She glared at him as if she expected an answer.
“No, I don’t think it can be a real name.”
“Not that it stopped her from traveling! How can you even get a passport with a name like that?” Her question was full of indignation.
“I’d like to know,” he agreed.
She sighed at his agreement. “Anyway, that’s where he and Loxi had a plan to live on the beach and teach yoga or some such thing.”
“I’m sorry.”
Her eyes searched his, and her chin quivered. In denial of that emotion, she said quickly, “You don’t have to be sorry. I’m just setting up why I was vulnerable. I’m over it now.”
He doubted that. He could see she carried the pain of the betrayal as if it were somehow her fault, as if she had accepted her fiancé’s abandonment as a judgment of her. That she somehow was not worthy.
“But I wasn’t over it then. Right after it happened, I was in a shocked daze. Naturally, in the staff room, my missing engagement ring was noticed eventually. I had to tell people Harry and I were no longer an item. I didn’t tell anyone the Loxi or Thailand part. It was too humiliating.”
Jefferson thought of her carrying that on her own, trying to keep her head up high, and ached for her.
“Anyway, I went from discussing wedding plans and poring over bridal magazines with two other teachers who were engaged to being the subject of gossip and pity.”
She sat very still. She pulled the blanket a little tighter around her and gazed out at the dark waters of the pitching lake beyond the cove.
“There was another teacher there,” she said, her voice strained. “Winston.”
He saw a flinch crawl along her skin.
“I can’t say I’d ever paid the least attention to him besides a casual good-morning. He was quite an unassuming little fellow, given to wearing bow ties.”
“Never trust a man who wears a bow tie,” he told her.
“Now you tell me.”
She gave him a little smack on his chest and continued. “He confided in me that the very same thing had happened to him. I could actually see the tears in his eyes when he said it. He asked me if I wanted to go for a coffee with him.
“It seemed safe enough. My God, he was a fellow teacher. I felt sorry for him. I thought maybe he just needed to talk about it. I actually thought Oh, look, other people beyond you have problems. I thought it would be good for me to get out of myself for a bit. So, I agreed. One coffee.
“But I could tell, once we were out of the school environment, that there was something a touch off about him. I’m not sure I could put my finger on it, but it made me uncomfortable, and I gulped down my coffee and left with murmured sympathies about the pathetic state of his personal life.
“The next day in the coffee room, he was entirely inappropriate, sitting too close to me, putting his hand on my knee, touching my hair. It was creepy. I took to avoiding him, even taking breaks in my classroom. But he tracked me down, and I did not want to be in my classroom alone with him.”
She stopped, troubled. Her hands were wound together and she stared down at them.
Jefferson could see they were trembling. He covered her hands with his own and felt how shockingly cold they were.
“The more I rejected him,” Angie whispered, “the more strongly he pursued me. He bugged me at school. He called me at home. He gave me unwanted gifts. He sent flowers.
“I finally had to talk to my principal about it. Winston was warned to stay away from me. He didn’t. It actually got worse after the principal talked to him. Within a few weeks, he’d been fired.
“The phone calls really started to come in then. I changed my number three times. He always managed to get it. Sometimes he’d be raging that it was all my fault. Other times he’d tell me he had forgiven me for ruining his life. Other times he would be crying. Pleading with me to come back to him. Come back to him? We’d had a single cup of coffee.
“I had to involve the police. I had to get a restraining order. He started hanging out across the street from my place, just out of range of the order. I moved to a new apartment with what I thought was better security. Despite all that, he just kept coming at me. I was a wreck. I was as jittery as if I drank a hundred cups of coffee a day. I startled if one of the children came up behind me suddenly. I barely slept, and when I did I had terrible dreams.
“I started to question my sanity. I wondered if I was overreacting. I wondered if I was making things worse than they were. I wondered what I had done to lead him on. I pondered, constantly, what I should be doing differently.
“On the last day of school before summer break, I went home to my new apartment. The door was locked. Nothing seemed amiss or out of place. I went into my bedroom. The first thing I noticed was that my dresser drawers had been opened.
“And the second thing I noticed was that there was a stuffed bear on my bed. A huge stuffed bear, a panda, almost as big as I was. It had a red ribbon around its neck that made it look as though its neck had been slashed.”
She shuddered at the memory, and Jefferson tried to contain the pure fury that was coursing through his veins.
“I called the police, and they said they would arrest him...if they could find him. I have never felt such terror or felt so unprotected. I tossed a few things in a bag, and got in my car. I let a few friends know I was going away, and why I was going away, but that I couldn’t tell them where.
“Because I didn’t even know where I was going. It seemed it didn’t matter how far I drove, it wasn’t far enough. I was so paranoid I would not use my phone or my bank card. I checked in with the police on pay phones—do you know how hard it is to find a pay phone these days—but there was no sign of him. I began to feel as if he was hot on my heels. I was running out of money and hope. And then I saw your ad.”
She was silent for a long time. “And that’s why,” she finished softly, “in a boat in the middle of a lake, right now, I feel exhilarated. Because finally, I am in a place where he can’t get at me.”
Jefferson knew he should be relieved that it was not their togetherness filling her with exhilaration. He told himself he wasn’t relieved—or disappointed—because the emotion he was feeling drowned out every other one.
He had never felt such a killing fury as he felt now at the two men who had brought Angie to this point. But he controlled himself. He could see she had had enough of men who could not put her first, whose self-centeredness was so complete they could not control their own impulses in the interest of someone else.
“You can stay,” he said gruffly.
“What?”
“You can stay at the Stone House. As long as you need to.”
“Oh, Jefferson.” Her eyes clouded with tears. “I don’t know what to say.”
And just like
