“But you’re pregnant with Ben’s baby and Ben was just…oh, shit.” Jamie’s hand went over her mouth.
“Exactly. Oh, shit.” Mandy felt a headache coming on.
Damien was having sushi with Rob on Monday and trying not to be a brusque jerk. He didn’t think he was succeeding.
“Man, I thought going to the Caribbean would loosen you up. You’re tighter than when you left.” Rob poked his chopstick at Damien. “Told you you should have slept with your assistant.”
“Fuck off.” Damien adjusted his tie and chewed his maki. He had spent an absolutely hellish weekend shut up in his apartment trying to work, with very little result. All he could think about was Mandy. Mandy and her baby. Mandy and him.
He hadn’t seen her at work that morning, but then he hadn’t expected to. She was good at avoiding him when she wanted to.
Rob shook his head. “You know something? You make it really hard to like you sometimes.”
Damien thought Rob was joking, but when Rob looked at him, he had disgust on his face.
“What do you mean?”
Only he knew what Rob probably meant, and Rob was right, but maybe for the first time, he needed to hear it said out loud.
“I mean you’re so busy feeling sorry for yourself, you treat everyone else like shit.”
Chest tightening, he set his own chopsticks down on his sushi plate. “You think I’m feeling sorry for myself? That’s fine for you to say. You weren’t the one who was charged with strangling your wife. You’re not the one whose marriage was dissected for a grand jury, and whose wife’s attributes and flaws were picked apart and discussed as if she had never been a human being.”
He never did that. He never spoke about Jess like that out loud. He never talked about the arrest, the charges, the feeling that he might as well be dead like Jess. He had felt empty, soulless, when they had charged him with her murder. And only marginally less so when the grand jury had voted not to indict him because there was no evidence.
But the reins of his tight control slipped through his fingers at Rob’s accusation. He felt anger, hot and bright. He couldn’t have anything he wanted, and yet his only friend had the balls to accuse him of feeling sorry for himself?
“Look, Damien, I know you’ve been through some serious stuff. But I’ve known you since we were kids. We’ve got a lot of history, and you’re just not the same guy anymore.”
No shit. When had Rob figured that out? Damien had known it for a long time. “Of course not. I can’t be the same stupid kid I was, the one who thought my dad was as strong as a superhero and that my mom was the perfect woman. I can’t be the same stupid twenty-two-year-old who met Jessica and thought I’d be happy and in love for the rest of my life.”
Rob shook his head. “If I could go back to that day at the lake, the day you and I cut out of work at the bank early to hit the beach, I would. I’d throw the football the other way so it wouldn’t hit Jessica’s friend…what was her name?”
“Sadie.” Damien’s maki churned in his gut. He remembered that day with agony. Sadie had been a flirty little thing, who had zeroed in on Rob after he’d beaned her with the football onaccident. Jessica had been more aloof. It had taken Damien the whole afternoon to convince her to give him her phone number.
“Even though she was a hot little thing and we had a fun weekend together, I wish I’d never met Sadie so you had never met Jessica. Because ten years later she’s still fucking with you.”
“She’s not fucking with me. Shedied. That wasn’t her fault.”
But Rob gave a sound of exasperation. “It’s not her fault she was murdered, of course not. She didn’t deserve that and I’m damn sorry that happened to her, I really am. But apart from all of that, before that horrible tragedy, you have to recognize that Jessica was just a bitch, Damien. She was a bitch the day we met her and she was a bitch every day after that. She played you for all you were worth.”
Damien’s face went cold. He sat very, very still, thinking it was a good thing they were sitting in a restaurant, because he felt like pounding Rob. It was wrong to say those things about Jessica. “That’s my wife you’re talking about. Who was killed.”
Rob’s voice was low, urgent, his hand gripping the table. “I know that. And maybe you’ll never talk to me again after today, but I have to say this. I can’t stand watching you die a little day by day, becoming this person I don’t know. You’re miserable. Tell me this—when you think of Jessica, are your memories happy?”
No. The answer was in his head before he could consider it. Of course he had some pleasant memories of Jessica. He had loved her, in his own youthful, flawed way, and there had been some fun times. They had been married, they’d lived together, they’d had lots of sex. But something had always been wrong between the two of them, and they both had known it. He was always insecure that she would throw in the towel on their relationship, and smart woman that she was, Jessica had always used that to her advantage.
“That doesn’t change the fact that she was killed.” Something he had never really dealt with. He knew what had been done to her in excruciating detail thanks to his grand jury indictment, but he hadn’t dealt with any of that. He had rammed it into a dark, hidden corner of his head to prevent him from losing his mind.
“No, no it doesn’t. But being killed doesn’t change that she was a bitch either, ya know what I mean?” Rob ran his fingers through his hair. “But you need to let go of your relationship, don’t you think? Don’t you deserve a chance to be happy?”
But Jessica had never been happy. Running the tip of his finger over a stray grain of rice on the table, Damien told the truth. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I deserve anything.”
“If you could have anything you wanted, what would it be?”
Mandy. And her baby. The realization didn’t surprise him at all. The knowledge had been creeping in for days. He cared about Mandy, he worried about her and the baby, he wanted to protect them. “A full life, with a family. I would want a family.” But he was broken, inside, and couldn’t expect any woman to take that on.
“Your mother asks my mother about you all the time, you know. She wants to know if I’ve seen you, how you’re doing, if you’re dating. I tell my mom I don’t know, because I don’t. I don’t know you. Maybe that’s a good place to start—talk to the people who actually still like you.”
