Halfway to You(99)

“Ann, what I said earlier . . .” He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I was wrong. I was in shock—”

“You’re relieved, though,” I said. “Right now, you’re relieved.”

“I’m relieved you’re all right,” he said.

“But also . . .”

Todd stroked my arm ever so briefly before his fingers fell back to his side. “Ann, at some point, our trip here will end. Then what? I’ll return to Colorado to run my business, and you’ll go back to Rome. It’s the same impasse as before. How could we parent a child five thousand miles apart?”

Ignoring the pain in my abdomen, I sat up straighter and looked into Todd’s eyes. “You’ve been choosing the past over your future—our future—for as long as I’ve known you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Do you really want to run a bookstore forever? Live in your parents’ house, with your parents’ furniture, and run your parents’ business? Do you want to live their dream forever?”

“I love the bookstore.”

“More than you love the life we could have together?”

“But I’m not going to throw my life away for—”

“Me?”

He pressed his lips into a thin line. “I am really, truly sorry about the baby, but . . .” He shook his head.

I quaked. Todd would never let go of the past. And if he couldn’t let go, he’d never be able to embrace me. Not fully. I was tired of competing with his grief and losing. I couldn’t win against a memory.

My words were a whisper, but they came with force: “Get out.”

“What?”

“Get. Out.”

“Ann—”

“If that’s truly how you feel, I don’t ever want to see your face again.”





ANN


Rome, Italy

April–June 2000

I’ll never forget the headline: Unraveling the Mystery of Ann Fawkes: The Reclusive Author Opens Up about Love and Life Overseas. It sounds so harmless, doesn’t it?

As you know, Maggie, the press caught on to the bombing and my hospitalization in Thailand. Todd and I had gone our separate ways, and I was back in Rome—at turns despondent and filled with an inconsolable rage over what had happened. Keith and Carmella kept encouraging me to move on, and I was trying, but then April came, and Keith rang from his business phone.

My publicist was also on the line, which clued me in to the bad news from the start. The short of it: I was to take an interview with a prominent magazine—to let a sleeping dog lie, I’ll omit their name here—to get ahead of the story. After the debacle at my premiere and subsequent tabloid buzz, they didn’t want the drama to spin out of control.

So I agreed.

I met the reporter at a nice hotel bar in New York and treated her to a couple gimlets. She turned on her recorder and rested it between us. The interview started out like a game of tennis: tense, but equally matched.

The reporter asked about my mother, and I spoke of her tragic life and even more tragic death, and how I hadn’t known about the cancer until the week she died.

The reporter asked about my travels, and I told her many glamorous and gritty stories about the world: my home in Rome, the volunteer teaching, and where I planned to go next (South Africa on assignment for Travel + Leisure).

The reporter asked about my fiction writing, and I told her the dullest version of the truth: there was talk of compiling my short stories into a collection, but the movie had taken precedence over the past year, and my focus had been elsewhere.

The reporter then asked about Todd, and when she called him by name—well, there’s no other way for me to put it—I panicked. I gulped my drink, and the gin and lime blazed a sour river down my esophagus. I believe I coughed; I remember the reporter offered me a cocktail napkin, which I took.

“Did I catch you off guard?” she asked, and maybe she looked a little pleased with herself, though I’m sure my memory is skewing the details against her.

“Perhaps you’re unaware of the fact that I don’t talk about my love life on the record,” I said.

“After all that drama at the premiere, don’t you want to set the record straight?”

I wiped my mouth with the napkin and slid it back across the bar to rest in front of her again, as if I’d merely borrowed it. For a beat, the reporter stared down at it, then tracked the recorder between us, then met my eyes again.

“What about the bombing in Thailand? He was there with you, wasn’t he?”

Though it was jarring to hear Todd’s name come out of her mouth so matter-of-factly, I knew this question was coming, because my team had prepared me. After all, the root of her query—Thailand—was the reason I had taken the interview in the first place.

I sat a little taller on my barstool. “Yes, we were there celebrating the New Year when multiple bombs went off in the city. I was in a taxi accident and ended up spending a night in the hospital. I appreciate your concern”—I paused to allow the venom of my tone to permeate—“but as you can see, I’ve recovered.”

She appeared nonplussed, save for a quick sip of her gimlet. Then the gears of her thoughts seemed to catch on something. She set her glass down with a soft, two-note clatter. “A whole night? What injuries did you incur, if you don’t mind my asking?”