She stretches. I reach for my ice cream. Both involve moving muscles, right? So I’m exercising right now, too. Hand, wrist, tongue, taste buds, sorrow-filled heart…
“So the whole Twitter thing happens,” Amanda says in a contemplative voice. “Declan claims that he understands the lesbian thing was for work. But he says you told him in the lighthouse that you were only dating him for the account—”
“That was a joke!”
Amy holds up one hand to get me to pause. Amanda is deep in thought, eyes on the windowsill, staring so intently at a small basil plant that it might spontaneously turn into pesto sauce.
“—and he quoted Jessica, and then something about Steve’s mother?”
Ouch. “What I said to Monica about only dating Declan for money got back to him.”
“I said that!” Amanda protests.
“I confirmed it.” A sick wave of horror pours through me. Even at the time, when I said it, I had a premonition it was a bad idea.
Now I know it. And I can’t let it go. Over and over, the memories of everything I ever said to Declan that might make him think I was manipulative and not earnest in my intimate moments makes me cry.
I couldn’t just own up to the truth and blow the mystery shop, could I? Most people would. Instead, I tap-danced to please all the different people I thought I needed to please.
And in the end I lost the one I wanted to please the most.
“Still doesn’t make sense,” Amanda says, brooding. “He’s not that shallow.”
“He’s that accustomed to being used by women for his money and connections, though,” I wail. “He told me I was special because I wasn’t trying to use him.” The memory of his vulnerability during that conversation makes me feel like I’m two inches tall and covered in excrement. He thinks I violated that. Violated his trust.
That is what hurts the most.
Amanda’s still shaking her head slowly. “I still don’t buy it. You guys weren’t together for that long—”
“A month.” I wish it could have been forever.
“—but he’s an eminently reasonable guy. You’re a reasonable woman. He should have heard you out. Should have listened.”
“He’s overreacting,” Amy concurs. “And he was kind of weird at Easter. Uptight and shy. Mom said the butter lamb freaked him out. Maybe he has a dairy phobia?”
I snorted. “No. It reminded him of his mother.”
“Hmmm,” Amanda says, stroking chin hairs she doesn’t have. “Perhaps that’s part of this.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing. Let me think this through.”
I’m kind of done with this conversation and now am absent-mindedly reading work email. It’s the kind of day where I can get away with working from home. I don’t have any mystery shops today. Just 115 emails from the people I manage.
As I open emails and scan quickly, I see we have three new approved mystery shoppers. Amanda and Amy take over the Declan analysis, trying to understand his motives, while I check out. I’ve worried and wondered and analyzed this issue to death, and can only come to one conclusion:
When you date a billionaire and something goes wrong, it’s always your fault.
The next twenty minutes go by in a blur as I sit on the couch and process email, Chuckles eats a ficus leaf and then hairballs it up, and Amy and Amanda ignore us while strategizing.
“Earth to Shannon!” Amanda says.
“What?”
“How did Declan’s mom die?”
I halt. “I…I don’t know. I asked him twice and he never answered.”
All six eyebrows in the room shoot up. Eight, if cats have eyebrows.
Amanda snatches the computer from me and types furiously.
And then she gasps in shock.
“Oh, Shannon. Oh my God.”
“What?”
“Read.”
The obituary Amanda pulled up on the computer screen has a breathtakingly lovely older woman’s photo front and center, a thick chain of pearls around her neck, her hair pulled back in a smooth updo. Lively, friendly green eyes so familiar my heart tugs at me stare back.
Elena Montgomery McCormick.
Declan’s mother.
Born in 1956. Died in 2004. She had him when she was older, and that makes James in his late fifties, which makes sense. My eyes race over the words to get them all in, and then I come to a dead stop.
Stung by the words in front of me.
The obituary is tasteful, mentioning her three kids—Terrance, Declan and Andrew—and her loving husband, James.
It’s the link under it, though, that makes me hold my breath. Makes time stand still. Makes the air go thick.
The headline for a Boston Globe story reads:
Local business leader’s wife dead from wasp sting.
Oh my God.
Amanda’s hands are gentle on my shoulder as my eyes race across the page. “I can’t find more about it, yet,” she explains. “There isn’t a major news story to explain how it happened.”
“His brother had a bad incident around the same time,” I tell her, brain reeling. Declan’s mother died from a sting? Died?
“I guess this explains why he knew exactly what to do with you,” Amy whispers, eyes glistening. My own throat goes salty and tight as tears I didn’t know I had in me spring to the surface. The memory of that picnic, how Declan was so calm and steady yet swift and immediate, reacting with perfectly orchestrated steps, how he ran with me in his arms so far, so hard, so fast…
He saved my life and then he broke my heart.
“This can’t be real,” I choke out, but deep down I understand more. Suddenly. Like a clap of thunder and lightning that makes the landscape bright in a flash, revealing parts unknown, the sound echoing in a ripple of cacophony, now I get it.
I get it.
“He can’t date me because I remind him of his mother,” I say.
Amy raises one skeptical eyebrow. “You look nothing like her. For one, she has cheekbones more prominent than Heidi Klum’s.”
I wave my hand in the air between us. “No, not that I look like her. The sting. She had an anaphylactic allergy, I have an anaphylactic allergy. Declan can’t handle it. Maybe I’m a trigger?”
Amanda makes a noise that tells me she’s not convinced. “He would have dumped you right after the ER incident, then.”
“It’s a miracle he didn’t,” Amy adds with a snort. “You nearly decapitated his second head.”