Heroes Are My Weakness: A Novel

“It was all about availability, wasn’t it? That’s what’s so ironic. If you’d met me in the city, you’d never have looked at me twice.” Theo belonged with beautiful women. He and she were lovers only because of proximity. She tucked her cold hands inside the front of her coat. “After everything you went through with your sister, how could you have fallen in love with Kenley?”

“She radiated independence and self-confidence.” He made a mockery of his own words. “Everything I was looking for in a woman. Everything Regan lacked. We hadn’t been together for six months when she pressed me to get married. I was crazy about her, so I ignored some misgivings and went along with it.”

“Which put you in virtually the same predicament you’d been in with Regan.”

“Except Kenley didn’t try to kill anyone but herself.”

“As a way of punishing you.”

He hunched his shoulders. “I’m getting cold. I’m going inside.”

The man who’d once stripped off his sweater and stood bare-chested in the snow was suddenly cold? “Not yet. Finish the story.”

“I already have.” He strode away from her and into the turret.

She pulled the photographs from her pocket. They burned her cold fingers. She gazed at them through the gray swirl of snow, then opened her hands. A gust of wind plucked at her palms and carried them away. One by one, they drifted into the muck at the bottom of the swimming pool.


AS SOON AS ANNIE WENT inside, Livia demanded her attention. Annie drew cartoons for her while her mind reeled from what she’d learned and brooded over what she still didn’t know. Predictably, Theo had only gone so far with his story. She’d have to pry the rest out of him. Maybe telling it would chip away at the icy wall he lived behind.

She planted a kiss on Livia’s head. “Why don’t you go do a puppet show for your stuffed animals?” She pretended not to notice Livia’s frown as she got up from the table.

Even before she entered the turret, she could hear rock music. She let herself into the living room. The music was coming from Theo’s office. She climbed the steps to the third floor and knocked but got no response.

The music was loud, but not so loud he couldn’t hear. She knocked again, and when he still didn’t respond, she tried the knob. She wasn’t surprised to find it locked. The message was clear. Theo had finished talking for the day.

She thought it over. The music switched from Arcade Fire to The White Stripes. Out of nowhere, the screech of a terrified cat ripped through the air, quickly followed by the kind of agonizing sound only an animal in the worst kind of peril could make.

The door flew open. Theo dashed out onto the landing looking for his cat. She slipped inside as he raced down the steps.

He had tossed his coat over the black leather ottoman that sat in front of his writing chair. His desk was neater than the last time she’d been here, but then he’d been doing most of his writing at the cottage. A few CD cases lay on the floor by the easy chair. The telescope stood in the window overlooking the cottage, but now she found the sight reassuring instead of menacing. Theo the protector. Trying to shield his mentally ill sister, rescue his crazy wife from herself, and keep Annie safe.

She heard his footsteps coming back up the stairs, moving with a slower, more purposeful tread. He appeared in the doorway. Stopped there. Gazed across the room at her. “You didn’t . . .”

She wrinkled her nose, going for cute. “I can’t help it. I have crazy-mad skills.”

His eyebrows slammed together. He advanced ominously into the room. “I swear . . . If you pull that on me one more time . . .”

“I won’t. At least I don’t think I will. Probably not.” Unless I have to, she thought.

“Just to ease my mind . . .” he said, through gritted teeth. “Where is my cat?”

“I’m not completely sure. Probably asleep under the studio bed. You know how he likes it there.”

Theo seemed to realize that—as much as he might want to do her just a little bodily harm, it wasn’t in his nature. “What the hell am I going to do with you?”

She went on the attack. “I’ll tell you what you’re not going to do. You’re not going to knock yourself out trying to take care of me. I appreciate the thought, but I’m able-bodied, relatively sane—at least in comparison—and I take care of myself. The way I’m doing it might not be pretty, but I’m doing it, and I’m going to keep on doing it. No heroics are necessary on your part.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

And maybe he didn’t. He seemed to view himself as the villain instead of the protector, but if she pointed that out to him, he’d likely dismiss it.

She plopped down into his writing chair. “I’m hungry. Let’s get this over with.”





Chapter Nineteen

GET THIS OVER WITH?” ONCE again his eyebrows went on a collision course. “You want to know if I killed Regan.”

The only way she could get Theo to tell her the rest was to goad it out of him. “Don’t play games with me. You didn’t kill her.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I know you, O master builder of fairy houses.” And she did. In so many ways she hadn’t until now.

He blinked. She cut him off before he could deny what he’d done for Livia. “You put your horror on the page. Now stop trying to distract me with all your phony menace, and tell me what happened.”

“Maybe I’ve told you as much as I want to.”

He sneered just like Leo, but she wasn’t put off. “You and Regan had both just graduated from college,” she said. “And not the same college. How did you manage to pull that off?”

“I threatened to ditch college altogether if she didn’t agree that we’d split up. I said I’d backpack around the world without telling anyone where I was going.”

She loved that he’d been able to do that much to protect himself. “So you went to different schools . . .” It didn’t take a crystal ball to figure out what happened next. “And you met a girl.”

“More than one. Don’t you have something better to do?”

“Not a thing. Keep going.”

He grabbed his coat from the ottoman and tossed it on a hook by the door, tidying up—not because he was a neat freak, but because he didn’t want to look at her. “I was like a starving man in a supermarket, but even though our campuses were a hundred miles apart, I was still secretive. Right up until senior year when I fell hard for a girl in one of my classes . . .”

Annie leaned back in the chair, trying to appear relaxed so he wouldn’t clam up. “Let me guess. She was beautiful, smart, and crazy.”

He managed a vapor of a smile. “Two out of three. She’s now the CFO of a Denver tech firm. Married with three kids. Definitely not crazy.”

“But you had a big problem . . .”

He shifted a yellow pad on his desk a few inches to the left. “I’d been visiting Regan on her campus as often as I could, and she seemed okay. Normal. By her senior year, she’d even started to date. I thought she’d outgrown her problems.” He moved away from the desk. “The family was getting together on the island for the Fourth of July. Deborah couldn’t make it, but she wanted to see Peregrine, so I brought her over the week before everyone else was scheduled to arrive.” He wandered toward a back window, one that looked out onto the water. “I planned to tell Regan about her the next weekend, but Regan showed up early.”

Annie tightened her fingers over the chair arms, not wanting to hear what came next, but knowing she had to.

“Deborah and I were walking on the beach. Regan saw us from the top of the cliff. We were holding hands. That’s all.” He splayed his hands on either side of the window frame, staring out. “It had rained earlier, and the rocks were slippery, so I still don’t know how she made it down the steps so fast. I didn’t even see her coming, but the next thing I knew, she’d thrown herself at Deborah. I grabbed her and pulled her off. Deborah ran up to the house to get away.”

He turned away from the window but still didn’t look at her. “I was furious. I told Regan I needed to live my own life, and she needed to see a shrink. It got vicious.” He pointed to the scar by his eyebrow. “Regan’s the one who gave me this, not you.” He indicated just below the scar a much smaller mark that Annie had barely noticed. “This is yours.”

She had felt so good about giving him a scar. Now the sight of it made her sick.

“Regan went wild,” he continued. “She threatened me, threatened Deborah. I exploded. Told her I hated her. She looked me straight in the eye and said she was going to kill herself.” A muscle twitched in his jaw. “I was so angry that I told her I didn’t care.”

Pity overwhelmed her.

He wandered toward the window with the telescope, not looking at her, not seeing anything. “A storm was coming in. By the time I got to the house, I’d calmed down enough to know I had to go back and tell her I didn’t mean it, even though part of me did. But it was too late. She’d already run down the beach to our dock, and she was climbing into the sailboat. I yelled at her from the steps to come back. I’m not sure she heard. Before I could get to her, she had the sails up.”

Annie could see it as if she’d been there, and she wanted to wipe away the image.

“The powerboat was out of the water for repairs,” he said, “so I jumped in the water, somehow thinking I could catch her. The surf was strong. She saw me and yelled at me to go back. I kept swimming. The waves were breaking over me, but I could still catch glimpses of her face. She looked so sorry, so apologetic. So fricking apologetic. Then she trimmed the sails and raced out into the storm.” He unclenched his fist. “That was the last time I saw her alive.”

Annie clenched her fists. It was wrong to hate someone with a mental illness, but Regan had not only destroyed herself and nearly killed Annie; she’d done her best to destroy Theo, too. “Regan got you good, didn’t she? The perfect revenge.”

“You don’t understand,” he said with a bitter laugh. “Regan didn’t kill herself to punish me. She did it to set me free.”

Annie came out of her chair. “You don’t know that!”

“Yeah, I do.” He finally looked at her. “Sometimes we could read each other’s minds, and that moment was one of them.”

She remembered Regan’s tears over a gull with a broken wing. In her sane moments, she must have hated this part of herself.

Annie knew not to let any of the pity she felt show in her face, but what he’d done to himself was wrong. “Regan’s plan didn’t work. You still think you’re responsible for her death.”

He dismissed her sympathy with a harsh slash of his hand. “Regan. Kenley. Look for the common element, and you’ll find me.”

“What you’ll find are two mentally ill women and a man with an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. You couldn’t have saved Regan. Sooner or later, she would have destroyed herself. The more troublesome question is Kenley. You say you were attracted to her because she was the opposite of Regan, but is that true?”

“You don’t understand. She was brilliant. She seemed so independent.”