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One

Sixteen years was a long time to hate someone.

David Montgomery leaned against a dogwood tree and gazed at the large antebellum-style house across from him. He drew himself deeper into his cashmere overcoat in an attempt to ward off the late October cold. The soft fabric caressed the back of his neck, a gentle reminder of how far he’d come in the almost two decades since he’d called this inconsequential corner of the world home. Back then he’d faced the winters in coarse wool, faded blue jeans and long underwear from the JC Penney catalog. Now he thought nothing of paying what his father had earned in a month as a tractor mechanic for one shirt from his tailor on Savile Row.

Jesus, what idiot urge had brought him here? What could he have been thinking? What had he hoped to gain? He straightened and took a step to leave.

Peace of mind, an insistent inner voice answered, stopping him, rooting him with its teasing promise --- to be rid of her once and for all, to bury her in his past, someone no more important than anything or anyone who’d come into his life during the eighteen years he’d lived in Baxter, Ohio.

Conflicting emotions had assailed him since he’d received word of his father’s accident. The woman on the other end of the line had insisted his father couldn’t last the night. David caught the first plane for Florida. Arriving twelve hours after the call, he’d expected to find his father gone already, with nothing left for him to do but make the funeral arrangements, but he hadn’t taken into consideration what a tough old bird his father was. It took Jim Montgomery two weeks before he finally let go of the difficult life he’d lived. Fourteen days of sitting at his father’s bedside had given David far too much time to think, to remember.

It wasn’t as if Carly still haunted him every hour of every day. After he’d settled in England and his career had taken off, there had been weeks, even months, when he hadn’t thought about her at all. Then, invariably, something would come along that triggered a memory --- a song, a picture in a magazine --- and thoughts of her would consume him.

The sound of a car drew his attention. He glanced down the narrow, tree-lined road and saw a maroon suv approaching. There was a woman behind the wheel; on the passenger side a small dog had its nose pressed to the front window. David saw a flash of dark auburn hair before the car turned into the driveway of the house he’d been watching --- her house. His eyes lighted in quick triumph. How wonderfully fitting --- the woman who as a young girl had vowed she was going to set the New York art world on its ear not only still lived in the same small town where she’d always lived, but she also drove the ultimate, flagrant symbol of suburbia. But then, he reasoned with a stab of bitterness, she undoubtedly needed a car like that to ferry around the three kids she’d had with good old Ethan.

David shuddered at his thoughts. What made him still care? She was nothing to him. He’d done everything he’d ever dreamed. More. And she’d done nothing, gone nowhere.

So why was he the one standing out in the cold?

Carly Hargrove shifted the cocker spaniel she was carrying to her left hip and unlocked the kitchen door. When she was inside, she gently put the old dog on the floor by his food. “i’ll get your blanket out of the dryer, Muffin,” she said, running her hand over his head, then pausing to scratch his ear.

As soon as she’d arranged the dog’s bed, she went to the hall closet to hang up her coat. The long car ride she’d taken after dropping the kids off at school had managed to eat up a few hours, but it had done nothing to ease her restlessness.

She set her purse on the closet shelf, yanked off her knit hat and ran her fingers through her hair, fluffing it back to its normal unruly volume. She really ought to do something to calm some of the frizz, if for no other reason than to please Ethan. He hadn’t actually said anything about her appearance, but he was quick to point out how attractive other women looked in sleek hairstyles.

At times her heart ached for the man she’d married, her pain wrapped in a ribbon of guilt. Mostly she just went on, letting one day merge into the next without conscious thought, reveling in the joy her children brought her, careful not to think about what her life would be like when they were grown and she and Ethan were alone.

And it had worked.

At least it had until three days ago when she’d run into Horace Manly at the pta meeting and had been blindsided by the news that David was accompanying his father’s casket back to Baxter to arrange for a memorial service.

Carly drew in a deep breath and purposefully closed the closet door. Fear of the unknown had begun to insinuate itself into everything she did and thought and she was being dragged down by it. She started up the stairs to make the beds, seeking comfort in the familiar and mindless action.

Sixteen years was a long time, especially in the life of someone like David Montgomery. When he thought about her, it was undoubtedly with a sigh of relief that she hadn’t weighed him down when he’d reached for his star.

If he even remembered her.

She tossed king-sized pillows onto the chair beside the bed and smoothed the comforter. Did she really hope that he’d forgotten her?

The lives of everyone she loved depended on that very thing. With mechanical movements, Carly finished tidying the master

Bedroom and moved on to her daughter’s room. Bending to pick up Andrea’s nightgown, she heard the front doorbell.

She jerked upright. It was probably only the mailman, she told herself, angry at how easily she could be shaken.

She started toward the stairs.

The instant her foot hit the landing and she saw the shadowed form of a man through the beveled glass of the front door, she knew. She considered slipping back upstairs but then thought how much more dangerous it would be to have David come back when Ethan or one of the kids were home. If she had to see him at all, it was better that she do it alone.

For days she had tried to imagine what it would be like to see him again. In her mind they’d already had a dozen conversations. He’d been the focus of her thinking when she drove the kids to school, when she stopped for groceries, and when she was lying beside Ethan at night listening to his breathing.

She opened the door wide, refusing to use it as a shield. She wasn’t prepared for the man who stood in front of her. There was no semblance of the boy Carly had known --- the mouth that had once been so quick to smile was now hard and tight; the wonder and mischief that had shone from his eyes were gone, replaced with a chilling blue anger.

“Hello, David,” she said. “It’s been a long time,” she added, an overwhelming sorrow settling through her.

“Yes, it has,” he answered slowly, openly studying her.

“I’m sorry about your father. When he moved away, I missed seeing him.” More than anything she’d missed the tie, however tenuous, he’d given her to David. “I heard you were coming and I . . .”

A corner of his mouth raised in a mocking smile. “and you were wondering if I’d stop by to catch up on old times,” he finished for her.

“I admit it crossed my mind once or twice.”

“Did you think I could come back to my old home town and not look in on you and Ethan? Come on, Carly. Ethan was my best friend. You were . . .” He shrugged. “I seem to have forgotten just what you were to me, Carly.”

She folded her arms across her chest. “Time will do that.”

“You seem to be doing all right for yourself.”

A too-bright smile preceeded her cheerful, “I’ve been lucky.” “I doubt luck had anything to do with it.”

An awkward silence followed. “What do you want, David?” “I don’t know,” he admitted.

“You must have some idea or you wouldn’t have come.”

“Is that how you see things now? Every question has a simple answer?”

“I’m sorry,” she offered helplessly, knowing it wasn’t what he wanted or needed but unable to stop herself. “I never meant to hurt—”

“Jesus christ, Carly, after all the time we were together don’t you think I deserve a little more than that? Both then and now?” She held her hands out in a pleading gesture. “That was sixteen years ago. If you came here hoping to find me wallowing in selfpity because I married Ethan and missed out on the opportunity to be the wife of a famous writer, you wasted your time, David. I may not cross oceans to spend my winters on a Greek island, but

I’m happy. Can you say as much?”

David smiled wryly and rubbed his hand across his chin. “How is it you know so much about me?”

“Let it go, David,” she begged him.

“I wish to hell I could,” he admitted with a sigh. He stared at her for what seemed an interminable time as if searching for something more to say. Finally, wordlessly, he turned to leave.

Carly watched him walk away. Instead of setting him free all those years ago, she’d imprisoned him in the same tangled web of lies that she’d spun around herself. She’d made a hundred promises to David and then sent him a letter that broke every one. Now she had a chance to set things right.

“David?” She called, ignoring the terrible risk she was taking to settle her debt. He stopped and looked back at her over his shoulder. The wind caught his hair, brushing it across his forehead, giving her a glimpse of the twenty-two-year-old boy she’d once loved and believed as necessary to her existence as the air she breathed.

“Yes?”

“Don’t go.” For the first time in years she would do something unplanned and uncalculated. Something for herself.

“What’s the point, Carly?” He retraced his steps. She hesitated. “Why did you come, David?”

With an abrupt, angry movement, he grabbed her, his fingers digging into her arms. “To rid myself of you. I don’t want to think about you anymore.” He brought his face menacingly close to hers. “I don’t want to remember what it felt like to love you. I don’t want to care that you could throw away everything we had.” With a look of disgust, he released her and took a step backward. “God --- I swore I wouldn’t let this happen.”

“There’s so much you don’t know,” she said. And so much she couldn’t explain. “I was young and scared, and I really believed I was doing what was best for everyone.”

“Are you telling me you regret marrying Ethan?” “I don’t let myself think about things like that.”

“What were you afraid of, Carly? Me? Did you think I would go off the deep end if you told me you’d been sleeping with Ethan while I was in New York and that you were pregnant with his child? Or did you think I’d tell you to get lost, so you figured you’d grab Ethan while you could?” He swept the hair off his forehead with his left hand, his wedding ring gleaming in the morning sun.

Carly stiffened her spine, bringing herself up to her full five feet six inches. “I can’t give you the answers you want, David, but if you give us a chance, we can be friends.” He started to say something and she put her hand up to stop him. “Friends are infinitely easier to forget than lovers.” When he didn’t immediately answer, she went on. “Isn’t that why you said you came here today, to find a way to forget me?”

“It’s a little hard to think of you as a friend after all the years of hating you.”

He could have hit her and it would have hurt less. “Come inside. I’ll fix some coffee and we can talk.” She stepped out of the doorway. “Or do you drink tea now?” Somewhere in the back of her mind a warning sounded. Gathering details of the life he had now would only add color to the canvas of her memories.

“i’ll have coffee,” he said, stepping inside the foyer. “Americans don’t know how to make a proper cup of tea.” A self-conscious grin played at the corner of his mouth. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded, it’s simply a fact.”

She’d always dreamed of going to England, or France, or china, longing to see for herself how other people lived. “Do you like living in London?” It was a dumb question. If he didn’t like where he was living, why would he be there?

“Yes.”

“I read somewhere that your wife is English.” She knew precisely where she’d read about Victoria Montgomery, in an upscale magazine called European Life. The article had been about the movers and shakers of London society and had included a photograph and several paragraphs on the bestselling author David Montgomery and his stunning wife, the former Victoria Digby, daughter of Lord and Lady Something-or-other.

“Is this what you had in mind, Carly, a cup of coffee and some idle chitchat? If it is, I’m not interested.”

She sighed. “This isn’t going to work if you don’t bend a little, David.”

After several seconds he took off his coat and handed it to her. “My agent tells me there are times I can be a real stiff-necked son of a bitch,” he said in lieu of an apology.

Carly held the coat on her arm while she reached for a hanger. The coat was soft and obviously expensive and, for an unguarded moment, she thought about slipping her arms into the sleeves and letting David’s lingering warmth envelop her. When she was in high school, she’d lived in David’s varsity jacket and could still remember the incredible feeling of intimacy that had come over her when she’d be sitting in the middle of class and her own body heat would release a trace of his cologne.

Forcefully shoving the memory to the back of her mind, she hung his coat next to hers and closed the closet door. “We don’t have much time,” she said. “I never know when one of the kids will decide to come home for lunch, instead of eating at the cafeteria.”

“That wouldn’t bother me.”

“They can’t see you here,” she answered, a little too quickly. His eyes narrowed. “What are you afraid of, Carly?”

For once she could hide behind the truth. “I’m not afraid of anything. It’s simply that when Ethan found out you were coming back, he asked me not to see you. I’d just as soon he didn’t know you were here.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” David said slowly, more to himself than to her. “He won. Why would he . . .” His head snapped up. “Well, i’ll be damned. Could it be you don’t like lying in the bed you made for yourself?”

“You always did use words as weapons, David.”

But never against her. At least not until today. “It’s an occupational hazard.”

Carly pointed toward the back of the house. “Why don’t we have our coffee in the kitchen?”

David nodded and motioned for her to lead the way. As they passed through the living room, he quickly scanned the pictures hanging there. Unless she’d stopped painting watercolors and her style had changed dramatically, and for the worse, none of the paintings were Carly’s.

She turned to say something and caught him looking at a picture of a girl standing next to a tree. “Ethan collects turn-of-thecentury artists,” she explained.

He gave her a questioning look. “Since when?” The Ethan he remembered had taste that ran to shopping-mall art.

“He started a few years after we were married.” “I don’t see anything of yours in here.”

“I got tired of looking at them.”

Something wasn’t right. And then it hit him. “You’re not painting anymore, are you?”

“I grew bored after a while. It’s difficult to maintain enthusiasm for something that’s third-rate.”

What was it about artists and critics? Of the hundreds of glowing reviews that had been written about his books, it was the halfdozen bad ones he remembered word for word. “and just who was the genius who told you your work was third-rate?”

She turned her back to him and continued into the kitchen. “Me,” she said, reaching into a cupboard for the coffee.

“I know what passes for art these days. I’ve seen too many

Paintings—hell, I own too many of them. I remember your work, Carly. You were never third-rate.”

“It’s past history,” she said. “I hardly remember what it felt like to hold a brush in my hand.” With a forced brightness, she added, “at least one of us made it.”

Battling a streak of vindictiveness, he considered telling her how close he’d come to not “making” it, how after receiving her letter he’d dropped out of school and lived on the road, spending the next two years hitchhiking his way through South America and then hopping a freighter to Europe. The ship was ancient and painfully slow and only the cook spoke enough English to put more than a halting sentence together. Boredom had prompted him to borrow paper and start writing again --- a cliché-ridden spy novel about nazis who’d hidden in argentina after World War ii. The hours he spent working on the manuscript were the best he’d had since leaving school. After two years of trying everything from tequila to whores, he’d stumbled on the one way to escape her memory, if only for a few hours.

He crossed the kitchen and leaned his hip against the tile counter. She was thinner, almost fragile looking, a word he would never have used to describe her back then. From the time they were first allowed to cross the streets by themselves, she’d refused to be left behind in anything he and Ethan did, whether it was crosscountry skiing or climbing trees. He liked that she’d finally let her hair grow and that she wore it loose; what he didn’t like was that he could still remember the sweetness of its smell, and how it felt against his bare chest after they’d made love.

“I’ve read all of your books,” she said, again turning the subject from herself to him. “They’re wonderful.” Softly, she added, “I’m so proud of you, David. You’ve done everything you wanted.” She paused. “everything you ever dreamed.”

“Ironic, isn’t it? I had the dream because of you and then succeeded in spite of you.”

She flinched but never lost a beat, going on as if the jab had been a loving stroke. “remember how you used to say your books would never hit the bestseller lists because really good books never did?”

There was no place to hide from her. She knew all his secrets, every pompous thought he’d had back then. “Well, at least I was right about that.”

She whipped around to face him. “You can’t be serious. Your books are as literate as they are exciting. Especially the last four. I couldn’t put them down when I was reading them and then I couldn’t get them out of my mind after I finished.”

A sickening thought occurred to him. It was like old times, each of them bolstering and defending the other. Only it wasn’t old times; it was now and it was warped. Still, he couldn’t stop himself from saying, “and your paintings were wonderful.”

“Even if I had the desire, I wouldn’t have the energy or time. This house, three kids, a husband, and a dog are about as much as I can handle.” As if on cue, the dog stood, made a circle and lay back down in its basket.

“I can’t believe what I’m hearing.”

She stopped filling the coffeepot long enough to give him a sardonic smile. “Surprised?”

“not at all. I knew you would have kids someday --- ” a caustic laugh punctuated his remark. “of course at the time I thought they would be mine.” Defensively, to cover his exposed feelings, he added, “What does surprise me is that you would use them as an excuse for giving up painting.”

She glared at him. “You always did try to put words in my mouth.”

“What really happened, Carly?”

“What are you trying to do to me, David? What do you hope to accomplish by pointing out how successful you are and what a failure you think I am?”

“When we were growing up” --- he struggled for the words to express what until then had only been feelings --- “our ambitions were so caught up together that at times I lost track of where yours ended and mine began. I’ve imagined you a lot of ways since then, but never once did I imagine you not painting.”

She went back to making the coffee. “can we talk about something else?”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Tell me about England.” A deep hunger to know what she’d missed seeing for herself, came through in her voice.

“On the surface, it’s a lot like we used to think it would be --- the double-decker buses, the tea shops, the museums.”

“and below the surface?” She asked eagerly.

He knew what she wanted, to live the experience through his eyes the way she had when he’d gone to New York without her. “What took me by surprise was the sense of history --- the feeling of mortality, and the utter insignificance that I felt the first time I stood in the middle of Westminster abbey. I went on a day when there was a blizzard outside and I almost had the place to myself.” He searched for the words that would make what he’d seen come alive for her. “It was incredible, Carly. There I was standing in the Poets corner, surrounded by memorials to Chaucer and Jonson and Browning.” He chuckled. “Talk about a humbling experience. I went home and threw out everything I’d written since moving to England.”

“Has it changed --- your feelings, I mean? Have you gotten used to living there?”

“You mean, have I lost my sense of wonder?” “Yes.”

He thought back to how he’d felt the first time he’d seen Trafalgar Square and the river Thames and how he felt when he passed them now. “I guess I have,” he said with regret.

“I suppose it was bound to happen.” She reached into the cupboard and took down two mugs.

He didn’t say anything then. The silence grew until it became awkward and she looked up at him. Her eyes were dark brown pools of sadness and fear that contradicted the seemingly casual turn in their conversation.

“Why did you turn your back on me, Carly?” He asked, unable to stop himself. “and why Ethan? What did he give you that I didn’t? Was it because I wanted to postpone our getting married again?”

Carly looked away, sheltering herself from the hurt she saw on his face. Now, even knowing how much it meant to David to hear what she would tell him, she found herself stumbling over the words. “I was lonely. Ethan was here when I needed him. He loved me. I fell in love with him. I never meant for it to happen --- it just did.” Allowing herself a crumb of truth, she added, “I know it doesn’t mean much for me to tell you this now, but not one day has gone by that I haven’t regretted the way I hurt you.”

He walked over to the window and stared outside, taking in but paying no attention to the shimmering red and gold leaves still clinging to trees no longer willing to nurture them. “I threw away all of your letters but that last one. Every once in a while when I was feeling particularly lonely or lost, I would reread what you had written and it would shore me up with enough anger to see me through until the next time. But then that stopped working after a while when the memories of how it really was between us started to creep in and thread their way through what you’d written. Once I even went so far as to make airline reservations to come over and confront you and demand that you tell me the truth.”

Carly folded her arms across her chest and hugged herself. “What stopped you?”

“I met Victoria.” “Your wife.”

“It took five months for that to happen.” He’d been her rebellion, she his entrance into a world that would otherwise have been closed to him. Her parents had been less than enthusiastic at the prospect of having a Yank for a son-in-law, especially one who made his living writing books. Theirs was a symbiotic relationship, unhampered by a romantic notion of love, fueled by a mutually satisfying sex life.

“But you’re here now—”

He kept his back to her. “The choice was taken out of my hands. My father’s last request was that he be buried next to my mother.” “That explains why you came to Baxter, not why you came to

See me.”

“The few hours my father was lucid enough to talk, he wanted to spend remembering. When he fell asleep and I was alone again, it was my own ghosts that came out to haunt me. I guess you could call my coming here today an exorcism.”

His pain had become hers and, added to her own, the weight became almost unbearable. “What can I say to convince you? What words do you need to hear?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted, again facing her. He held out his hands in a helpless gesture. “I thought I knew you so well, Carly. No, damn it, I did know you. We spent—”

She couldn’t take any more. “Stop it, David. You’re only making this harder.”

“What I’m asking for isn’t that complicated, Carly --- just tell me the truth. When you do, I promise you’ll never see me again.”

“You changed when you moved to New York. Every time I visited you it felt like the wall between us was getting higher and harder to climb until finally I couldn’t get over it at all. You stopped calling and when you did, it was always about your problems, your disappointments, your failures. There was never time for me or what I was going through.” She was counting on his forgetting the love that had also been expressed, the hope and the loneliness. “every time we set a date to get married, you broke it. You even forgot I was coming to visit you that last time and didn’t come back to your apartment until I had to leave for the train. I just couldn’t take it anymore.” It was all true but the last part. Her love for him, her determination to see them through the hard times, had never faltered.

“I didn’t forget you were coming,” he insisted, resurrecting an old argument. “You never told me. For God’s sake, Carly, you must have seen how surprised I was when you showed up the same weekend of your father’s funeral. If I couldn’t get time off to come home for the services, what in God’s name made you think I could get it off to be with you if you came to see me? It didn’t make sense then and it doesn’t make sense now.”

“I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“Was what we had back then really that bad?” He asked.

“Why can’t—” The rest died on Carly’s lips as she froze at the sound of the front door opening.

“Mom?” A voice called out. Panic gripped Carly.

“are you upstairs?”

“It’s Andrea --- she can’t see you here.” Carly’s gaze flew to the doorway. Too late.

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