Scared To Death (Live to Tell #2)(10)

“Mom! She took my—”

“Don’t listen to her, Mom, I did not!”

Standing at the kitchen counter listing to the commotion from down the hall, Marin closes her eyes for a long moment. Then she wearily resumes what she was doing: pouring the last dredges from the coffeepot into her cup.

The girls have been up for less than an hour, and at each other’s throats the entire time. At first, Marin attempted to referee. Now, she’s doing her best to ignore.

Is this what it’s going to be like every day, all summer long?

“Give it back! Mom!”

“Mom!”

Marin sips the coffee.

Bitter.

Just like me.

She sips again, makes a face, and dumps the cup into the sink.

Maybe she should brew a fresh pot. But so much caffeine isn’t good for her. Maybe that’s why her nerves have been acting up so much lately.

“Mom!”

“Mom!”

Her shoulders are tense. Stress. Not good.

I need something stronger than coffee.

But not now, in the middle of the day, with the kids home.

God help me.

God? Yeah, right.

She never believed in God before the ultra-conservative, religious Garvey came into her life, nor during most of the forced churchgoing years they were together. She certainly doesn’t believe now. Not after the merciless ordeal she and her family—and the Walshes, and the Cavalons—have endured.

On the first Sunday morning after Garvey’s arrest, the girls dressed in their church clothes, as always. Marin told them to go change.

Caroline was thrilled; Annie dismayed. “Why aren’t we going to church?”

Marin blamed the media. “The press knows our routine. They’ll be there waiting for us. I can’t subject you girls to that circus.”

She got a lot of mileage out of that reasoning for—quite literally—a month of Sundays. After all, it was true: the stretch of Fifth Avenue in front of the Church of Heavenly Rest swarmed with reporters intent on snapping photos of Garvey Quinn’s family and slapping them all over the tabloids with captions that ridiculed their phony piety.

In the months since, Annie has occasionally asked when they’re going back to church, and Marin is running out of excuses—conflicting plans, headaches, the weather. She hates herself for not having the strength to admit her own hypocrisy to her daughters; hates herself more for having gone along with something in which she had absolutely no sense of conviction.

But as she told her dubious, agnostic parents back when she was first falling in love with Garvey, she believed in her future husband more than she didn’t believe in God.

And then, for a while there, she even found fleeting comfort in both. Maybe there really was something to this God stuff. Maybe that was why Marin Hartwell had been handed a chance at happily-ever-after with a hero who could have had anyone, but miraculously wanted her.

Concealing her first pregnancy and giving up her newborn son for adoption soon shattered her fledgling religious faith—yet, curiously, not her faith in Garvey, who coerced her into making those decisions. She convinced herself, somehow, that if there was a God, he had betrayed her; even that she had betrayed herself. But not Garvey. No, never Garvey. She never realized the truth about him until last August, when it was too late.

Down the hall, Caroline and Annie continue to squabble. As usual, Caroline is accusing her sister of snooping through something—her room, or her laptop, or her phone…

Marin closes her eyes and presses her thumb and fingertips into her throbbing temples, wondering when the ibuprofen she’d taken earlier is going to kick in.

“I told you not to…”

“Why do you always have to…”

“I’m telling Mom!”

When the ringing telephone chimes into the melee, the girls don’t miss a beat. They never bother to answer anything but their own cell phones.

Normally Marin doesn’t, either, because you never know whether it’s going to be a reporter or Garvey calling from jail. Both tend to register—as this call does—as “private number” on the caller ID.

But anything is better than listening to World War III.

She picks up the receiver.

“Marin! There you are!”

Heather Cottington—the one old friend who’s stuck by her in the wake of Garvey’s scandal. Countless rounds of “I told you so” have been a relatively small price to pay for an adult confidante who, despite a high-profile allegiance with the opposing political party, wouldn’t dream of capitalizing on her proximity to the notorious Quinns.

Plus Heather—who is married to a doctor and whose home medicine cabinet is a veritable pharmacy—is always happy to share her Ambien and Xanax with Marin, who, as Heather often says, needs it more than she does.

“I’ve tried your cell twice this morning. I was getting worried.”

“Sorry. I didn’t hear the phone.”

“Really?”

“Really. Maybe I accidentally silenced the ringer. Or maybe the battery’s dead.”

Maybe she even lost the phone somewhere. Who knows? Who cares?

Heather, who wears her Bluetooth headset like a diamond tiara, pauses dubiously before continuing, “So anyway, I thought I’d better check in and see how it’s going so far.”