have said no. Yesterday, she had hated him, despised him. But that was yesterday. The day before that the answer had been different, and today . . . Well, she wasn’t entirely sure how she felt about him today. “One of the reasons I let him go was because I loved him,” she admitted slowly and deliberately. “I was angry with him because he went back to his wife so easily.”

      “But you told me you pushed him away.”

      “He didn’t fight for me.”

      “Did you fight for him?” Matt asked, surprising her.

      “No.” Stephanie turned to look at her father. “I thought you’d be mad at me.”

      “Why?”

      ”Because I’d been stupid enough to get pregnant . . . because I’d been involved with a married man.”

      “Look, who knows how I would have felt ten years, or even five years ago. I’m not thrilled about it, but as you get older, you come to realize a simple truth: Love is the only thing worth fighting for.” He turned and walked away, back toward the house.

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