The Trouble with Angels (Angels Everywhere #2)(60)

"Then it seems to me you should let Karen go and enjoy herself.”

"You don’t understand,” she said, shaking her head.

A waitress arrived with plastic menus tucked under her arm. She carried the coffeepot with her.

"Just coffee,” Thom told her.

"Brian will only hurt Karen,” she insisted under her breath once the waitress had filled the mugs and left. "Never having gone through a divorce, you can’t appreciate what all this means. Brian left us. He turned his back and walked away.” What she didn’t say was that he’d emptied their bank account on his way out the door.

"Tell me about Brian,” Thom suggested. "Then maybe I will understand.”

"I don’t want to talk about him. Every time I do my blood pressure soars and I overdose on antacid tablets.”

Thom grinned. "It seems to me you’re all riled up as it is.”

That was true enough. "All right,” she said. She owed him that much for the way he’d helped Karen. For the way he’d helped her.

Maureen drew in a deep breath as she sorted through the memories. Many of them had been tainted by her bitterness over the years, and she wanted to be as fair as possible. Although heaven knew Brian didn’t deserve that.

"We met in college. I was shy and didn’t have a lot of friends. Brian and I were in a math class together. I’ve always been good with numbers, and Brian was in way over his head and failing badly. He went to the teacher for help, and she suggested he talk to me.”

"You tutored him.”

"Yes.”

"Did he pass the class?”

Maureen nodded. "Yes, but just barely. He was so pleased, he asked me out to dinner. I hadn’t dated very much in high school, and Brian was outgoing and popular. I felt like the luckiest girl in the world to have him pay attention to me.”

"How long did you date before you were married?”

"Three years. What upsets me now, as I look back, is that I knew the kind of person Brian was from the beginning. He changed his major five times. Even then he fluttered from one interest to another. He couldn’t seem to hold a job more than a couple of months.

"There was always a good reason he had to quit, you understand. No matter where he worked, there was someone who had it in for him. Another favorite excuse was an incompetent co-worker he couldn’t bear to be around.

"Once, I was away for a week…. I don’t remember what, a family obligation, I think.” She paused and cupped her hand around the mug. It hurt even now to confess this. "When I came back a friend told me she’d seen Brian with some other girl. I didn’t believe her. I thought she was jealous and trying to break us up so she could have Brian for herself.”

"He had affairs?” The question was asked in the gentlest of voices as if carefully peeling back the bandage from a half-healed wound.

"Affairs?” Maureen laughed. "Where do you want me to start?” She didn’t give him a chance to answer. "Six months after we were married a burly truck driver stopped me in the parking lot outside our apartment building. He asked me to give a message to my husband. I was to tell Brian to stay away from his wife, and if he didn’t the trucker claimed he’d kill Brian.”

"You told Brian?”

"Of course. I was scared out of my wits. This guy was serious. Brian convinced me he had the wrong guy, and like a gullible fool”—she paused and raised her eyes to the ceiling—"I believed him.” It astonished her how dense she’d been, how long it had taken her to wake up and accept reality. Denial was sometimes underrated as far as she was concerned.

"When did you realize the truth?” This too came in the same gentle, caring voice, almost as if Thom were afraid of hurting her by asking.

"It took far longer than it should have. I saw him with another woman. I don’t think I would have believed it otherwise. Later, after I’d dried my eyes and composed myself, I confronted him.” She stopped, remembering that scene and how naive she’d been.

"He admitted he was involved with the other woman, but claimed she was older and had set out to seduce him. He cried and told me how sorry he was, and then he begged me not to divorce him.”

"Were you planning to leave him?” he asked.

"I don’t know what I would have done. It was shortly afterward that we decided to have Karen. He was attentive and loving for a while, but that soon changed. This time I was a little smarter, a little wiser.”

"The affairs continued?”

Maureen nodded. "After a while I began to pick up cues when he was going into another relationship. All at once his appearance would be important, and he’d spend more time in front of a mirror.”

"Did you confront him?”

"Naturally. He denied everything. He claimed I was imagining things, that I’d become obsessively jealous. We had some real humdinger fights. Dear God, I can’t believe I stayed in that sick marriage as long as I did. The love was gone long before the marriage ended.”

"How was he with Karen?”

Maureen stiffened. "The same way he is with every other woman in his life. He used her. He’d build up her hopes with promises he had no intention of keeping.”

"He left you.”