Anders stares at me and I’m half expecting his expression to transform into one of revulsion and disgust, but his face remains full of regret.
“I will never be able to set her free if I fall in love with someone else.”
And then this darkness, this cold wave of misery and despair, washes over me.
It’s an impossible situation. To show his wife compassion would be to destroy her mother, but he might have been willing to make that excruciating choice at some point in the future ifhe truly believed in his heart that it was in everyone’s best interests.
But if he falls in love with another woman, if he lets himself love me as I suspect he wants to, he will never be able to withdraw life support from his wife. It would be considered a selfish, despicable, murderous act.
Everyone would say he’d killed her to be with me.
He drags his hand over his face and shudders, and I can’t help but sit there in shock and stare at him.
34
I toss and turn all night long. In the end, I had to leave Anders alone in the living room, too shaken to talk anymore. He accepted it and, I think, welcomed it. It was a lot to take in, for both of us.
Laurie might be alive, but she’sgone, Wren. My wife is gone.
That’s how Jonas described Laurie too. He said she was gone. Notdead.Gone.
EvenIphrased it,Casey said you lost your wife...
To use the worddiedwould have sounded crass, but what if Ihadput it differently? What if I had said,Casey said your wife died in a car accident a few years ago? Would he have corrected me in the same way that he corrected the timing and the circumstances?
How will I ever know? How will I know when or if he would have told me about her? Did he think I’d return to England none the wiser? Forget all about him? Is that what he wanted?
When I think about the look on his face when he heard I might move to America and take the job with Dean, I think that maybe it was.
He’s so much worse than Scott. At least Scott was honestwith me. Scott never lied, he never took the easy path. He made difficult choices, but he believed them to be right.
I feel a sudden rush of respect for him, which somehow makes this situation feel worse.
I thought Anders was honorable. He would have been willing to quit his job—a job heloves—to do the right thing by his family, his brother.
Heisa man of honor.
My head hurts. My heart aches. I don’t know what I’m still doing here, but the thought of getting up and leaving, of leavinghim...I don’t think I can do it, not yet.
I awake witha start, disoriented. I must have fallen back asleep. Someone is knocking on the apartment door, but then it stops, and what happened last night comes rushing back to me in a flood.
Where’s Anders?I wonder as the knocking sounds again.
This time there’s no end to it, so I jump out of bed and venture out of my room in my black silk pajamas.
There’s a note on the coffee table with my name on it and I snatch it up, glancing toward Anders’s room to see that his bed is made and empty.
Had to go into work, his note says.Please call me when you wake up.
I hurry across the room, thinking that maybe he’s forgotten his key, and I suddenly want to see him, so badly.
But then I open the door and find Kelly standing there and I almost have a heart attack.
“Anders is at work,” I tell her.
“I know,” she replies. “I just saw him leaving. It’s you I want to speak to.”
“What do you want?” I ask, and I don’t mean it to come out sounding as rude as it does. “Come in,” I add hastily, trying to make up for my manners.
