Undeniably Yours

by Becky Wade

  She wanted to believe, maybe already did believe, that she could trust him. And if she could trust him, then an internal pang of desire here or there couldn’t hurt her that much. Could it?

  Hanging out with Bo was like peering at a mouth-watering slice of cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory. The slice was beautiful. Intriguing. It filled you with tempting urges. But it was also very bad for you.

  So, ultimately, you were glad for the glass case separating you from the cheesecake. The glass kept you from bingeing. The glass kept you safe.

  Chapter Eight

  In the mood for Oreos and milk?” Meg asked Amber the next evening. Silly question. Because who wasn’t—at any time—in the mood for Oreos and milk?

  “Sure.” Amber plugged her baby monitor into an outlet on the kitchen countertop and fiddled with the dials.

  Meg poured two tall glasses of milk and set them on the granite-topped island in the center of the big house’s kitchen. Like Jayden, the kitchen had been put to bed at this hour. Meg had always liked the tidy quiet of it at nighttime, the soft under-cabinet lighting that gave a person the sense that the room was resting after a busy day’s effort.

  Once she and Amber had settled on the bar stools that lined the island, Meg doled out napkins, then peeled back the flap on a brand-new package of Oreos. The scent of the dark chocolate wafers and soft vanilla centers wafted into the air. She scooted the package toward Amber.

  Amber took three, so Meg took three. Better not to let Amber know that she could easily eat six or more at a sitting until they were closer friends. Also, she was working out now. Better for her weight-loss goals, not to mention her acid reflux, if she just ate three.

  “I haven’t had Oreos and milk since I was a kid,” Amber said.

  “Really? I haven’t stopped eating them since I was a kid.”

  “Should I dunk?”

  “Strictly a matter of personal taste.”

  Amber dunked.

  Meg ate hers regular-style. First bite, second bite, chased with a sip of milk.

  “You know . . .” Amber dunked her half-eaten cookie again, causing crumbs to frost the surface of her milk. “We don’t have to talk about Stephen if you don’t want to, Meg. I mean, thank you for offering, but it’s okay.”

  “I do want to talk to you about him.” Meg sighed. “It’s just hard.”

  Amber regarded her sympathetically, then went back to her Oreos.

  Amber looked vulnerably young to Meg tonight, in her faded skinny jeans and yellow hoodie. She’d tucked her feet into fuzzy turquoise slippers that had silver crowns stitched onto their tops and pulled her brown-streaked-with-blond hair into another of her messy ponytails.

  Since Amber had moved in, the two of them had spent a good deal of time together. Meg suspected that Amber had once been brash and independent, had gone out into the world full of herself, and then been smacked down hard by the realities of life. Her bad decisions had left her without money, without education, and without a father for her child.

  Unfortunately, as much as Meg wished it weren’t true, everyone—including Amber and herself—had to pay the price of their free will. The two of them had both chosen poorly and paid highly. They’d both come out of their hardships with battered bravery.

  “I guess I’ll begin at the beginning.” Meg picked up microscopic bits of Oreo with her fingertip. “I met Stephen when I was in college. I thought he was charming.”

  “He was.”

  “And handsome.”

  “So handsome, the big jerk.”

  “He came from a normal background, which I liked. I’d always wanted to be more like everyone else.” Reminder to self, Meg thought, to beware of charming, good-looking, normal guys. Of which Bo was check, check, check—all three.

  “What’d your dad think of him?” Amber asked.

  “He had a lot of concerns. As soon as we got engaged, he hired a firm to investigate him.”

  “Seriously?”

  “The firm couldn’t verify everything that Stephen had told me about his past, which made my father suspicious. I wish it had made me suspicious, too, but it didn’t. At the time I didn’t want to hear or believe anything except that Stephen was perfect. We were married the summer after I graduated. I was twenty-two.”

  Amber watched Meg with utter stillness.

  Meg released a painful exhale. “It started with one little lie. I didn’t think much of it. Then I caught him in more little lies and a few bigger ones. I began to check up on him, and I found out that he was lying to me about his job. Our finances. Where he was at night. Everything.” Meg caught herself nervously spinning her earring back and dropped her hand. “Whenever I tried to confront him about the lies, he’d get angry. Actually, if I stepped out of line in any way, he’d get angry. I’d never, not once, seen him lose his temper when we were dating. But after we were married, it got so bad that the smallest thing would set him off. And he’d just become furious. Horribly furious.”

  “I’ve seen him lose it, too.”

  “As the months went by, I realized that all the charm and all the sweetness he’d shown me when we were dating had been an act. The truth was that he didn’t actually feel any of it. He didn’t love me. It had all been a big con to get what he wanted. I’ve spent hours talking to therapists about him, and based on some of those conversations, I think . . . well, I think he’s a sociopath.”

  Dead seriousness resounded like a gong through the room. Rightly so. The mind of a sociopath ought to terrify. Meg was painfully aware, as Amber must be at this moment, that Amber had had a child with this person. Meg could easily have been in the same predicament. She remembered the dreams she’d once dreamed, back when she’d been in love with Stephen. The hope she’d had that one day they’d have children together. “Basically a sociopath is someone who’s completely self-centered and who doesn’t feel any guilt or remorse. They have no conscience.”

  Amber swallowed audibly. “‘One thing you can’t hide is when you’re crippled inside.’ John Lennon.”

  “You didn’t know Stephen as long as I did,” Meg said carefully. “But I’d recommend that you do some research on the characteristics of sociopaths, then think back on your time with Stephen. Think whether or not he showed you some of those characteristics. After we were married, Stephen and I lived together for a year. By the time he left, he’d shown me nearly every trait on the list.”

  Meg’s gaze passed over the glasses of milk with beads of condensation on the outside, across the orderly countertops, and out the window to the gardens aglow with professional lighting. But her heart didn’t remain in the cozy kitchen. It traveled back to the crushing despair Stephen had put her through five years ago. “I can’t tell you how much I wish that I’d been smarter, how much I regret that I fell for his act in the first place. But I did, all the way.”

  “That’s not your fault, Meg.”

  It came as a surprising relief to hear Amber say those words, to have someone to relate to after all this time. Meg reached over and gave Amber’s hand a squeeze.

  Amber returned the pressure. “I fell for it, too. He’s like, a really good actor.”

  After a moment, they dropped the link of their hands but not the link of their shared empathy.

  “Wanna go back to eating cookies?” Amber asked hopefully. “How about we try to put Stephen out of our minds?”

  “I’d like to, but I have one more thing I need to tell you.” Meg took a moment to gather up her courage, because this next part was the hardest thing of all for her to admit and something she’d never told anyone else in the world.

  “Oh?”

  “When I graduated from college, my father gave me two million dollars as a gift.” She knew she simultaneously sounded like the world’s worst spoiled little rich girl and an unforgivable braggart.

  Amber whistled low, her blue eyes rounding.

  “I think it was his way of trying to provide for me, even though I’d already turned down a trust fun
d. I wanted to live on what Stephen and I made and nothing more.”

  Amber’s nose wrinkled. “Why?”

  “I needed to prove to myself that I could stand on my own two feet.”

  “I mean, I needed to prove the same thing to myself when I left home. But I’m not sure I could have turned my back on”—she indicated their surroundings—“all this.”

  “Yes, you could have. If all this had left you as empty as it left me.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I didn’t touch the two million dollars. I put it away in a private, separate account just in case of an emergency.”

  “Uh-oh,” Amber whispered. “I’m afraid I know where this is going.”

  “Stephen stole it all from me. Every dollar.”

  The two women looked at each other for a long moment, their expressions stark. “He must have been going through my things, because I’d never told him about that account. Never.”

  “I’m so sorry. You found out about the money after he left?”

  “Yes. About a week after he disappeared, I remembered the account. It gave me a sick feeling in my stomach because I knew what I’d find before I even called the bank.”

  Amber shook her head, her expression turning angry. “I can’t believe he took your money.”

  “Once I confirmed it, I knew that he was gone for good. And I knew for sure why he’d pretended to like me in the first place. His relationship with me was never about anything except my father’s money.”

  “I hate his guts. When I see him I’m going to bean him with my knuckles right here.” Amber indicated the middle of her throat. “Did you send the police after him?”

  “I couldn’t file criminal charges against him because Texas is a community property state. But I could have brought a civil case against him.”

  “Did you?”

  “I thought about it. But in the end I didn’t because I was too afraid that the media would get ahold of the story. I didn’t want everyone knowing what he’d done to me, so I kept silent. I didn’t tell my father or anybody else about the money.”

  “I’m the first?”

  “You’re the first.” Meg fiddled with the edge of her napkin. “I can’t stand that I let him go free with my money. If I’d held him liable, I’d have slowed him down at least, pushed him off course. He might not have been able to do what he did to you. I apologize, Amber.”

  “You don’t need to! After all you’ve done for me, how can I ever be anything but thankful? I don’t blame you a bit.”

  “If you’d been in the same situation, I bet you’d have prosecuted him. You’d have been braver than I was.”

  “No way.”

  Moisture fogged Meg’s vision. Amber’s forgiveness and reassurance poured over her like warm rain. “Thank you for being so gracious.”

  Amber rolled her eyes. “Are you kidding me? I’m the one that should be thanking you. Here.” She passed Meg a fresh napkin and Meg used it to stem the flow of tears. “So what did you tell people,” Amber asked, “back when Stephen left?”

  “I simply told them that Stephen and I had separated. And then, a year to the day after he left, I filed for divorce.”

  “Why’d you wait a year?”

  “Because I filed on the grounds of abandonment, and to do that in Texas, you have to wait that long. It was a hard year.” Growing up she’d been shy and sensitive, but mentally stable. After Stephen, soul-deep betrayal, desolation, and panic attacks had descended on her like vultures. She’d barely managed to hold herself together. “I was still living in Houston, carrying around his last name, having to answer all kinds of questions from friends and family. Once I got the divorce, I took back my old name and moved to Tulsa for a new job and just . . . just started over.”

  “Well, good for you.”

  Meg lifted a shoulder. “I wanted to tell you all this so that you’ll know everything I know when you decide whether or not you want to find Stephen.”

  “Can I think a little longer about what I want to do next?”

  “Sure.”

  “I say we finish our Oreos.”

  “Agreed.”

  Amber got busy dunking, and Meg got busy chewing. What do you know? Food tasted better after you’d cleared your conscience by dumping all your revelations.

  “I can actually eat more than three Oreos,” Amber confided.

  “You know what?” Meg smiled. “So can I.”

  It took Amber two days to make up her mind about Stephen.

  “So,” Amber said to Meg on Wednesday evening over the phone, “I’ve been thinking a lot, trying to decide what to do about Stephen. I’m pretty sure I’ve made up my mind.”

  When her cell phone rang, Meg had been treating herself to a bath brimming with rose-scented bubbles. “Hold on a sec,” Meg said, leaning out of the water, afraid of dropping the phone and electrocuting herself. She closed her eyes, cupped her forehead with her free hand, and braced herself for bad news. “Okay. Go ahead.”

  “I just have to find him.”

  Stephen. Meg’s mind reeled at the thought of searching him out. It made her feel like a person taking part in a plan to walk up to a sleeping beehive and split it open with a carving knife. At least she could find comfort in knowing that she’d shared her secrets with Amber. Amber had been given all the information she needed to make an educated decision about whether or not to hunt out the beehive with the carving knife.

  “I keep trying to talk myself out of it,” Amber continued. “But I don’t think I’ll be able to relax until I finish things with Stephen for good.”

  “I understand.”

  “You do?”

  “I do. And what’s more? I’ll help you. I’ll help you find him.”

  After Amber’s call, Meg slept poorly, chased by dreams of Stephen. Dreams in which she stood rooted to the spot, frozen, and trying but unable to move as he came rushing furiously forward to hurt her.

  The moment she opened her eyes the next morning, anxiousness pounced on her. It stayed with her while she got ready for work, drove into the city, and went through the motions of her job.

  She kept asking for God’s help, kept telling herself to keep calm and breathe. But like a swimmer trapped in a tank, the waters of inexplicable, suffocating worry continued to mount. Up to her chin. Over her head, stealing all her air.

  “So you’ll oversee the team?” Uncle Michael asked her.

  “Yes.” He’d been talking for ages about some team he’d formed to create some report for some oil and gas exploration proposal for some company. Her mounting alarm hadn’t been helped by him, his relentless expectations, and his overinflated assessment of her potential at Cole Oil.

  When was he going to leave? They were surrounded by the rich confines of Meg’s father’s office, sitting in shiny leather chairs in the seating area, with folders full of numbers on their laps and silver pens in their hands. She really, really didn’t want to come unglued in front of him.

  “I’d like to have the team’s report on my desk by Friday morning,” he said.

  “I’ll work on it. If that’s all,” she pushed shakily to her feet, “I have some calls I’d better return.”

  His attention flicked over her. “Certainly.” He rose, as smooth and elegant as always, and strode to the door. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  Once he’d left, Meg counted to ten, then threw the lock on the door and exhaled a half-sobbing breath. I’m crazy, she thought. Nuts. If Uncle Michael had any idea, he’d lock me up—

  No, Meg. Quit it. You’re okay. You’re just upset today. Overwhelmed by everything.

  She crossed hurriedly to the desk, located her sudoku, and toed off her heels. “God, come,” she whispered. “Help me.” With quivering fingers, she smoothed open the book in front of her. Hardly any blank puzzles remained. She’d need to buy another because she’d certainly have enough psychosis left to fill it.

  Her eyes screwed shut. Please help me, Lord. Please please please. He
lp me to calm down.

  She believed in the Holy Spirit. Not just His closeness, but that He actually lived within her. Trust me, Meg, that Spirit seemed to whisper.

  I’m still trying to. Wanting to. Is . . . is this job your will for me? It doesn’t feel like it, but I can’t see any other path before me. Will you show me your plan?

  No plan burst full-blown and clear into her head. In fact, the only thing she sensed God saying?

  Wait on me. Not very reassuring! Her sanity was teetering on a knife’s edge, and she craved clear direction. How much longer could she battle this particular attack? How much longer could she live like this?

  She opened her eyes, gripped her pencil like a lifeline, and tried to focus her thoughts on filling empty squares with numbers. Her mind skittered through the options. 1? 7? What about here? 5? Checking the columns up and down, up and down, to see what might fit.

  She hovered on the brink of submerging in her own heart-pounding panic for endless minutes. Finally, the waters began to lower, giving her just enough air in the top of the tank to breathe.

  When her phone rang, she felt confident that God was reaching out to her in the way that He often did, offering her support and comfort through one of His people. Since Stephen’s desertion, He’d proven himself faithful a thousand times. She’d learned that she could count on Him in the same way that she could count on there being sixty minutes in an hour, or twenty-four hours in a day.

  She pulled her phone from her purse, expecting to see Sadie Jo’s or Lynn’s name on the screen. Instead, the incoming call came from an unfamiliar number.

  She pressed a button to answer. “Hello?”

  “Meg?”

  She recognized the voice instantly. A shiver raced down her spine and all the way along the rear of her legs, tingling against the backs of her knees. “Bo?”