LITMIR.BIZ

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not proud of what happened next. I lost my mind. I started smashing all her little staging items—her expensive vases and her pictures that didn’t mean anything to anybody. I’m not sure I have ever been so angry.

      “And she left. She left in the middle of a snowstorm and drove away. And I didn’t go after her.

      “No, I sat and brooded over the mistake I’d made, and asked myself how I couldn’t have seen sooner what was coming. I didn’t think—not once—about all the things I loved about her. The way she laughed, and how smart she was, and how she liked to play jokes on me. I didn’t think about all the good years we’d had before we started to build that house, or all the things we had in common. No, I got rip-roaring drunk, and I passed out on the couch.

      “I woke up to a knock at the door. It was the police. She’d made it up our road to the highway. But she had tried to take a corner too fast. It was slippery. She’d gone off the road. She died on impact, when the car hit the water.”

      Angie could feel the tears streaming down her face. She got up from where she had been sitting and stood behind him. She wrapped her arms around him and leaned her head into his back.

      He jerked away from her. He spun and looked at her. His eyes were dark with a fury that made her take a step back from him, even though it was obvious the fury was directed at himself.

      “That’s the me that nobody knows,” he said grimly. “I killed her. She had nowhere to go when I got mad like that. I might as well have put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.”

      Angie gasped at that, but he wasn’t done.

      “You were right. Those people love me. They’ve loved me since I was a six-year-old boy. But they don’t know me. And I don’t think they’d be trying so damned hard to make something good come out of something bad if they knew the full truth.”

      “Jefferson,” Angie said, her voice a croak of pure pain, “it was an accident. You did not kill your wife. That is a terrible burden you’ve been carrying. You are a good man.”

      He looked at her long and hard. And then he pushed past her and took his seat at the controls of the boat. He flicked it on and gave it full throttle. The nose lifted so quickly, she was thrust into one of the back seats. They shot over the still water like a rocket that had been launched.

      When they arrived at his dock and he helped her out of the boat, his face remained grim.

      “Don’t love me,” he said. And then he turned and walked away.

      Angie watched him go. It was already too late for that. She already did love him, beyond reason. The fact that he carried this terrible burden of guilt, along with his grief, did not make her love him less.

      But it did make her see the truth. Perhaps it was the truth he had already seen.

      She was hiding here. Cowering, really, from what life had handed her. To love him, to lead him through everything that love meant she could not cower.

      She had to face her life head-on.

      She had to show him she did not need his protection. He had set himself up in that role, a role he already thought he had failed at.

      And she had allowed it. She had taken great comfort in it.

      But it had done what it needed to do. It had helped to heal her. Now, to love him, she had to come to him whole, not in fragments of fear and not a hostage to her own history. She had to dig deep within herself and be the person he had shown her she could be. She had to give him back what he had given her. She had to lend him her strength, just as he had lent her his.

      And she could see only one way she could do that.

      Angie had to be fearless.

      * * *

      Jefferson went to his room without waiting to see how Angie would react to all he had told her. In the morning, he expected she would look at him with the disdain of someone who had been shown a truth that was different from what they had believed.

      He expected he might see signs she had been crying.

      Instead, when he ventured out of his room in the morning, he saw Angie was already busy. The muffins were fresh baked, as always. He heard her in the living room.

      “The photographer is coming tomorrow,” she called to him.

      He resisted an impulse to yell he didn’t give a damn about the photographer. Was she going to pretend he hadn’t said anything last night? He grabbed a muffin and went and stood in the door of the living room.

      The princess was gone, and Cinderella was back, her hair hidden under one of her babushka creations, her shorts showing off the slenderness of her legs, her T-shirt clinging. She had a small mountain of pillows on the floor.

      “Where did those come from?” he asked gruffly.

      “I made them.”

      How was it possible to like this as much as the goddess she had been last night? How was it possible to love this as much.

      Love.

      There was that word again. And the truth smashed into him. He loved her. Enough to let her go on to the life she deserved.

      “When?” he asked.

      “Last night. I couldn’t sleep.”

      So, she was more distressed by what he had told her than she was letting on. He could see that now. She was avoiding looking at him.

      He stuffed the entire blueberry muffin in his mouth, as if somehow, that could help him stuff back the terrible sensation of loss that was sweeping through him, even though she was standing right here.

      “You need to go see if you can find some flowers,” she said, placing a pillow on the couch. She scowled at it, then karate chopped the top of it. “I should have asked to have the ones from the dinner tables last night.”

      He scowled. He had just laid an earth-shattering truth about himself at her feet, and she was going to talk about flowers?

      Well, fine, he’d go along with that. He’d go find some flowers. He didn’t want to be around her anyway. It caused an ache in him that felt as if it would never go away.

      Grabbing another muffin, he went out the door.

      He made sure he was gone a good long time. He emptied Anslow of flowers and then, as an afterthought, he pulled off the lake and picked a bouquet of wildflowers from the hills. The wildflowers, he somehow knew, would delight her more than the ones he had gotten from the tiny flower shop in Anslow.

      Why, he asked himself, was he picking wildflowers for her.

      Because, at the very core of every man, was a little light that flickered, that would not be put out, not even if you threw pails of water on it.

      That light was hope.

      But that light died in him when, laden with flowers as she had requested, he went back into his house.

      Maybe, subliminally, he had registered that her car was not parked under the tree where it had been since the day she arrived.

      Maybe, subliminally, he had registered there was no movement in the windows, no lights on, as he had come up the staircase from the lake.

      Whatever it was, he knew the instant he walked in the door. He knew before he called her name and walked room to room looking for her. He knew before he took the stairs, two at a time, up to her room and found the closets empty and her suitcase gone.

      The wildflowers fell from his hand and scattered across the bleached hardwood floor.

      He had known before having evidence, because it was as if her essence was gone from the house.

      He walked back through, more slowly. It was strange, because the house was as perfect as it had ever been. As he went from room to room, he saw it looked exactly as Hailey had dreamed it would look. Staged, to give the illusion

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