A Marriage Worth Fighting For Read online

  By seven-twenty he was down in the building’s underground parking garage, with his overnight bag in the trunk and his engine warming.

  His marriage was not going to end with an arid little note from Alicia and divorce lawyers blazing their legal guns at fifty paces. He needed to confront her face-to-face, find out what was behind this, make her see.

  See what?

  His gut churned as he gunned the car in Reverse and squealed the tires on the echoing concrete.

  See that this was impossible. Wrong. Just…impossible.

  He seemed to have no other words for it than those two. Impossible and wrong. After almost five hours driving, with clenched hands aching on the wheel and jaw wired tight, he pulled into one of the twin driveways of his brother Andy’s elegant and cleverly subdivided Victorian house in Radford, Vermont, with no more idea of what he wanted to say to his wife than he’d had when he started.

  * * *

  The hammering on the door wrenched Alicia out of her restless, unhappy sleep. For about ten seconds, her heart thumped so hard in her chest that it interfered with her breathing and her skin prickled and stung with fear, but then she knew what was happening.

  MJ.

  Of course.

  Why hadn’t she thought that he would race up here for a confrontation the moment he read her note? He had a highly developed need to win in any situation he encountered, and the prospect of a divorce was no exception.

  She looked at the clock. Five minutes to midnight. It seemed appropriate. He must have gotten home from the hospital early tonight. Either that or he’d driven up here way too fast.

  Probably both.

  She felt sick at the thought of the imminent clash between them, and was only glad that Andy and Claudia were in New York City for a few days and weren’t around to hear anything through the walls.

  She had called them to ask if she and the children could use the rental apartment, “just to get away for a short break and see the fall colors,” and they’d said of course she could, given her some practical instructions and told her where she could find the key. She dreaded their return four days from now, when she would have to tell them the truth.

  She dreaded the next few minutes far more.

  MJ hammered at the door again. Much more of it and he would wake the children, and that was the last thing she wanted. She rolled out of bed, grabbed a robe from where she’d left it on a chair in the corner of the room and hurried down, her bare feet chilling quickly on the wooden stairs and her whole body aching with reluctance and dread.

  She snatched the door open just as he was about to batter his fist against it once more, so she caught him with it raised in the air, then saw the strong surgeon’s fingers slowly uncurl and drop back to his side.

  He hadn’t showered or changed after his day’s work. He was still wearing the dark suit pants and one of the crisp white business shirts he favored whenever he wasn’t wearing scrubs. There was a bright moon in the sky and it picked out the white of the shirt and made it glow against the darker matte of his skin.

  He’d taken off his tie and opened the shirt at the top for comfort, and his hair was windblown from driving with the car window cracked open. He liked to drive that way in all weather except the dead of winter, said it was bracing. His shirtsleeves were rolled to the elbow and the shirttail had come untucked at one side, so for once—unusually—there was something rakish about him.

  His breathing was heavier than usual and ragged at the edges. His high, square brow was pleated in a tight frown, and there was an odd, numb look to his mouth, even in the low light spilling onto his face from inside the house.

  He looked a mess.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but then nothing came out and Alicia didn’t have the words for this situation,

  either, so they just stared at each other, helpless and hostile and so painfully far apart.

  In the end, they both spoke in the same moment.

  “I’m not inviting you in.”

  “You can’t do this, Alicia.”

  They went silent again. Despite what she’d just said, she almost moved aside to let him across the threshold. The patterns of seven years were hard to kick. She expected him to force the issue, simply barge past her with or without her consent, but he didn’t.

  He actually stepped back, spread his hands a little and conceded her victory. “All right, if you don’t want me in the house, then that’s your right and your choice.”

  “Thank you. Yes.”

  “But I hate that you’re doing this. That you left a note.”

  “You wanted us to talk about it in front of Abby and Tyler?”

  “You’ve taken them from their home.”

  “I— What was the alternative?”

  “Kick me out,” he said, harsh and bitter. “That’s what Anna did to James.”

  It shocked her that he could make this reference. Anna and James had been part of their wider circle of friends until they’d divorced, after one of the most poisonous marriages Alicia had ever seen. They were still fighting mercilessly over custody of their five-year-old daughter, who was caught in the cross fire and would bear the scars.

  Before Alicia could find words to protest any comparison with such a couple, MJ asked her, “Does Andy know why you’re here?”

  “No, not yet. He’ll have to, of course, and Claudia, and everyone else.”

  “If you go through with the whole stupid—” he began, but he must have seen something in her face. Whatever this was on her part, it wasn’t stupid. He didn’t finish. He just stood there, a look of loss and uncertainty carved painfully deep into his even, good-looking features. When had she ever seen MJ look like that?

  “I’d better go to a motel,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m not sleeping on my brother’s front lawn. If you want me to make an appointment to talk to you in the morning, Alicia, I’ll do that. Just tell me where and what time. But I’m not going back to the city until we have talked, and I think you owe me that, at least. When I saw your note—” He swallowed hard, lifted his clenched hand to his throat for a moment and didn’t finish.

  She saw goose bumps on his forearms. Vermont nights were getting chilly at this time of year and he wasn’t dressed for it. Neither was she, with her feet bare on the hardwood of the front hall.

  The idea of an “appointment” in the morning seemed worse than having him here right now. She knew she wouldn’t sleep all night, and the prospect of facing down her husband at some kind of formal meeting across a café table—but who would look after the children?—made her stomach drop.

  “No,” she said. “Let’s talk now.”

  “Here?” He gestured at the front porch and the yard and almost seemed willing, despite the chill and dark.

  This time, she did step back. “Inside, of course.”

  He came across the porch and through the door, and his shirtsleeve would have brushed the front of her robe if she hadn’t leaned a crucial inch closer to the hallway wall. “Where’s Maura? I don’t want her—”

  “She left.”

  “Left?”

  “Quit. She didn’t want to be in Vermont. Too rural. I gave her money for a cab and a bus ticket back to the city. You probably crossed paths with her somewhere near Albany.”

  She closed the heavy wooden door and followed him toward the front living room, but he turned suddenly while they were still in the hall and pulled her into his arms, with a disturbing mix of authority and hesitation. “Don’t—don’t do this.”

  “What?”

  His muscles were hard around her, all knotted and demanding. “Any of it! This gesture. We have two children. A partnership.”

  “It’s not a gesture.”

  “Forgive me if I get the semantics wrong,” he almost yelled.

  “You’re right. There’s so much else wrong. Semantics is not even the tip of the iceberg.”

  “What else is wrong?”

  “Eve
rything, MJ. What’s right? Tell me one thing that’s right about our marriage?” She pushed at his arms. They were so rigid they were almost painful, and she had no desire whatsoever to soften into them when they were like that.

  But then she caught the drift of scent from his skin, a mix of soap and nuttiness, and for a moment it made her crumble inside. The scent of safety, she’d thought when it first became familiar to her, seven years ago. A precious, desperately valued scent that said everything was going to be okay now. She didn’t need to be scared anymore. She didn’t need to be alone.

  It was such a powerful memory. It almost undermined her resolve. Unconsciously, she relaxed a little and felt his hold on her grow closer, but at the same time softer, a little less like a vise. His hands slipped down the back of her robe, warming her spine, coming to rest in the inward curve of her waist.

  He laced his fingers together, leaned back a little and looked at her, eyes raking over her as if taking inventory or examining a precious possession in search of flaws. Hell, he couldn’t possibly think he’d won this already, could he?

  She’d left him, left her marriage, and it wasn’t a mere gesture. She meant it. She was serious.

  And yet, why shouldn’t he think he’d won? He won so many things, so often. Discussions about where and when to go for their vacation, inevitably choosing status destinations that they could talk about with their friends. The decision about building his medical career in New York City, following his father’s and grandfather’s tradition. She hadn’t even dared to suggest that somewhere else might be a worthwhile choice. The debate about when they should start trying for a baby, when Alicia would have preferred to wait another year or two—and then of course she had gotten pregnant the first month.

  But if Alicia thought she was winning this one, why wasn’t she pushing him away? she wondered. She should be!

  “You have a beautiful apartment,” he said, still angry but softer about it. “You have a platinum credit card. I buy you gifts. I take you out. When do I ever say no to any of it? Your personal trainer, your wardrobe, the help we pay top dollar for.”

  There.

  Right there.

  That was the whole problem.

  In a nutshell.

  She was bitterly unsurprised that he’d come out with such a catalog of material benefits, too. Of course it was the first thing he would think of, and the fault lay as much at her own door as at his. More so. The only thing that surprised her—always surprised her, in a guilty, self-

  doubting way—was that he seemed satisfied with his side of the bargain. What did he get out of the arrangement? There must have been hundreds of women who would have been worth more to him and who would have married him for better reasons.

  This was the thing that made it impossible for her to continue their marriage.

  He thought she’d married him for what he could give her. The money. The status. The pampered lifestyle. And for whatever reason, he was content with that.

  Worse, when she searched her heart and searched her memories, she couldn’t find the proof to tell him he was wrong. She’d been too desperate at the time to even think about love or the deeper levels of a partnership.

  She wrenched herself out of his arms, sick with shame and disappointment at herself and at him. Of course their marriage had failed. How could either of them expect any other outcome, given its flawed foundations?

  “Go back to New York, MJ,” she said on a harsh whisper, while she wondered if she was a different person from that terrified twenty-three-year-old seven years ago, or if she would soon discover that she hadn’t changed at all.

  Chapter Two

  Seven years earlier…

  “Mail,” Alicia’s boss said shortly, tossing her a handful of envelopes, which made her heart sink as soon as she saw them. “Came yesterday.”

  The last time she’d moved apartments, she’d won Tony Cottini’s permission to use his restaurant address for her mail delivery, since her job seemed a more stable entity than her place of residence, but she regretted it every time these letters came.

  It was so obvious what they were. Overdue account notices, containing increasingly strident demands for payment. They were cold things, echoing the cold of the November day outside.

  “Thanks,” she told him quickly, then stuffed the mail in the battered purse hanging on a hook in a dingy alcove and hurried to the serving window in front of the kitchen to line four plates of hot food along her arm.

  Tony wasn’t a bad boss—if he had been, maybe she wouldn’t have fallen into her current trap with the mailing address, because she wouldn’t have dared to ask—but he still had a healthy interest in her attaining maximum productivity levels at all times.

  She delivered the food with a smile, took the order from the next table and skimmed back to the kitchen to slap it in front of the short-order cook, calling it out as she did so. “Three specials, two eggs over easy with bacon and hash browns, one on whole wheat, one scrambled, sausage and home fries, white toast.”

  Okay, now Table Three.

  It was only seven in the morning. Her feet had already begun to ache, but that would taper off after the rush hit its peak at around eleven. By the time she finished her double shift twelve hours after that, the rest of her would be so tired that the old reliable feet almost wouldn’t care.

  Table Three had a doctor at it, eating by himself. She could tell he was a doctor because a) the restaurant was only a block from a major Manhattan hospital, so doctors grabbed a quick meal here quite often, b) he was reading a gigantic medical textbook and c) he’d forgotten to take off his name badge, which read Dr. Michael McKinley, Jr.

  “What can I get you?” she asked him, coffeepot in hand.

  At Tony’s, they didn’t bother with all that hi-my-name’s-Alicia-and-I’ll-be-your-server-today stuff. Again, he was a decent boss that way. He just growled at them every now and then, “Say whatever greeting you like to the customer. Just be sincere and say it with a smile.”

  Oops, she’d forgotten the smile.

  She put it on.

  The one she’d practiced.

  The one she’d paid for.

  Or rather, borrowed the money for, at the kind of horrible interest rate you had no choice about when you had an unimpressive credit history.

  The one she was, in other words, still paying for.

  Dr. Michael McKinley Junior looked up from the giant book in response to her question, and his gaze arrived at her face in time to see the smile—its dutiful dawning, its practiced beauty and its slow fade when she thought about how much she still owed for these perfect straight white teeth.

  He ordered the biggest breakfast on the menu and held out his cup for coffee like a thirsty man in the desert, which made her think he’d probably been working all night. She filled it neatly, to the perfect height.

  There was a pride in doing good work. She’d learned that as an actress—okay, wannabe actress—and she’d always tried to carry it through into the rest of her life. Look at it this way: What if she had to play a waitress in a major movie someday? What if she was chosen to front a lifestyle TV show? Or feature in a national ad campaign for a top-selling brand of coffee? Or if a modeling photo shoot called for her to pose with a steaming cup in her hand?

  Those fantasies didn’t come very often anymore. They’d been scoured away by six years of struggling to survive in Manhattan, since she’d arrived here off a bus from Tennessee at the age of seventeen. Six years of fitting acting classes and auditions around restaurant shifts. Six years of scraping together the money to eat and sleep, as well as updating her modeling portfolio and fixing her damned teeth.

  She’d been told to do this by several modeling agencies, and it had seemed like an investment in her future, the one key piece of the puzzle that was missing. Once she had straight white teeth, the work would start to flow and the money would pour in.

  But it still wasn’t happening, and there was this horrible slippery slope whe
re you paid off the loan for the teeth with a credit card and then got another credit card to cover the maxed-out balance on the first one, and it was so hard to get ahead.

  When did something stop being an investment and start being money poured down the drain? She hadn’t taken any of those expensive acting and voice and movement classes for a while, and her photo portfolio was more than three years old.

  “You’re a beautiful girl,” she’d been told a thousand times. “But…”

  Fill in the blank.

  You’re two inches too short. You’re too big in the bust. You don’t have the voice. You’re too small in the bust. You don’t have the dance training. You’re a model and we’re looking for an actress. You’re an actress and we’re looking for someone who can sing…who can speak French…who can ride a unicycle…who can dance with bears while wrapping a flaming cobra around her neck and juggling ten chain saws.

  Yeah, and don’t even go near the X-rated ways to complete the “someone who can” equation. This was one of her few sources of pride. She’d never stooped to porn videos or the casting couch.

  But she was scared sometimes. Scared every day. She had nothing to fall back on. No close family, since Grammie’s death. Some distant cousins she didn’t even know. Friends in only a little less bad shape than she was. She could never call on them to bail her out. Most of them, she didn’t even know if they really were friends. More like fellow prisoners in the same trap. Maybe every single one of them would scramble over her dead body if it gave them a route to success. How much scrambling would she be prepared to do herself?

  The desperate plans went around and around in her head. Work more double shifts so she could pay off the debt and get some money saved. Abandon her dreams of success, leave the city and find somewhere cheaper to live, take some night courses to earn a more realistic qualification.

  She had nothing in that area, because she’d been so sure that the “You’re so beautiful” she’d heard since the age of nine would be enough.

  There it was, right now, on Dr. Michael McKinley Junior’s face. You’re so beautiful. He didn’t say it out loud, but she’d learned to read it even when it wasn’t spoken. It was like the twenty-seven supposed Eskimo words for snow, so many variants of the same thing.