Mother May I(41)

The truth was, he’d hurled himself into a hum of busy misery to wait Betsy out. He was clocking overtime at the shop, weight training, running, anything to keep his heart from breaking while he waited for Betsy to come back to him.

If Bree reported he was wallowing and pining, she might not. No one comes back to sad-sack, lovelorn goons. So he made jokes and talked about how awesome post-high-school life was, until Bree put a hand on his arm and stared him down, serious.

“Marshall. I’m your friend,” she said. No pity in her eyes. Only kindness.

He felt misery break out all over him like a sweat, visible and obvious. “Please don’t tell Betsy, okay? Tell her I’m great. Tell her I have a date next week. I can’t stand it if she’s feeling sorry for me.”

“Okay,” she said. He glared, skeptical, but she raised three solemn former–Girl Scout fingers. “I promise.”

After that they sat on the floor and watched MTV, drinking the sticky-sweet coolers. She quietly let him be unhappy, but not alone. It was the nicest gift he’d ever gotten. Better, in the moment, than the ten-year-old Chrysler LeBaron his dad had dropped off before skipping his high-school graduation.

Neither of them was a big drinker, so by the time all four bottles were empty, they were leaning on each other’s shoulder watching Celebrity Deathmatch. She giggled until she snorted and then grinned at him, embarrassed.

He remembered then how pretty she was. He’d forgotten, cloaked as she’d been in Betsy’s best-friendship. Her grin faded, and she bit her lip. They both were buzzed, and she smelled of roses. He leaned in a little. He could have kissed her. There was permission in the way she tilted up her face.

Instead he got up, then reached down to pull her to her feet, too. “You better eat something before you drive. Come on. I’ll make you a Steak-umm sandwich.”

She seemed as relieved as he was that the last inch had not closed between them.

Back then he’d thought of Betsy as a girl in an adjoining hotel room. She’d closed her door, but he didn’t think she’d bolted it. His was wide open, waiting for her. Kissing Bree would nail both doors shut and drape them with bombs and poison frogs and fire. Betsy would forgive him any girl who happened in this gap, except for her best friend.

Even so, there were no other girls in those long months. How could there be? He and Betsy had invented what love should look like. His parents were divorced, hers hated each other, so they’d made up something different. They’d discovered sex together, too, the summer after junior year, and developed their own lexicon of looks and phrases that no one else could read or follow.

When Betsy did come back, they called her months at Georgia State her rumspringa, when they talked of it at all. They didn’t, much. No need, once it was over. It had been a good thing. She’d needed that time, free, before she could choose a life with him and never wonder, never wander. He’d never had her restlessness, but the separation had taught him his own capacity for faith and patience. He didn’t know everything she’d done in that year. It didn’t matter. He’d simply waited through it, like a seed over a long winter.

He wondered if Bree ever thought about that long-ago kiss that didn’t happen. Remembering it now, the shine of her eyes, the way her dark hair had smelled of roses even then, though some sweeter, simpler version, he understood the truth: This was not some silly crush.

He was in love with her.

He knew Bree better than he knew anyone on earth, except for Cara. He knew her, and he loved her for all the reasons Betsy had loved her. The big ones, like her loyalty and that fierce fight under her quiet, but also a host of tiny, intimate things. The way her nose got little wrinkles on the sides when she grinned or how she saved the bits of cookie dough in her ice cream to eat at the end.

No one else alive knew him and his history the way Bree did, because hers was all entwined in it. No other woman looked at Cara and recognized and cherished every bit of Betsy that was alive inside her only daughter.

Ironic. If he’d kissed Bree those many years ago, he’d have lost Betsy forever. Now that situation had completely reversed. Of all the women he could bring into his daughter’s life, Bree might be the only one that Betsy would fully approve.

He ran a hand across his hair. No wonder he was hell-bent on this course, though it was dangerous, illegal, and in a flaming moral red zone. Not to mention this was the wrong time to realize he loved her. There was never going to be a good time, but this was the actual worst.

Once this was over—if this was ever over—he would have to get some distance. He would buy Jenna-from-the-lab her shrimp dinner, maybe get back on Match, definitely take himself off snack-mom rotation.

But for now he couldn’t leave her side. For now he had work to do. Gabrielle had already sent an answer to his first notes.

M, I did a quick search, but nothing came up in our files on either Adam or Kelly Wilkerson. Not as cocounsels, witnesses, plaintiffs, or defendants. No mention in depos either. I’m going to go through every file Trey and Spence worked on together, one by one, starting with the oldest, but you know our search function is amazing. I’m concerned. —G





He emailed back, saying he was disappointed but to stick with the deep search. As he hit send, his phone buzzed. A text had landed. Trey.

I don’t know any of these people.