Текст книги "Spring Fever"

Автор книги: Mary Kay Andrews

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

7

True to his word, Max Kaufman was standing at the emergency room entryway when the ambulance pulled up the ramp at Passcoe Memorial Hospital. In his late fifties, with a close-shaven shock of graying hair and large, soulful brown eyes, Dr. Kaufman was already dressed in rumpled green surgical scrubs.

After Sophie had been moved to a gurney and brought inside, Dr. Kaufman nodded a brisk greeting to Mason and Annajane, and then was all business, feeling the listless child’s forehead and gently probing her abdomen.

Sophie cried feebly at his touch. “It’s okay, sugar,” Mason said, clutching her hand. “Dr. Max is going to make you feel better.” He leaned down, smoothed her hair from her face, and kissed both cheeks.

“We’re going to take this little lady back and get her blood drawn right away, do a CT scan, and make her comfortable, but from what you’ve told me, I suspect it is her appendix, in which case, we’ll just get that bugger out of there,” Dr. Kaufman said. He nodded at the nurse hovering at his elbow, and she began to wheel Sophie away.

“Well, Miss Sophie,” they heard the nurse say. “My name is Molly. And I’ve got a little girl just your age at home, and her name is Sophie, too. What do you think about that? I sure do love that pretty pink dress you’re wearing. Did you have a birthday party today?”

“No,” Sophie said. “We were getting my daddy married, but then I throwed up.”

Dr. Kaufman chuckled, looking from Mason to Annajane, raising one bushy eyebrow at the groom’s vomit-spattered tuxedo and his ex-wife’s ruined dress. “Everybody good now? Fine. Fill out the paperwork, get yourself some of our world-famous crappy coffee, and I should be able to let you know something about the surgery in a few minutes.”

“Is this really necessary?” Mason asked anxiously.

“What, an appendix?” Dr. Kaufman said, irritably. “Mason, nobody really needs an appendix, as far as we know. It’s not terribly common for a five-year-old to have appendicitis, but it’s not a rarity either. That said, if she does have a hot appendix, we need to remove it, or things will get really ugly really fast. So you need to let me go find out, all right?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned and disappeared behind the swinging door to the examining rooms.

“Thank you,” Annajane called after him.

“Prick,” Mason muttered. He turned without a word and went to the intake desk to start filling out the paperwork.

Annajane found herself alone in the emergency room waiting area, a cheerless room with beige linoleum floors, beige painted walls, and a row of army-green straight-backed leatherette chairs that faced a wall-mounted television showing a video of proper hand-washing techniques. The only other entertainment option in the room was a beige metal magazine rack holding a handful of well-thumbed copies of Highlights for Children and Modern Maturity.

Choosing Modern Maturity only because all the brain-teaser puzzles in Highlights had already been worked, she was idly scanning an article about prostate health when Mason returned, slumping into a chair once removed from her own. He sighed loudly and buried his head in his hands.

Annajane looked at the clock. “It’s barely been fifteen minutes,” she pointed out.

He didn’t respond.

“She’s a perfectly healthy little girl,” Annajane added. “And Dr. Kaufman really does know what he’s doing.”

“I know that,” Mason said, his voice muffled. “It’s just … this place.” He raised his head. His voice was strained and full of despair. “This place. You know?”

“I do know,” Annajane said softly. She hesitated, but after a moment, she reached over and squeezed his upper arm. His hand found hers, and he patted it briefly before letting go. They both knew this room all too well.

A little over five years ago, she’d rushed into this same emergency room and found Mason sitting in almost the same place, slumped over, despondent, waiting for news from this same doctor, Max Kaufman. Only that time, the patient had been Mason’s father, Glenn, and the news, when it did come, had been devastating.

Funny. That day was the beginning of the end of their marriage.

*   *   *

There had been other fights. Annajane wouldn’t have called them fights, really. Quarrels, or tiffs, if anybody ever really used that word.

They’d been married less than two years, when the little fissures in their happiness began to appear.

Mason and Annajane were living in the caretaker’s cottage at the lake. It was only a temporary address, Mason assured her, a rent-free solution until they saved enough money for a down payment on a house of their own.

The cottage had been abandoned for years. As children, she and Pokey had appropriated it for a playhouse, furnishing it with cast-off furniture from the big house, a wobbly kitchen table, a pair of rickety wooden chairs, and an army cot for campouts. They played at cooking with a battered saucepan, once nearly burning the place down after attempting to heat up a can of SpaghettiOs on Davis’s Boy Scout camp stove.

And yes, she and Mason had snuck away to the caretaker’s house for stolen hours in the first few months after they’d started dating.

At first, Annajane had been enchanted with the quaint honeymoon cottage, with its deeply pitched slate roof, leaded-glass windows looking out onto the lake, and stacked stone fireplace.

But living there was a different matter. The kitchen’s warped wooden cabinets didn’t close, the refrigerator barely cooled, and that adorable roof had a spot that leaked—directly over their bed. It was drafty in the winter and hot in the summertime, and damp and mildew from the lake seemed to creep in year-round. Also, there were mice. There was no washer or dryer, which meant they had to either troop into town to the coin Laundromat or drag their basket of dirty clothes up to the big house, like a couple of college students.

All that Annajane might have cheerfully accepted. She hadn’t grown up in a mansion, as Mason had. Her family’s two-bedroom brick ranch had one window air-conditioning unit—in Ruth and Leonard’s bedroom—and just one bathroom. The real problem with the cottage was its location—directly in the looming shadow of Sallie Bayless, a constant presence in their lives, who was prone to dropping over uninvited to offer Annajane unsolicited advice on everything from housekeeping: “Annajane dear, you really must use lemon oil every week on Mason’s grandmother’s walnut dresser, to keep the wood from drying out”; to cooking, “Annajane dear, we never, ever use dark meat in chicken salad”; to marriage itself, “Annajane dear, no man wants to see his wife in the morning before she’s fixed her hair and her makeup—and his breakfast.”

Her mother-in-law never came right out and criticized the new bride in front of Mason. That wasn’t Sallie’s style, but the slow drip-drip-drip of her constant nitpicking had the effect of sand in Annajane’s newlywed sheets.

Annajane knew it was no good trying to extricate their life from Mason’s family, or his family’s business. They were too tightly woven together now.

And it was all Pokey’s fault.

She’d shown up, unannounced, at Annajane’s studio apartment in Raleigh, on a freezing weeknight in February.

“Guess what?” she’d demanded, as soon as she’d stepped into the room. “I’m pregnant!” And next came, “You’re gonna be my maid of honor. And I won’t take no for an answer.”

Pokey had been in no hurry to finish college. She’d declared herself on the six-year plan, until she met Pete Riggs at a fraternity party in Chapel Hill. He was from a wealthy Charleston family who owned a chain of fine furniture stores. He was tall and redheaded and had earned a full four-year golf scholarship to Wake Forest. Fun-loving Pokey called Annajane that night, dead serious, to announce that she’d met her future husband. And as always, what Pokey wanted, Pokey got.

Before Annajane knew it, she was being dragged to bridal boutiques for fittings and, yes, back to Passcoe, for a seemingly endless round of brunches, teas, dinners, and showers.

Mason was a no-show for all of the prenuptial hoopla. He was working as a regional manager for Dr Pepper, in Memphis, with his father’s blessing, to gain experience outside his own family’s business. He was, Pokey confided, being a major pill about the whole thing. “Mason doesn’t approve of Pete, and he doesn’t approve of me getting married and dropping out just a semester short of graduation, and he most definitely doesn’t approve of me having a baby. He threatened to put a beat-down on Pete for knocking me up, until I admitted I actually got myself knocked up on purpose. But if you ever tell that to Sallie, I’ll never speak to you again,” Pokey said.

“Too bad,” Annajane had murmured, trying to sound unconcerned about Mason’s opinions. She was desperate to see him again, and desperate to pretend he’d never entered her life. It wasn’t until she had to walk up the aisle on his arm, the day of Pokey’s wedding, that Annajane allowed herself to remember how she felt when Mason Bayless touched her. It wasn’t Mason, she told herself, it was just spring fever.

Still, she tried to avoid him at the reception, dancing with every man in the room who was under the age of seventy and hiding out on the veranda of the country club, behind a huge potted palm, between dances.

That’s where he found her, leaning against the veranda railing, sipping a glass of lukewarm champagne toward the end of the evening.

“Shoes hurt that bad?” he’d asked, gesturing toward the high-heeled silver slingback sandals she’d slipped out of.

“They’re killing me,” Annajane said, taking a large sip of champagne, hoping he wouldn’t notice her suddenly flushed face in the darkness.

He picked up the sandals and flung them high into the air and out over the women’s practice green.

“Great,” she said glumly. “Two hundred dollar shoes. Gone.”

“I’ll buy you another pair,” Mason offered. “Maybe a pair you can actually walk in?”

She didn’t smile. “What do you want, Mason?”

He sighed. “I really screwed up, didn’t I?”

“Did you?”

“I was a shit heel,” he said, resting his back against the railing.

“A deflowerer of virgins,” she said, nodding her head in agreement.

He winced. “If I told you I never stopped thinking about you, all this time, would you believe me?”

“No,” Annajane said, unsmiling. “Because if you’d thought about me, even once, I’m pretty sure you could have figured out how to get in touch with me over the past two years.”

“You’re not easy, are you?” Mason said, with an exaggerated sigh.

“Not anymore, no.”

“Listen.” He touched her elbow lightly, and she jerked it away, but he took it again. “Will you please listen?”

“No,” Annajane said. But she didn’t move.

“I fell hard for you that summer,” Mason said.

She gave a snort of disbelief.

“I did. Honestly. But it wouldn’t have worked out. Your mother made me realize that.”

She whirled to face him. “My mother? What are you talking about?”

He raised one eyebrow. “She never told you she called me, did she?”

“No,” Annajane said. “Why would Mama have called you? She didn’t even know we were seeing each other.”

“Your mother is not a stupid person, Annajane. She figured it out.”

Annajane’s jaw dropped, and she felt a shiver go down her spine. “All of it?”

“Yep,” Mason drawled.

“Oh, God. And she never said a word to me. Never let on she knew.” She grabbed Mason’s arm. “What did she say?”

“Enough. She called me on my cell phone. From yours. I guess you’d left it lying around the house, and she took a look at the call history. Listened to some of the voicemails I’d left you … about meeting me out at the lake house.”

Annajane remembered those voice mails. Her face burned with the memory of those sexy messages Mason loved to leave.

“Long story short, she told me to stay away from you. I tried to point out that you were nineteen, and legally of the age of consent, but that didn’t cut much ice with your mother. She was very clear that I should get the hell out of your life and stay out. And she made some threats that weren’t very nice.”

“My mother? Threatened you? And you believed her? My mother wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“Your mother said she would call the sheriff and have me arrested for statutory rape. And even if the charges didn’t stick, it would ruin my life and ruin my family’s reputation. And she meant every word of it.”

“But it’s not true,” Annajane said. “You didn’t rape me. Nobody would have believed a story like that.”

Mason shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. She was so intent on getting you away from me, she would have eventually cooked up something that would work. Anyway, you had to go back to State, and I was headed off to Penn. I decided maybe we should just cool it.”

“Nice of you to let me know,” Annajane said. “Coward.”

“You’re right,” Mason agreed. “I suck. And the longer I went without talking to you, to try to explain things, the easier it got to just avoid Passcoe, and you. Pokey gave me reports of what you were up to, though.”

“She did?”

“I heard about the guy in your marketing class. An SAE, right?”

“He was an ATO actually,” Annajane said. “And dumber than a box of rocks.”

“And wasn’t there some mysterious Asian guy you went with in New York? Pokey said you got his name tattooed on your ass.”

“His name was Nouri,” Annajane said. “And he was Pakistani. And no, I did not get his name tattooed on my ass. It’s a very small butterfly and it’s on my hip.”

“I’d like to see that,” Mason said. “I’m very interested in entomology, you know.”

“Fat chance.”

“Pokey says you’re currently unattached,” Mason said.

“Pokey has a big mouth,” Annajane said.

“You haven’t asked me if I’m seeing anybody,” he said.

She turned toward him and raised one eyebrow, almost afraid to ask. “Are you?”

“No,” he said, drawing the tip of his finger up her forearm. “I’ve been saving myself for you.”

Annajane gave him her sweetest smile. She plucked his hand from her arm and dropped it. “What a waste. Nice try, Mason.”

She hopped off the flagstone veranda and set out onto the golf course in her bare feet.

“Hey! Where you going?” Mason called after her.

“To get my damned shoes,” she muttered.

*   *   *

With a newly minted marketing degree in hand, Annajane took a job in Raleigh, working for a start-up fast food chain called PoBoyz. She set up PoBoyz promotions at high school football games, stock car racetracks, and minor league baseball games. She worked eleven-hour days and got promoted twice within eighteen months. And then her supervisor called her in for a face-to-face on a Friday at four o’clock.

Phoebe, the department’s administrative assistant, gave Annajane a dark look.

“What?” Annajane asked. “It might be good news. I totally killed with that football game promotion. The franchisees said they’d never had so many buy-one get-one coupons fulfilled.”

“It won’t be good,” Phoebe warned. “She never hands out attaboys on Fridays. Mondays are for attaboys. Fridays are for … well, I hope I’m wrong.”

Eileen, her supervisor, got up and closed the door as soon as Annajane walked into her office. One look at her boss’s face and she knew Phoebe had been right.

“I’m sorry,” Eileen said, without preamble. “This is awful. I hate this. But I have to let you go.”

“Why?” Annajane knew it was bad form to ask, but she’d never been fired before.

Eileen stared down at her desktop. “Howard Dewberry’s nephew just graduated from college.”

“So?” But Annajane knew what was coming next. Howard Dewberry was one of the company founders.

“The kid needs a job, and he thinks marketing would be ‘fun,’” Eileen said. “And you know the kind of budget we’re working with. I can’t afford two marketing assistants. Anyway, Annajane, the truth is, you’re too good for this job. You’re smart and hardworking, and you’ve outgrown PoBoyz. I’m doing you a favor, really.”

Annajane got up with a sigh. “Funny, it doesn’t feel like a favor.”

She kicked around Raleigh for another six months, sending out résumés and doing temp work, but when her savings ran out, she faced the inevitable and moved back to Passcoe.

But not to her mother’s house. Not after the blowout they’d had after Annajane confronted her about making threats to Mason.

Instead, she got a crappy job selling ads for the town’s only radio station, and she rented a crappy half of a duplex on a crappy street on the outskirts of town.

It didn’t take long for Pokey to start matchmaking once Annajane moved home.

“What did you say to Mason at my wedding?” she demanded one day while they were sitting at her kitchen table. Pokey was spooning cereal into Denning’s mouth, and he was spitting it out just as fast as she shoveled it in.

“Nothing,” Annajane said. “I just let him know I wasn’t interested in getting together.”

“That’s a big fat lie,” Pokey said. “I saw you watching him at the wedding. And he was watching you. For God’s sake, why don’t you just sleep with him and be done with all the cat-and-mouse games?”

“I did sleep with him, and then he dropped me like a bad habit,” Annajane said. “Remember?”

“You were just kids,” Pokey said. “Anyway, you can’t keep avoiding him forever. He’s moving back to town, you know.”

Annajane’s pulse gave a blip. “When? Why?”

“Daddy finally talked him into giving up the job at Dr Pepper,” Pokey said. “He’s coming to work at Quixie.” She looked over at the kitchen clock. “And I’d say he should be getting into town right about now.”

She gave Annajane an innocent look. “He hasn’t seen the baby in months. I made him promise to stop by as soon as he gets in.”

Annajane stood up abruptly. “Pokey! This isn’t funny. You should have told me you were expecting Mason. I don’t appreciate…”

The kitchen door swung open, and Mason stepped inside. He stopped in his tracks when he saw that his sister had company.

He looked from Pokey to Annajane and sighed. “She tricked you into coming here, didn’t she?”

Annajane nodded. “She tricked you, too, didn’t she?”

“Yup.” They both turned to confront Pokey, who’d scooped the baby out of his highchair and was beating a fast retreat out of the kitchen.

“Traitor!” Annajane yelled.

Mason sighed. “Did she tell you I’m moving back?”

Annajane nodded.

Mason stared at her intently. “It’s a small town, Annajane. You can’t hide from me for the rest of your life.”

“I haven’t been hiding from you,” she lied.

“Sure looks like it from where I stand,” Mason said. “Maybe let the past be past? At least agree to be friends again?”

She bit her lip and looked out the window. Because she knew if she looked at him, she would cave. Wasn’t there some cure for the way she felt every time she was with him? Wasn’t it about time she outgrew this adolescent obsession with Mason Bayless?

He reached out and tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear. “Please? Gimme another chance?”

She did. Two months later, she signed on as assistant VP of marketing at Quixie, working for Davis Bayless. Six months later she and Mason were engaged.

*   *   *

While Annajane figured out how to work for her charming, hyper, demanding future brother-in-law, Mason was busy climbing the corporate ladder.

Within six months, he’d been named divisional sales manager. For the first time, he was working for, and with, Glenn.

Father and son were on the road constantly, meeting with supermarket chains and convenience stores, trying to gain a foothold for Quixie in new markets.

Which meant that Annajane was back at home in Passcoe, working long hours, and trying hard to prove her own worth as a professional to Davis, who still tended to treat her like an annoying little sister. Which might not have been so bad, except for the fact that she could hardly complain about her job to her husband or her best friend—since Davis was their brother.

Two short weeks before the wedding, Ruth abruptly announced that she and Leonard were selling their house to move to Holden Beach.

“Now?” a bewildered Annajane had said, looking around at the boxes her mother had seemingly packed overnight. Leonard smiled wanly from his reclining chair, then looked away.

“It’s his heart,” Ruth had said. “The doctor says he’s got congestive heart failure. From working at that damned plant…”

“He said no such thing,” Leonard objected. “My heart trouble ain’t got a damned thing to do with Quixie or the Baylesses. Thirty years of smoking and that chronic obstructive whatever you call it, that’s what’s done a number on my heart.”

“But why the coast?” Annajane had asked. “You don’t know anybody there. Why not stay here, where your family and friends are?”

“Because it’s high time we got out of Passcoe,” Ruth declared. “We’ve always wanted to live at the beach. Watch the sunsets, play golf, eat seafood whenever we want. Enjoy our lives while we’ve still got time.”

“Your mother’s allergic to shrimp,” Leonard put in. “And I don’t know a putter from a driver. We’ll be bored to death. But I can’t do nothin’ to change her mind.”

A month later, Leonard suffered the first of two heart attacks, and the emotional tug-of-war began in earnest.

Annajane made the long drive to Holden whenever she could, but when she couldn’t, Ruth’s sniping was relentless.

“I guess you got better things to do with your fancy new family than come all the way down here,” her mother would say, with a martyred sigh. “Probably there’s something going on at the country club.”

Whenever she did spend the weekend with her parents, she felt guilty for not spending the time with Mason. Although Mason, she noticed, seemed to have no problems keeping busy when she was away, and even some weekends when she was home. He’d always been a huge fan of college football and basketball, but after their marriage, it seemed to her, he spent an inordinate amount of time either watching UNC games on television or in person.

“You didn’t even go to Chapel Hill,” she fumed the Saturday after Thanksgiving as he waited for his father and Davis and some other buddies to pick him up for the big UNC-Duke game, only a few hours after he’d gotten home from a weeklong business trip. “I don’t see why this is such a big deal for you.”

The words sounded bitchy and whiny, even to her, but she couldn’t help it. She hadn’t seen Mason alone in nearly two weeks. As it stood now, he would get back from Chapel Hill around noon Sunday, then turn right back around and hit the road with his father again on Monday.

He’d looked incredulous, and then annoyed. “Are you serious? This is just the biggest game of the year in this state. I’ve been going to this game since I was five years old. My grandfather took me to my first Carolina-Duke game. And his grandfather took him. If you really wanted to go, I could get you a ticket.”

“And spoil all your fun by making you be the only guy who has to drag his wife along? No thanks,” she’d said quickly.

Home alone most weeknights, Annajane, in turn, felt resentment seeping into her usually cheerful demeanor. Pokey was busy chasing her toddler son, so they didn’t see each other that much. Her other friends, young and living the single life, occasionally invited her to join them for drinks or dinner, but she no longer enjoyed staying out til two in the morning, only to stumble to work half-awake and half-sober. She made up excuses not to go. She stayed home and dined alone on canned soup and a vague, simmering sense of dissolution.

And when Mason made his nightly long distance phone call, reporting on the dinners he’d just shared with important accounts at four-star restaurants in Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville, or Charleston, Annajane would silently contemplate the shabby little cottage and her lonely bed. This was not what she’d thought marriage would be.

If Mason noticed her misery, he never mentioned it. He and Glenn were engaged in a high-stakes battle, trying to place Quixie in Maxi-Mart, a huge regional discount supermarket chain with nearly three hundred outlets around the South, many of them in new markets for Quixie. The deal was potentially worth millions for the company.

Among the Maxi-Mart executives father and son were wooing was a woman named Eva. Mason referred to her frequently in those late-night phone calls. “Eva wants us to meet with the guys down in Orlando,” he’d say. Or, “Sorry, babe, we won’t be home tomorrow after all. Maxi-Mart is the sponsor of a charity golf tournament in Richmond, and Dad and I are gonna play in a foursome Eva put together. You understand, right?”

She wasn’t the jealous type. She and Mason were still practically newlyweds. And after all, this was company business. He was doing this for the company, and for them. Just six more months, Mason promised, “Maxi-Mart will be signed and sealed and we’ll start house hunting. Hell, you can start looking now. All I ask is that you find something with a den for my big-screen, and a master bedroom big enough for a king-size bed. And no leaks overhead!”

“And a nursery?” Annajane asked.

“And a nursery,” Mason assured her.

Still, she heard whispers around the office about this Eva woman. Whispers she chose to ignore. She’d asked Mason about Eva once, on one of their rare weekends together. “Yeah,” he said, “I guess she’s all-right looking, if you like that type.”

“What type is that?” Annajane wanted to know. “Sexy? Flirty?”

Mason shrugged. “I guess some guys might find her sexy. You know, high heels, expensive business suits. She’s pretty buttoned-up.”

“Not your type?”

Mason laughed and reached around and began to tug at the zipper on Annajane’s dress. “Nah, I’m more a zipper man my ownself.”

And then Christmas rolled around.

Annjane had volunteered to plan the company Christmas party. She’d wangled a sizable budget out of Davis and spent weeks planning every detail, from hiring the perfect Santa Claus for the visit with the employees’ children in the afternoon, down to the oyster appetizers and prime rib at the seated dinner at the country club. For the after-dinner, she’d rented a full-scale disc-jockey setup, with Mason spinning records for the first hour of dancing.

Mason and Glenn were scheduled to drive back from a four-day business trip to Atlanta that Friday, the day of the party.

With Mason out of town so much lately, their love life had definitely taken a backseat to business. But not that night, Annajane decided. She had a postparty seduction carefully planned out for her husband. She’d splurged on a new dress, a short, tight-fitting emerald green velvet sheath with a plunging neckline—cut as low as she dared to go in conservative Passcoe—to be worn with a pair of wickedly sexy five-inch-high stiletto heels. And underneath? She had a black-lace push-up bra and the merest suggestion of filmy black-lace panties. It was going to be, she vowed, an evening Mason would not soon forget.

At six o’clock that night, when she’d run home to change after the children’s party, Annajane was chagrined by the fact that Mason’s car was missing from the driveway. He’d promised to be back from Atlanta by 5:00 P.M., in time to shower and dress for the party. As she zipped herself into the green dress, she tried to ignore the fact that Mason’s tux was still laid out on the bed, where she’d placed it earlier that morning.

She’d called his cell phone twice as she drove back to the country club, but both times her message went directly to voice mail.

By seven, when she stood at the door to the ballroom welcoming their guests, cell phone clutched in one hand in case he called, she was doing a slow burn.

Sallie, of course, noticed everything.

“What a lovely dress,” she’d said, her eyes flickering on Annajane’s daring décolletage. “But won’t you be cold without a jacket or something?” Later, during dinner, Sallie walked past and noticed her constantly checking the phone and texting Mason. “Annajane, dear,” she whispered, gently closing her hand over the phone. “This is business. Glenn and Mason are closing a deal. Sometimes things get complicated.”

“But he promised to get here for the party!” Annajane whispered back. “And he hasn’t called. Maybe something has happened.”

Sallie had given her a tight, knowing smile. “It’s just business, Annajane. Get used to it. I have.”

All that night, she’d endured the embarrassment of having her husband a no-show. She sweet-talked Pokey’s husband, Pete, into stepping in as deejay; table-hopped and chatted with every employee in the room; and, in between, picked at her dinner and glowered at the empty chair beside hers. All that night, her phone did not ring. Finally, at nine o’clock, she tucked her phone into her evening bag, resigned to the fact that it probably wasn’t going to ring.

At eleven, she said her good-byes and drove home alone. The temperature had begun to drop at sundown, and now snowflakes were softly falling. White Christmases were a rarity in North Carolina. Any other night, she might have stood at the bay window, watching with wide-eyed glee at the snow sifting onto the lake and accumulating on the shaggy green evergreens ringing the little cottage. But on that night, she shut off the twinkling white lights on the Christmas tree she’d decorated by herself. In the bedroom, she hung up the party dress and changed out of the black lingerie and into a frowsy flannel nightie.

Their room was freezing, and the window panes rattled as the wind howled outside. Part of her worried about Mason driving home on treacherously icy roads; another part of her burned with anger and disappointment.

Finally, she drifted off to sleep, only to awaken at the sound of a car driving up to the house. She checked the clock on the nightstand. It was nearly two. She heard the front door open, heard heavy footsteps on the floors, heard their bedroom door open.

In the half-light from the hallway, she saw Mason drop his suitcase. He walked over to their bed, leaned down, and kissed her cheek.

Annajane pretended to be asleep. She made a show of yawning and half-opening her eyes.

“Sorry to miss the party, babe,” Mason whispered.

She wanted to sit up in bed and throw something at him. She wanted to scream her rage about broken promises and ruined evenings. Instead, she rolled over and faced the wall closest to her side of the bed, her body rigid with suppressed fury.