The intensity in his tone surprised her, but not as much as the words themselves. “You’ve been wondering that for four years?”
“I guess it’s more like five now, but yes. That night at the alumni dinner, when you got in my face, all I could think was he doesn’t deserve her.”
Christy-Lynn felt her cheeks go pink but said nothing.
“Were you happy? Back then, I mean.”
She thought about that a moment—and about her need to think about it. Shouldn’t the answer be obvious? It wasn’t, though. Like everything else in her life the truth lay half in shadow, perhaps because that was how she preferred it. Things tended to be less messy that way.
“I think I was numb,” she said at last. “Not happy. Not unhappy. There were signs, I suppose, that it wasn’t Shangri-la, but there wasn’t any one thing. It was gradual, you know? Insidious. It wasn’t until he was gone that I realized I’d been married to someone I barely knew. I was holding on so tightly I never realized how much we’d both changed. Still, it wasn’t enough to leave. At least I didn’t think it was.”
Wade came to sit in the chair beside her, beer balanced on one knee. “Were you still in love with him? I asked once before, and you never did answer.”
Christy-Lynn looked out over the lake, watching the light play over the mercury-smooth surface. “I’m not sure I ever was,” she answered finally, realizing, perhaps for the first time, what she had never let herself see. “How’s that for an admission?”
“Then why marry the guy?”
“I was in awe of him,” she said with a shrug, not even sure she understood it. “And it’s what respectable people do, isn’t it? Grow up and get married? Respectability was important to me back then. Which is probably why I always gave up what I wanted—so I could be who and what he wanted. But after a while, the shine started to wear off. It was like going backstage after a play and seeing the star without his makeup.”
“But you stayed.”
Christy-Lynn looked at her hands, smoothing her nails one at a time. “It wasn’t because of the money.”
“I knew that,” Wade said quietly.
“Or the status.”
“I knew that too.”
“I don’t know. He was this larger than life guy, always so sure of himself. And back then, I wasn’t sure of anything. It was . . . attractive. And it made him the perfect place to hide.”
“From what?”
She met his gaze evenly. “Myself. And it worked. The day I became Stephen’s wife I stopped being Christy-Lynn Parker. And for a while, I was okay with it. They say ignorance is bliss, and I guess it was, because I never bothered to ask myself who I’d be if I wasn’t his wife.”
“You said you gave up what you wanted. What did you want?”
They were silent for a moment, sipping in unison as they watched a pair of egrets lift away from the shore. “I used to think about writing sometimes,” she said, finally breaking the quiet. “Not the great American novel, but something. I had a couple of ideas I pitched to Stephen, but he always squashed them. He said telling someone else what they’re doing wrong isn’t the same as being able to do it yourself.”
Wade eyed her stonily. “So that’s it? You just abandoned your dream because he said so? Stephen gets what he wants and to hell with your dreams?”
Christy-Lynn screwed the cap back on her water bottle and set it on the railing. It was true. Well, mostly true. She wasn’t sure writing had ever been a lifelong dream, but it was something she had toyed with—and given up. On Stephen’s say so. But at the moment, she was more intrigued by the anger she saw banked in Wade’s eyes.
“What happened between you two?”
He shrugged, rolling his empty beer bottle back and forth between his palms. “It was years ago.”
“Maybe, but it still bothers you. It’s there every time you talk about him, the same tamped-down fury that’s coming off you right now. So what was it?”
“We were friends. Or I thought we were. Wade didn’t have many friends back then. He had a tendency to suck up all the oxygen in the room. But there was another side of him, one he kept to himself until no one else was around, like when we’d come up here to study. He was different then, laid-back, maybe because there was no one around to impress. But then we’d get back to Charlottesville, and it was like he’d flip a switch. All of a sudden the big man on campus was back.”
Christy-Lynn nodded. She knew exactly what he was talking about. “And what else?”
“He was lazy.”
“That’s it?” She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting, but criticizing Stephen’s work ethic hadn’t been on the list. “You think cranking out a book a year is lazy?”
“I meant his writing was lazy. He had talent but never bothered to hone it. He was happy just turning out stock stories that leaned on sex or violence to sell. There was never any emotion in his work, never any of himself. That’s the hard part, spilling your guts out onto the page, tapping into the stuff that scares you, crushes you, breaks you wide-open. Stephen couldn’t be bothered.”
Christy-Lynn sat mulling his words, certain there was more to the long-standing rift than he was letting on, something more personal, more painful. “You’re saying you’ve been angry for twenty years because Stephen didn’t live up to his potential?”
“I was laying the groundwork,” Wade replied tightly. “I’m not the only one who thought Stephen was lazy. Our professors saw it too. They started leaning on him, challenging him. It was getting harder and harder for him to slide. At the end of our sophomore year, we had a course project due, a short story that counted as a large part of our grade. Stephen knew what he was working on wasn’t good. He asked me to help him fix it, so I gave him some ideas, all of which required pulling the story apart. Rather than doing the work, he went into my desk and found a piece I’d written the previous year. He retyped it minus my edit notes and handed it in as his own. He got an A and passed the class. Unfortunately, the professor passed it along to the editor of the Meridian, who ended up printing it. That’s how I found out—when I saw my story in print with his name on it.”
Christy-Lynn went still, numbed by the revelation. “He just . . . stole it?”
“Borrowed was the term he used. He said he just needed to pass the class, and it wasn’t like I was ever going to do anything with the story, so what was the big deal?”
“I can’t even—” She paused, dragging both hands through her hair. “What happened when you told the professor it was your story?”
“Nothing happened. I didn’t tell him.”
Christy-Lynn gaped at him. “I don’t understand. He stole your story and got a publishing credit for it, and you just let him get away with it?”
“It would have been my word against his, and I knew better than to think he’d ever cop to plagiarism. The bastard couldn’t even bring himself to apologize. Suffice it to say, we were through as friends. It wasn’t just that he stole my work and passed it off as his. It was that he could screw over a friend when he knew damn well I was willing to help him.”
“I’m so sorry, Wade.”
“For what?”
“That night at the alumni dinner. I thought it was sour grapes, and all the time you were sitting on this.”
“You called me bitter and jealous.”
“I’m sorry.”
Wade forced a smile. “Forget it. You didn’t know. Besides, you were right. Or at least half-right. I was pretty bitter. But it’s water under the bridge now.”
Christy-Lynn pushed to her feet and crossed to the opposite side of deck, more shaken than she wanted to admit. Who had she married? A man who kept a mistress, who fathered a child he barely saw and had neglected to provide for, who plagiarized a story written by his best friend. It was unfathomable. But really, it wasn’t. And that made it worse somehow.