A Bridge to Love Read online

  “How much would the new partner pay for David's share?” she managed to ask.

  The figure Oliver named seemed horrifyingly small. He offered her several sheets of paper that explained his calculations. She took them, but couldn't focus on the numbers.

  “I'll have to look at these later,” she said, dropping them on the coffee table.

  Oliver was watching her with concern. “Kate, I'm terribly sorry. We didn't arrive at these decisions without considerable debate.” He jumped up, scraping his fingers through his dark blond hair. “Damn, I hate this. You should never go into business with people you care about.”

  Kate felt tears gathering in her eyes and willed them not to start down her cheeks. All she could do was nod; she didn't trust her voice.

  He came over to sit beside her, and took her hands in his with a gentleness that threatened to undermine her control. “Take some time to think about this. Call me when you want to talk about anything at all. I'll go over the facts and figures with you whenever you're ready.”

  “I will,” Kate said.

  Oliver stood up to go. Before he left, he rested his hands lightly on her shoulders and said again, “Call me if you need anything.”

  She dredged up a smile. “Thank you.”

  Kate closed the door behind him and then leaned back against it, feeling the solidity of the big oak door that she had lovingly stripped of its old dull varnish. She ran her hands along the grain, feeling the smooth, satiny surface. She probably wouldn't be able to keep this house. She would have to uproot the boys from Claremont and rent an apartment in a less costly area in a different town.

  An unaccustomed flare of anger burned through her. David had reduced his life insurance policy and refused the mortgage insurance that their agent had recommended. She hadn't thought that it was a good decision, but she trusted his judgment. They had sunk every penny of their savings into the C/R/G partnership. Despite her reservations, she had agreed. Now Oliver said it was worth far less than what David had always led her to believe. And she and the boys were going to pay for it.

  The thought of Clay and Patrick pushed Kate's brain back into gear. David had kept his own papers regarding the firm in a file cabinet in the attic. Maybe she could find something there that would increase the value of his share. At the very least, by taking some action she could stave off the panic threatening to swamp her.

  She picked up the papers Oliver had given her and scanned them as she walked slowly up two flights of stairs to the attic. Fitting an old brass key into the file cabinet's lock, she pulled open the drawer and started looking through the various folders. All were labeled in David's beautiful architect's printing, but they weren't in any sort of order. She pulled out a handful and sat down on the floor to sort through them. She was skimming through some contracts when she spotted a folded handwritten letter stapled crookedly between the pages. It had obviously gotten mixed in with the papers by mistake so she pulled it loose. Idly curious, she unfolded it and started to read.

  Dearest David,

  You've just left and already I miss you so much that I can barely breathe. I thought that if I wrote to you, I could almost imagine that you had just stepped into the next room and that we were holding this conversation through the doorway. But of course, I won't hear your voice answering me or have the joy of knowing that you could walk back in at any moment and kiss the back of my neck as I sit here at my desk.

  Kate stopped. This had to be an old, old letter. She flipped it over but there was no date on it anywhere. It was signed “Sylvia.” She desperately tried to remember if David had mentioned an old girlfriend with that name. Failing at that, she looked at the document it had been stapled into. The contract was less than two years old and was for a private home in Baltimore. Kate read the clients' names, neither of which was Sylvia.

  She remembered David talking about that house. He had made a dozen or so trips to Baltimore to check on the project.

  But he always made a point to meet with clients regularly. He said that he could catch problems before they became disasters that way. She returned to the letter.

  And that's all that you would have to do—just kiss me once—and we would be back in my now-empty bed. But I have to stop thinking about that; my body aches for you.

  I know that the house will soon be done. I will have to find you a new reason to come here: a skyscraper so enormous it will take decades to finish. I will make sure the contract requires you to supervise even the smallest detail so that you will be here every day. And every night, we can have dinner at my table and talk about everything in the world and not have to hurry to the bedroom in desperation.

  She couldn't bear to read any more. She had to be misinterpreting something! This couldn't be to the David who was her husband, and it couldn't have been written just two years ago! She searched frantically through the rest of the file, looking for something, anything to explain the letter.

  There were only more contracts from that same year, the year that he had died so suddenly of a heart attack, leaving her alone with two young boys to raise. She couldn't catch her breath.

  In those first terrible days after David died, she had wondered how she could survive without him. She put up a brave front for Clay and Patrick, only to collapse in despair the minute she was alone. She found the strength to keep going in the love of her children and in the memory of the love that she and David had shared. In difficult moments, she even imagined that David was standing beside her, supporting her decisions.

  She anchored her future on the foundation of a secure and happy past.

  Now that, foundation lay shattered, blasted to pieces by a single sheet of paper.

  David had not loved her.

  Kate stared at the letter in her hands as she tried to reconcile the image of her golden, loving husband with this evidence of his other self. She felt so hollow that she was afraid her body would simply crumple inward. She forced herself to breathe as she kept staring at the letter. She sat there as the afternoon light faded. No coherent thoughts formed in her mind.

  She felt only a swirling sense of cold, of being totally, utterly, completely alone.

  Three

  “Mom? Mom? Where are you?”

  The vibration of a slammed door reached some recess of Kate's mind. Clay and Patrick. She frantically shoved the papers back into random file folders until only the letter was left lying alone. She jammed all the files back into the drawer as she heard the boys' calls moving closer.

  She didn't want to touch the letter again, but she had to hide it until she could destroy it. The one certainty she had left was that she never wanted Clay and Patrick to know this about their father. She picked it up by one corner and carried it to a bookcase under the eaves. She folded it with her fingertips, and then closed it into the middle of a dusty copy of On the Origin of Species.

  “Mom? Are you here?” Clay's voice had taken on a worried edge.

  Kate tried to call down to reassure him. Her first attempt came out as a hoarse whisper, so she cleared her throat as she started toward the steps. Clay met her on the landing. “Mom, didn't you hear us? We've been looking all over for you.”

  Kate shook her head. “I'm sorry. I didn't realize what time it was,” she managed to push through her throat.

  “Are you okay? You sound kind of weird,” Clay said, then shouted down the steps, “Pat, I found her. She's in the attic!”

  He turned back to her with obvious concern on his young face. “Are you sick? You don't look normal.”

  Kate tried to remember how to look normal, but she felt so different that she couldn't summon up the appropriate expression. So she enveloped Clay in a hug and murmured in his ear, “I'm fine, just a bit distracted.”

  Patrick came pounding up the steps as Clay disentangled himself. “Hey, Mom. What are you doing up here? We kept yelling all over the house for you.”

  He came over and gave her his usual perfunctory peck on the cheek and suddenly Kate found �
�normal” again. Normal was what life had to be for Clay and Patrick. If she could throw herself in front of a bus for them, she certainly could pretend that she had never found one small piece of paper. That just happened to annihilate her.

  She managed to fix dinner, clean up and check homework. But when bedtime came, she went straight to her bathroom, flipping on the switch that lighted the mirrors over the sinks. Kate braced her hands on her sink and stared at her reflection. She looked like the same person she had seen in the mirror that morning. Why didn't she appear crushed, or betrayed, or scared out of her wits? The woman staring back at her looked confident and serene and, yes, attractive. Attractive enough to prompt a connoisseur of women like Randall Johnson to invite her to dinner.

  So why the hell had David slept with another woman? How had she failed so completely in their marriage? And how could she have been so unaware that she didn't have even the slightest clue about what was happening?

  “God damn it, David! Why aren't you here to explain this to me? How can I understand if you aren't here to talk to me?”

  She knew that she couldn't deal with this alone. She had to talk with someone or she would go in circles until she went insane. The only person she trusted was Georgia. She returned to her bedroom and called to ask her friend to come over after work the next day.

  Mechanically, she got ready for bed and climbed between the sheets. She didn't bother to pick up a book from the bedside table or to click on the television news. She turned out the light and lay there, staring sightlessly upward in the darkness. She found some comfort in the occasional soft dream whimpers from the dog, who was stretched out as always on the rug beside the bed. But even Gretchen's faithful presence barely penetrated the swirling fog of failure and loneliness that engulfed her. Kate's brain spun like a kaleidoscope, shifting jagged images of David in bed with a strange woman around thoughts of selling the house against panic about paying college tuition. She sorted through her memory, reinterpreting scenes from her now ruined marriage, finding dissatisfaction where before there had seemed to be none.

  She could manage neither tears nor sleep.

  Somehow she smiled for Clay and Patrick the next day. They were stunned but grateful to be treated to Domino's Pizza for dinner. Clay eyed her a little worriedly but evidently decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth and so kept quiet. When Georgia breezed in after dinner and saw the pizza box, and the dirty dishes still scattered around the kitchen, she stopped dead and looked hard at Kate. Going straight to the refrigerator, she opened a bottle of wine and poured two large glasses, one of which she thrust into Kate's hand. “Drink this now. We'll talk when the boys are in bed.”

  Kate put down the glass. “No, I don't really feel like wine, thanks.”

  Georgia put it back in her hand. “If you don't drink this, I'll pour brandy down your throat and you know what a hangover that will give you.”

  Kate took a sip of wine. “Thanks for coming, Georgia. I've been feeling so alone.”

  Georgia turned to Clay. “Why don't you and Patrick head upstairs and let your mom and me talk woman-to-woman?”

  The boys agreed to her request with unusual promptness and pounded up the steps.

  “All right, Kate, spill it,” Georgia said once they were ensconced in the den with the doors firmly closed. “And feel free to cry on my shoulder. You look like you need to.”

  Kate blinked in surprise. She hadn't cried once since she read the letter. She couldn't summon up enough strength to cry. She hadn't really thought about how to tell Georgia the awful truth, so she just said flatly, “I found a letter from another woman to David. He was having an affair sometime in the year before he died.”

  “He was what? Jesus Christ, what a bastard! How could he do that to you? And he saved her letters?” Georgia was so angry she couldn't sit still; she got up and paced around the room.

  “Letter,” Kate corrected. “I only found one. And I don't think that he meant to save it. It was stapled into a contract.”

  Georgia came over to Kate's chair and knelt in front of her, taking her hands. “I'm so sorry, Kate. To find out now when there's no way to change things... it's awful. What can I do to help?”

  Suddenly the tears came.

  “Tell me what I did wrong. Tell me why David needed to sleep with another woman. Tell me that my family's life wasn't built on a huge lie.” Kate lifted her tear-streaked face. “Tell me how I could have been that blind!”

  “You did not do anything wrong. You were a wonderful wife. My dates always envied David.”

  Kate shook her head and wrapped her arms around her own waist to hold in the sobs.

  Georgia took Kate by the shoulders and shook her gently. “Stop blaming yourself. David is the creep here, remember? You didn't go off and sleep with another man.”

  “I never even wanted to. That's what I don't understand. What made him even think about it?” Reaching a decision Kate put down her wineglass and stood up. “I'll show you the letter and then we're going to burn it. I don't want Clay and Patrick to know about this. Ever.”

  She brought the letter down from its dusty hiding place and handed it to Georgia. She wanted Georgia's clear, legal mind to find the flaw in her reasoning, to tell her that she was wrong about David.

  “Son of a bitch!” Georgia muttered as she finished reading. “She definitely wasn't a one-night stand.”

  “How could I not have known? I thought that we were so close, that we knew each other so well.”

  Georgia sat on the arm of Kate's chair. “I remember you saying that year that David was traveling constantly. You thought that the stress might have contributed to his heart attack. You probably didn't see him enough to be able to tell. Stop beating yourself up.”

  “Why did he do it, Georgia?”

  Georgia moved back to her own chair and stared up at the ceiling for a minute. “All right, I'm going to give you my honest opinion of David. Promise you won't hate me.”

  Kate almost felt like laughing. “At this point, the worse it is, the more I'll like it.”

  Georgia looked relieved at this small flash of spirit and launched into her argument.

  “When you and David met, you were both rising stars in your firms. You were a brilliant engineer, and David was a brilliant architect. You also happened to be poised, beautiful and great with people, the perfect up-and-coming architect's wife.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “David went after you with every weapon in his arsenal. Remember how flattered you were?”

  “How could I not be? David could have had any woman he wanted; they were falling all over him. Evidently even after we were married.”

  “Stop it. But you've put your finger on something important. David was used to being the center of attention. He loved working with clients because they admired him and listened to him.”

  Georgia paused a moment, then continued, “David expected you to be the adoring and supportive wife, so he tried to eliminate anything that competed with him. He made you shut down your very successful consulting business the moment he could afford to.”

  Kate couldn't believe Georgia's implication. “I shut it down because I couldn't keep up with the work while I had small children.”

  “That's because David focused entirely on his own career and left you to bring up the children, run the house, entertain clients and draw plans for C/R/G. He forced you into a situation where you had to give up your profession for your family.”

  “And I've never regretted it.” Then she remembered her financial difficulties and amended that, “Until now.”

  Georgia looked at her speculatively, but she was on a roll and didn't want to change the subject. She brought forth the clincher. “David could force you to dump the job but ultimately he couldn't compete with the children.”

  Kate felt completely dazed. Georgia was painting a picture of a manipulative self-centered man whom Kate didn't recognize as her husband. “David was crazy about the boys!”

/>   “Of course he was. They were his sons. Men love having sons. But he missed the focus on him and on C/R/G. David leaned on you all through your marriage.”

  “We leaned on each other...” Kate faltered in her defense. Her nighttime agonies came back to support her friend's comments. She had asked Georgia to tell her why David had betrayed her, and Georgia was building a formidable case against him.

  Georgia ignored Kate's comment. “I think he found this woman who stroked his ego with her undivided attention, and he indulged himself in an affair with her.”

  Kate could not refute Georgia's logic, so she changed the subject. “We're getting rid of this right now,” she said, taking the letter to the fireplace. She picked up a long fireplace match from the mantel and lit three corners of the letter, letting it fall on the grate as it flamed. She torched every remaining fragment until only a pile of ash was left. She looked up at Georgia. “We are the only two people who will ever know about this letter.”

  Georgia crossed her heart with one finger. “My discretion is absolute. Now, what are you going to do about this?”

  “What do you mean do about it?” Kate asked, stirring the ashes around with a poker.

  “You can't just burn the letter and forget about it. You have to do something to help you get over David's betrayal.”

  Kate looked at Georgia and realized that she was serious. “What would you suggest? Painting a scarlet A on David's gravestone?”

  “You could find Sylvia and throw rotten eggs at her house. Or slash all the tires on that old Porsche that David was always working on.”

  That reminded Kate of her other problem. “I need that Porsche in mint condition. I'm selling it.”

  “I thought that you were keeping it for the boys when they got old enough to drive.”

  Kate slumped into her chair and let her head fall back on its cushion. New tears welled up and she angrily wiped them away with the back of her hand. “I forgot to mention my other problem. Oliver and Ted want to sell David's share of C/R/G to a new guy, which means that I have no income.”