The Perfect Marriage(51)

It was his expression that made the most indelible impression. It looked as if the undertaker had tried to give him a peaceful smile, but the end result made it appear as if James had been on the verge of saying something right before he was killed.

What would he say now? she wondered.

Would she be able to bear it?

“I love you so much, James. And I always will. I’m so sorry that our time together was so short. Please believe that I love you. More than you can even know.”

She waited a beat, even though she knew that he wasn’t going to answer. She’d never hear his voice again.



Wayne took a seat in the back of the chapel. He had considered sitting up front, to be closer to Jessica and Owen, but he worried it might look like he was pushing too hard.

He spotted Jessica at the front. She’d always looked her best in basic black.

Owen sat beside her. Seeing the two of them together, Wayne felt as if he were looking at identical profiles.

There is an old wives’ tale, although some claim it as scientific fact, that newborn babies look like their fathers as a way of ensuring their survival, given that maternity is provable but paternity can be in doubt. Wayne had done some reading on this topic after Owen was born, purely as an intellectual pursuit. What he found was that the science was uncertain as to whether babies actually looked like their fathers, but the research was more definitive that fathers who believed their babies resembled them were more present in their children’s lives.

Wayne, however, had never thought Owen looked even remotely like him. When his son was an infant, Wayne joked that the male figure Owen most resembled was Elmer Fudd. As Owen grew, his maternal resemblance became pronounced. He and Jessica shared the same square jaw, straight nose, and large smile, as well as some other recessive traits, such as blue eyes and left-handedness. Whenever Jessica posted Owen’s picture on social media, the comments poured in. “He’s a little you!” they’d say. In fact, other than Owen and Wayne both having detached earlobes, Wayne was hard-pressed to note a single physical characteristic he shared with his son.

After Jessica’s infidelity was revealed, Wayne couldn’t completely banish the thought that, despite her insistence to the contrary, James had not been her first indiscretion. An unwanted pregnancy from another man might have explained why she had accepted his marriage proposal, an enduring mystery that Wayne hadn’t been able to wrap his mind around to this day.

Wayne had felt a modicum of relief when he’d been selected as Owen’s bone marrow donor. He viewed it as being akin to a paternity test. Of course, he knew that being a partial donor match for the stem cell transplant wasn’t that at all. Indeed, if he hadn’t been selected, an anonymous donor would have been found. Still, the fact that he had been selected was enough for him to once again push away his deepest fear about his connection to his son. There are things you know about your child, and one of those things was that Owen was Wayne’s flesh and blood.

The process, it turned out, was not all that dramatic. All Wayne would have to do was go under general anesthesia while the doctors harvested his bone marrow through a syringe. The doctor said the only side effect he’d anticipate was general soreness. Wayne wouldn’t even have to stay overnight in the hospital. The procedure was scheduled to occur next week, the day before Owen’s transplant.

Wayne doubted Owen cared that he’d be the one contributing the stem cells as opposed to some anonymous donor. But he still hoped that somewhere, deep down, it would provide some tangible evidence to Owen that there was nothing he wasn’t willing to do for him, even to the point of putting his own life at risk.



Haley listened to the minister tick off the virtues of a man she had once loved, then hated. The biography being recounted was one she knew well. How James had been raised in a hardscrabble town, put himself through college, and developed a love for art. How his apprenticeship in some of the city’s finest galleries had led him to branch out on his own.

None of that sounded like James to Haley. He was not his work, at least not to her. When Haley shut her eyes to conjure James, he lay on the sand beside her on their honeymoon, looking out at an anchored yacht.

“You think you can swim that far out?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said with a laugh. “The coming back might give me some trouble, though.”

“You won’t have to do it all at once. After we swim all the way out there, they’ll have no choice but to let us come aboard so we can gather our strength before swimming back.”

At first, she thought James was joking. But if he was, he wanted to maintain the illusion he was serious, because he stared at her without even the hint of a smile. The last thing Haley was going to do was show James that he had married someone who lacked adventure.

“Okay, then,” she said, and raced to the ocean.

The yacht was actually much farther away than she had imagined, perhaps because it was twice as large as she’d estimated from the beach. It took nearly a half hour for them to reach it. When they did, she wondered if her joke about being able to swim there but not back might have been too on the nose.

“Ahoy, ahoy,” James called out from beside the hull.

A man stuck his head over the rail and squinted down at them.

“We were wondering if you might like some company,” James shouted up.

Just like James had predicted, the man lowered the ladder, and they climbed aboard. It was a scene from a James Bond movie: James and Haley, dripping wet, walking on the finely polished wood floor of a hundred-foot-plus yacht. Also on deck were three women sunning on lounge chairs, each in her twenties and wearing a string bikini, sans top.