Envy(102)

“My own stupidity.” After a short pause for emphasis, he continued. “I underwent several operations, first to reconstruct the bones and replace the missing pieces with plastic or metal. Then the muscles and tendons had to be reattached. After that, the skin.…

“Hell, Maris, you don’t want to hear all that, and I really don’t want to talk about it. Bottom line, I was in the hospital for over a year, then in… other facilities. I went through years of physical therapy. It was a bitch. Like hell must be, only worse. That’s when I got hooked on prescription painkillers. When the doctors refused to prescribe any more, I bought the pills off the street from independent vendors.”

“Drug dealers.”

“With whom I became bosom buddies.” She didn’t appear to be shocked, but she might be if he told her the depths to which he had sunk in order to maintain his stash. So he summed it up. “I was a mess.”

“But you pulled yourself out of it.”

“No, I got grabbed by the balls and yanked out of it.”

“Mike.”

“Mike,” he repeated, shaking his head over the miracle of it. “For reasons I will never understand, he befriended me. He appeared one day out of nowhere. Through the blurred vision of a drugged-out stupor, I saw him standing there amid the squalor, looking at me as though trying to decide if I was worth the effort it was going to take to save me from myself.”

“Maybe he was sent to you.”

“A guardian angel? Fairy godfather? At least he wasn’t the Grim Reaper. Although in the weeks just following his rescue, I sometimes wished I was dead. Before I knew what was happening, he seized my stash and slapped me into detox.”

“That couldn’t have been pleasant.”

“You don’t want to know. Believe me. When I got out, he enrolled me in more therapy, physical and emotional. Cleaned me up, installed me in an apartment outfitted for the physically challenged, asked what I intended to do with the rest of my life. When I told him I had an itch to write, he set me up with a computer.”

“He started you writing.”

“He put it in the form of a dare.”

“Which gave you a reason to go on living.”

“No, by then I had decided I must go on living.” I had a damn good reason to, he thought darkly.

“Can I ask a very personal question, Parker?”

“You can. You might regret it.”

“Is Roark you?”

He’d known she would get around to it sooner or later. She was too smart not to have pieced it together. A writer writing about a writer. Naturally she would see the parallel and ask. The answer he had ready wasn’t a lie, just not the whole truth. “Not entirely.”

“Loosely based upon?”

“Fair to say.”

She nodded solemnly but pried no further. “Did you start writing the mystery series right away?”

“No, I tried several genres. Devised and discarded a dozen plots a week for almost two years. Several thousand acres of trees went into my trash can before the Deck Cayton character clicked. He was the first thing that held my interest, that took my mind off my physical limitations.

“When I had what I thought was a publishable story, I retained an agent and told her she could submit the manuscript if she swore on her life and the lives of her children never to reveal my identity to anyone.”

“And Mackensie Roone came to be.” She touched his cheek. “It was a rebirth for which we can all be grateful. I’m just sorry for the suffering you had to endure to get there.”

“In the long run, it’s going to be worth it.”

The moment the sentence was out, he realized he’d spoken it in the present tense. He feared Maris might notice and question him about his ultimate goal, but she had turned her head away from him and was gazing out across the surface of the water. The lights of a tanker winked on the horizon.

Raindrops began to fall, creating wet dimples in the sand. They fell on the wood platform in light spatters. Parker heard them even before he felt the sprinkles on his skin. They felt as warm and soft as tears.

“Parker?”

“Hmm?”

“Remember that first day I came to the cotton gin, you suggested that Noah had married the boss’s daughter to further his career?”

“That yanked your chain.”

“Yes. But only because you hit the nail on the head. Deep down I knew it.” She turned and looked into his face. “I caught him this week with another woman.” The simple statement was followed by a pause that gave him time to respond. He kept his expression neutral. “I won’t bore you with the sordid details.”

“How sordid?”

“Sufficiently sordid.”

“Enough to send you scrambling back here? Payback time?”

“No. I swear that’s not why I’m here. Noah’s affair provided me with justification for coming back. But the truth is, I didn’t want to leave in the first place.”

“Then why did you go?

“It was a matter of conscience.”

“Over what? Nothing happened.”

“Something happened to me,” she exclaimed softly, pressing her fist against her chest. “I wanted to stay with you, and that was reason enough for me to leave. Being around you wasn’t healthy for my marriage. What I was feeling for you frightened me. For my peace of mind, I needed to reestablish myself as a happily married woman. Ironically, I’d been back in New York only one day when I discovered that Noah had broken our marriage vows.”