“Have you thought of a support group? I’m sure you could find one with other people who’ve gone through the same thing.”
Julia didn’t jump at Max’s suggestion. Grief counseling sometimes didn’t happen for weeks or months afterward. If at all. “Did you join some sort of group?”
Cameron had only lost his body. He hadn’t gone away. Max didn’t think there were any support groups for that. “No,” she answer simply.
“Why?” Nothing idle about the question or the way Julia strained forward waiting for the answer.
Max felt the odd urge to touch her hand, to soothe, though she only showed minimal outward signs of stress. “I didn’t want them to think I was crazy.”
She didn’t want to give up Cameron for the sake of healing.
Julia, strangely, didn’t ask why Max had used that word. “You never want to reveal the worst things to a bunch of strangers, do you?” She said it almost thoughtfully, gaze on her nearly empty cup at the edge of the table, fingers playing with the wedding band on her left hand.
“The operative word being bunch?” Max prompted.
“Yes,” Julia finally murmured, eyes rising to meet Max’s. “Yes. I’ve always liked being the center of attention. This is the first time it seems like a...” Her voice trailed off.
“Like an intrusion?”
“Yes. Isn’t that odd?”
“It’s first time you’ve really needed someone to actually listen and understand.” You didn’t get that from a crowd at a cocktail party or a fundraiser.
“Maybe it’s anyone,” Julia whispered, a quiver to her lips. “I’ve never needed to talk in quite this way.”
Someone to talk to. Max had needed that, too. Cameron was the one who came to her rescue. She had a feeling old Lance wasn’t going to rush in on his celestial white charger to save his wife.
“Guess I’m the chosen one.”
Julia’s nostrils twitched, then she sniffed. “Is it too much to ask?”
Max wasn’t clear exactly what the other woman was asking for, but the question spread a strange sensation through her limbs, like bacteria multiplying, accompanied by echoes of Cameron’s voice. Tell her. It had been the litany of their afterlife together. Tell someone. Free yourself. She’d heard the words so often they almost seemed branded on the inside of her eyelids.
Max ignored Cameron as she had so many times before. She’d tell the truth, but never the whole of it. She’d stick with Julia simply to find out the truth about Lance, nothing more.
“The only way we’re alike is murder, Julia.” That’s how she started, not really knowing what Julia wanted. She felt vaguely guilty contemplating the woman as a confidante. It should have been Cameron. Or Witt. Even her former best friend, Sutter Cahill.
Tell her.
There was something to be said for personal distance.
“We’re alike in other ways, Max.” Julia picked up the tea cozy again and began toying with the gilt edges. Max said nothing, waiting for her to go on. “You said you couldn’t go to a support group because they’d think you were crazy.” Pause. Wait. Continue. “They would have thought there was something wrong with me, too.” Finger along the piping, Julia slipped a hand inside to caress the satin quilting. “You see, I knew about Lance and his other women.” Deep breath. “We didn’t talk about it. I simply knew he had to have the kind of wife who accepted. So that’s what I did.”
Betrayal as motive? After so many years? Perhaps. Perhaps that had caused the deep pain she’d glimpsed in Julia’s eyes. So many different ways to betray, so many levels. Julia accepted her husband’s peccadilloes, but how much rope had he wanted? Would renting an apartment for one of his other women have pushed Julia past her bearable limit?
Julia smoothed her hand around the inside of the cozy. “I know what you think. Desperate older woman.”
“There’s not that much of an age difference between us, Julia.”
She snorted, a definite un-Julia-like sound. “Enough. Especially when a man turns forty. That’s when they start looking to the younger women anyway.”
“Maybe you’re right. My husband was thirteen years older than I was.” The chemistry, though, had been immediate and permanent, still potent after death.
“No other women?”
“I would have killed him if he had.” But what about the days he disappeared after the bitter fights? Where had he gone? The thought of an affair had never entered Max’s head. It wasn’t trust. It was simply inconceivable that Cameron could take in another woman’s breath or feel someone else’s heartbeat against his chest.
Inconceivable. Wasn’t it?
No reassuring voice sounded in her head.