The Art of Keeping Secrets Part 22

"You look great," he said. "Really, you do."

"I finally got some decent sleep." She brushed her hair back from her face.

"Then it must have been a good trip."

She shrugged. "I don't know, Shawn. It was bizarre. I still don't know how to process all of it. But now it's up to the FAA. I just want to get on with my life. You know?"

"What did you find out?" He leaned forward.

Annabelle gave Shawn the facts of her trip like bullet points in a presentation.

"So," he said, paused to take a long swallow of coffee, "all you know is that he was flying Liddy Parker to see her dying mother. That's it? And you're happy with that explanation."

"Listen, Shawn, I don't know what I'm happy with. If you're asking if he was with her, I don't think so. I really don't. Her best friend did say she had an affair when she lived here in Marsh Cove, but I don't think it was with Knox." Even as Annabelle spoke the words, doubt crept like termites into solid wood, slowly eating away her belief. She closed her eyes. "That sounds like denial, doesn't it?"

Shawn shook his head. "No, it sounds like faith."

"Maybe I'm being a fool. Maybe Knox was her lover, and that's why she left. But . . . she's dead, Shawn. And so is he."

"What about her daughter?"

"You want to ask her daughter if her mother had an affair with a married man?"

"No," Shawn said, "I don't." He dropped his chin, and Annabelle reached over, touched his fingers.

"Are you okay?"

"Listen, Annabelle, I need to tell you something. I never wanted you to know this, but I can't have you believing something else."

The cafe walls moved in a wave; Annabelle's lungs clamped down and she saw a simple V in the road of her life, and she didn't want to take either fork. She could travel to the right-the way of ignorance-and not know what Shawn was about to tell her. Or she could take a left-the way of the truth-and struggle to integrate it into the beliefs she had come to embrace.

She stood, looked down at him. "No," she said. "Don't say it." She held her hand up to stay his words. Maybe, just maybe, like the sh.e.l.ls in her jar at home, her memories of Knox were broken, only fragments of the real thing, a contrived attempt to fulfill her own wishes.

Shawn stood. "Let's walk, okay?"

As if in slow motion, Annabelle followed Shawn outside. Her well-laid plans for the day-organizing her house and catching up on her advice column-were all forgotten. She didn't care to hear what Shawn wanted to say; she needed to believe for one more day before her world changed again.

They walked a few blocks in silence before he sat down on a concrete bench facing the bay. She settled next to him; he took her hand.

"I don't want you torturing yourself for no reason. There are things you need to know."

She searched his eyes to see if she could discern the words without him having to say them. "Shawn, here is what I know-that Knox loved me; he loved our kids; he remained faithful to our life. That is what I believe. If what you have to tell me is any different, I'll listen, but I'll still believe that his heart was with us."

Shawn closed his eyes. "We all keep secrets, Belle."

Shame poked out its ugly head as Annabelle thought how she had kept secret from Shawn that she was pregnant when she and Knox got married. "You're right."

He released her hand. "I'm the man Liddy had an affair with."

The air wavered before Annabelle. "Huh?" Her reply came mumbled and soft.

"When I was married to Maria, I had an affair with Liddy Parker. No one ever knew except Maria. No one. Not even Knox. Maria wanted to leave me anyway, so she allowed me to keep secret the catalyst for our breakup."

Annabelle needed to see if this was real, if the man she'd known her whole life could have done this and she hadn't known. She touched his leg, then his arm to see if he was solid and not a vaporous ghost of secrets revealed. "You cheated on Maria." It was not a question. "All these years I thought she abandoned you-I hated her for it. She was a friend; I loved her. I'd known her since third grade, and I thought she was . . . the one who . . . but you cheated on her."

"Yes." His tone was flat. "I'm only telling you so that you won't think Knox had the affair with Liddy. That's all."

Annabelle felt such an odd mix of emotions she couldn't sort them out. That her best friend had kept this secret from her all these years fractured her belief in their simple and honest relationship. Not knowing how to react, she just stared at him.

"Don't look at me like that, Belle. Please. I can take a lot of things, but not your disapproval. You have no idea what it was like then. It was years and years ago. Maria and I had nothing together-we should never have married. Liddy was a beautiful, magical artist who came to me, and I thought she could fill that empty place inside me. Of course she couldn't and didn't, and then she left. I hadn't thought about her in years."

"What empty place would that be, Shawn? The one where you have a great life, a fulfilling job, wonderful friends and family? That hole?"

"No. The s.p.a.ce that can only be filled when the one you love loves you back. When you can't make someone love you. That empty place."

She knew what he meant because she felt it, too: the despair that threatened to overtake her if she thought for more than two minutes that Knox had not loved her as she had loved him, the emptiness that loomed when she thought again, What if none of what I believed is true?

She took Shawn's hand, understanding the dark place. "I'm sorry, Shawn. I didn't mean to say it so cruelly. Did you love Liddy?"

"No. I thought I did for a little while, but she was only an escape. I am ashamed to say I was glad when she moved. When I realized that I had used her to leave a bad relationship, I felt terrible."

"And you never told Knox?"

He shook his head. "Never. I didn't tell anyone. Until now."

"Oh, G.o.d, how many more secrets are there?" Annabelle dropped her head into her hands. "If you . . . if you did this thing and kept it from me all these years, why couldn't Knox have done the same? If she had that kind of power . . ." All Annabelle's beliefs, which she'd been gathering all day, crumbled. She could talk and talk, and remember and remember, and gather more sh.e.l.ls, but what was the truth?

He spoke in a whisper. "That is the only reason I told you. You think I wanted you to know about this? Never. But I could not have you think it was Knox who had the affair. . . . He wouldn't. He didn't."

Annabelle looked up now. "If you could, he could."

Shawn looked away, and she knew it was because her words were true and he had no answer for them.

"Why else," she said, "would he have been with her?"

"I came to relieve your fear, not add to it. That woman told you Liddy had one affair in Marsh Cove; you're looking at him."

Then a possibility crossed her mind like an arrow of such piercing pain that she doubled over. "Shawn, are you making this up to force me to believe Knox was not that man?"

He stood, touched the top of her head. "G.o.d, no. I wouldn't do that."

She looked up at him. "I thought you wouldn't cheat on Maria either, that she left you because she was selfish and cruel. Here's the thing, Shawn: we know part of the story, only part of it, and we form our belief around that part. Now you're telling me another piece of the story, and it challenges everything, doesn't it?"

"No, it doesn't challenge everything."

She rose next to him, looked toward the horizon. "It breaks life into pieces I can't put back together, not in a way that makes any sense to me."

"You don't think I'm trying to piece this all together, too? You aren't the only one who feels hurt and betrayed by Knox."

She looked away from the water and sky, refocused on Shawn. For the first time, she saw anger flare in him, where only grief and sympathy had been before. "What do you mean by that?"

"Knox didn't tell me about Liddy, either. He didn't say a word to me about taking her somewhere on a plane. h.e.l.l, I didn't even know he had kept in touch with her. You aren't alone in this."

"I wonder if he knew he'd hurt everyone-you, me, our friends."

"I don't think he would ever intentionally hurt us, or anyone for that matter. Listen, what I had with Liddy for that brief time was wrong. It didn't seem that way then, but we both admitted that we had tried to find something in each other that we couldn't get from the one person we truly loved. We even tried to make that okay. Isn't that the worst part? We tried to make it okay that we tried to take our love for other people and give it to each other."

Annabelle stepped closer to Shawn to ask, "Who did she love?"

"She never told me."

"But Maria loved you, didn't she? She was my friend . . . a good friend, and I turned my back on her because I thought-"

"It wasn't Maria that couldn't love me back."

They faced each other, and Annabelle felt a shifting beneath her feet, a crack opening that might expose another secret she wasn't sure she could bear. She asked anyway. "Who did you love like that, Shawn? Who did you love so desperately that you tried to fill the loss with an affair?"

"You."

"Shawn . . ." His name escaped her mouth in a whisper.

He took a step backward. "I am going to walk away now, because I cannot stand to see your eyes."

He turned to leave. She wanted to find words to soothe him, make him come back, but instead she sank back onto the bench. Had she always known this? Another secret.

She returned to her car, allowing the obligatory ch.o.r.es of the day to drive her forward without thought. When Shawn's face or words entered her head, she forced herself to think of Keeley and Jake, of her newspaper column, her grocery list . . . anything but his confession.

When she drove back to pick up Keeley from school, she thought how children did this for parents-made them move, forced them to get up and go when they felt incapable of doing one more thing. This is what love does.

Keeley crawled into the pa.s.senger side of the car. "This is so embarra.s.sing-getting picked up by my mother."

Annabelle nodded at her. "You can start taking the car next week if I don't get one more call from the school."

"No more calls." Keeley leaned against the car door, stared at her. "What did you do all day?"

"Not much."

"I doubt it. You're always going a hundred miles an hour."

Annabelle stopped at a red light and looked at Keeley, and her heart filled all the way to the edges with love. "Well, maybe you just don't know me as well as you think you do."

"Yeah, right," Keeley said.

Silence filled the car and Keeley reached over, turned on the radio, and Annabelle tolerated the music of Ludacris until they pulled into the driveway. "You have a lot of homework?"

"Yeah," Keeley said. "I'll be in my room."

Annabelle nodded.

"Mom?" Keeley opened the car door, put only one foot on the ground.

"Yeah?"

"You okay?"

"Yes," Annabelle said, ran a hand over her face.

"Okay." Keeley got out of the car.

Annabelle met her daughter on the other side of the car, now convinced that honesty was the cure for all that ailed them. "Listen, Keeley, I'm not okay. I'm sad. It's really hard being without your dad and fighting the good fight, you know?"

"I know." Keeley looked away. "I left math cla.s.s the other day because Nicky Mulroney showed me the front page of the newspaper with Dad's story. I didn't mean to skip, Mom. I really didn't. I just meant to go the bathroom and try not to throw up. But the next thing I knew I was in the car. Then the next day I didn't want to face them again-so I didn't go again. I'm sorry."

Annabelle took her daughter's hand. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"You didn't give me a chance . . . and I hated you and life and Dad and Nicky Mulroney and school and everything."

Annabelle nodded. "We'll get to the other side of this, okay? Let's just not hate each other. It's hard enough without that."

"Deal." Keeley ran up the stairs to the porch. The screen door fell shut behind her.

Annabelle sat on the bottom step. She would stay strong for Keeley. There was more at stake than her own belief and trust in Knox; her daughter was also in danger of losing faith.

TWENTY.

SOFIE MILSTEAD.

Sofie curled her knees to her chest as she sat up in bed, stared across the room toward the easel holding her mother's uncovered artwork. The hospital had only held her for one day, and then released her the night before. After Bedford had tucked her in, bought groceries and made sure she had everything she needed, he'd left her to return to finish his lecture series.

The quilt fell to the floor and Sofie reached for it, wrapped it around her legs. Nothing made any sense. She still could not remember why she'd gone to the boat, why she'd become so confused as to break all the rules of diving.

Her fitful sleep revealed sc.r.a.ps of ragged remembrance: morning light streaked across the bow of the boat; peeling red paint on the hull; the mask too tight across her forehead. Yet in wakefulness, she found that these images did not fit together into one whole.

She curled tighter into herself and willed sleep to come and reveal the truth. She suspected Bedford was telling her only the parts of the day he wanted her to know: how he was there when the coast guard had brought her in, how John had been beside himself with fear, how her scuba tank had been empty and how the shrimp boat's men had seen her floating in the water and dragged her into their boat. Her breathing had been rapid and shallow when they pulled her on board. They had believed she was unconscious from the hit on the head. Her savior had been the buoyancy vest, which left her floating faceup.

There was more to the story; she knew there was. Just like the one time she had asked her mother for the whole story about her father. She'd wanted to know all of it, not just the ending when Knox Murphy saved them. All her life she'd been waiting for the whole story.

Sofie felt the same way now: there was more, so much more to this tale.

And as she had then, she waited.

She didn't know what or whom she waited for until the phone rang. Even before she answered it, she understood that Jake Murphy knew something about that day that would help her. What stopped her from answering the phone was one glistening reality: if he offered her the truth, then she must tell him the truth about his father.