Live to Tell (Live to Tell #1)(60)

That Garvey isn’t here isn’t unusual. He frequently goes for an early morning run.

That she didn’t stir when he left is most definitely unusual.

Marin attributes it—and the fact that her head is pounding—to her own foolishness the day and night before. The chocolate ice cream cone on the street was the only thing she’d ingested all day—followed by a champagne toast to her husband and two glasses of red wine at last night’s fund-raiser dinner—a meal she didn’t even get a chance to eat.

That part wasn’t her fault. She had ordered the vegetarian entree. There was a mix-up in the kitchen, and she was served beef instead. By the time they brought her a new plate, the head table had been summoned for a photo op, and she was whisked off on an empty stomach.

Flashbulbs, people, endless small talk, smiling until her face hurt…

All in the line of wifely duty.

After the fund-raiser, Garvey was off to another event. She collapsed into bed beside an empty pillow, wondering, in a wine-induced melancholy, if marrying him had been the worst mistake of her life.

No. Not the worst mistake.

She knows what that was. She’s been paying for it every day for more than twenty years now.

Twenty-one years, five months, and three days. She could figure out the hours, too, if the prospect of turning her head to the nightstand to check the digital clock wasn’t so excruciating.

She should probably get up. She has a million things to do today—as she does every day—and she never allows herself to linger in bed.

But maybe just for a few more minutes…

Marin closes her eyes and wills herself back to sleep, but sleep refuses to come. Instead, she finds herself looking back—something she rarely allows. If you keep moving, stay busy enough, there’s no time to lie around and wonder what might have been, if only…

Everyone in Marin’s world had wanted her to marry Garvey. She’s well aware that few—if any—of the Quinns were rooting for Garvey to marry her.

True, she had gone to all the right schools, worn all the right clothes, traveled in the same circles as Garvey. That they met in the first place really wasn’t surprising. That they made it down the aisle surprised everyone—except the two of them.

They were crazy about each other. They had everything in common—well, everything that mattered. Or so Marin believed, at first.

She, too, had been raised in the Back Bay—though not in a four-story brick townhouse that had been in the family for generations. Her entrepreneurial parents were as wealthy as—if not wealthier than—the Quinns. But nouveau riche didn’t cut it in Garvey’s world.

Perhaps her biggest sin, as far as Garvey’s famously conservative family—and, at first, even Garvey himself—were concerned: Marin didn’t go to church.

In addition to his law degree, Garvey had obtained a master in theological studies from Harvard Divinity. He spoke seven languages, including Hindi, Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew. But he didn’t speak Marin’s.

“I don’t believe in atheism,” Garvey informed her early in their courtship—but not early enough to nip their romance in the bud. It was already too late for that.

“Well, I don’t believe in God,” she shot back.

“How can you not?”

Marin shrugged. “I wasn’t raised with religion.”

She could tell it was a deal breaker right then.

Sure enough, he soon made a halfhearted attempt to stop seeing her. That lasted about twenty-four miserable hours.

Then they were back in each other’s arms, and to hell with the rest of the world.

Had Marin known Garvey all her life, she might have recognized that she was his brief—and only—rebellion. It was fueled, she later realized, by the most meaningful loss of his life: the recent death of his grandmother, Eleanor Harding Quinn.

Marin has never quite been able to grasp her husband’s complicated relationship with his grandmother, whose formidable influence far overshadowed even that of his own parents. As far as Marin can tell, the relationship was built on a foundation of mutual respect rather than genuine affection.

No one other than Garvey seemed to miss the family matriarch. If anything, there was almost an air of relief that she was gone. Once, when her name came up at a family gathering, one of the more distant cousins intimated that Eleanor had suffered from some kind of mental illness. But the subject was dropped immediately, and when Marin asked Garvey about it, he replied that it was the cousin, and not his grandmother, who was crazy.

Marin wasn’t surprised. She knew how much Garvey’s grandmother meant to him. Eleanor wanted for Garvey what he wanted for himself. Her death—unexpected, from pneumonia—brought her grandson either profound grief or perhaps, Marin suspects, subconscious relief, a fleeting reprieve.

In any case, Garvey temporarily lost sight of his goals. Maybe he needed to blow off some steam after all those years spent living up to his grandmother’s ideal. Maybe he wanted to fall in love. Or maybe he needed to. Maybe it was just part of the master plan.

Every great man needs a loyal woman by his side, he told Marin—so frequently that she sometimes felt as though he’d been keeping a checklist of all the elements necessary to get him to where he wanted to be.

Family Pedigree: the Quinn bloodline went back to the Mayflower. Check.

Ivy League Education: Harvard Divinity and Harvard Law, like his father and grandfather before him. Check.