The Marriage Agreement

She held him tighter, stroked him with soothing hands, murmured tender lies—that it was okay, that everything would be all right.

He said, “I called the ambulance. And then I hid, in the trees, until they came. They took him out. He was so still, but maybe…he could have been alive. There were cops, too. They looked around the property, but they didn’t find me. Tory, I have to get away. I have to get out of town….”

She begged him to stay. But he said he couldn’t. He’d end up in jail if he stayed. So she said she would go with him.

“You can’t. You’re sixteen. How would we live? It would never work. But I’ll come back, Tory. I swear. Someday…”

Someday.

She hadn’t liked the sound of that at all. Someday could be forever. Someday could mean years.

But what could she do? She sneaked back into the house to get what money she had there, and then came out again and gave it to him. And after he left, in the house once more, she tiptoed to the hall bathroom, locked the door and turned on the light, expecting to find dark stains all over herself.

There was nothing. Her eyes looked wide and haunted in the big bathroom mirror, but her blue pajamas bore not a single dark smear. The blood had all dried on him before he came to her.

Before he left he had asked her to find out what she could about Blake. He promised to call. In a few days…

And he had called. Once. Three days after that terrible night. He called in the late afternoon, when her father was still at his clinic and her mother was at the beauty shop.

By then Tory had thought that everything would be all right. Because Marsh’s father had not died. Blake was out of the hospital and back on his feet. She told Marsh the news, bursting with joy that it would all work out, after all.

“You can come home now, Marsh. Your father didn’t die, and it’s safe to come back.”

“No, Tory. I can never go back there. He’ll kill me if I do. And if he doesn’t kill me, I’ll kill him….”

He’d sounded so very far away. And so desperate. A fugitive from justice. He’d actually called himself that. He wouldn’t tell her where he was calling from. He said he had to keep moving, he couldn’t let Blake find him.

“You don’t know him, Tory. You don’t know how he is. Nobody gets the better of him….”

She was crying when she hung up the phone, thinking she’d go crazy waiting for Marsh to call again.

But she hadn’t gone crazy, though sometimes in the weeks to come it had felt like she was. And as it turned out, he never did call again. That was the last time she ever spoke to him—until a few hours ago, when she’d picked up the phone and heard his voice saying her name.

A dark-haired woman wearing too much perfume brushed past her murmuring, “Excuse me,” as she went.

“Oh.” Tory blinked. “It’s okay…”

A black leather wing chair waited a few feet from where Tory stood. She ordered her numb legs to move, to take her there. Once she reached it, she sank stiffly into it.

Marsh came toward her. So strange. Her heart was breaking all over again. It shouldn’t be like this, shouldn’t feel like this, not after all these years.

He stopped just a foot from her chair. Concern had turned those dark eyes to velvet. “God. Tory…”

Almost, she lifted up her arms to him.

Almost, she surged from that chair and into his embrace.

Almost.

But not quite.

She hesitated, thought, Do I really want that—his arms around me? And how can I be certain that he will welcome me there?

Then she realized it didn’t matter whether she wanted him to hold her, whether he wanted her body pressed close to his. Somehow, while she hovered on the brink of throwing herself at him, the dangerous moment had passed.

Tory stayed in the chair and stared up at him. “Why now?” The hushed words seemed to come out all on their own. “Why now, after all this time?”

“Tory, I—” He cut off his answer before he even said it. “Please. I think we’d better go somewhere more private. To my room, all right?”

She probably should have said no to that. But she didn’t. People kept strolling by them, and there were three clerks behind the check-in desk. She didn’t need any of those people witnessing her distress, let alone hearing whatever she and this man ended up saying to each other.

She stood on shaky legs and smoothed her rumpled skirt. “All right.”

For a moment she thought he would take her arm. She didn’t know if she could bear that—his touch, right then.

But then he only gestured. “This way.”

She fell in step beside him. They strolled across the lobby and down into a central court area paved in stone. Then up three carpeted steps to the elevators. He pushed a button. They waited. She didn’t look at him. It seemed better not to.

A set of doors opened. They got on with two men in business suits. The elevator had glass walls. They rode up with a view of the open court area retreating below them.

The two businessmen were arguing, speaking in tight, hushed tones. Tory ignored them. It wasn’t hard. Most of her energy was taken up in painful awareness of the man beside her—the man she still would not look at. She stared blindly down at the courtyard as it moved away beneath them.

The businessmen got off on the fourth floor, leaving Tory and Marsh alone the rest of the way. Marsh didn’t speak. And Tory felt that she couldn’t speak, that if she’d opened her mouth only a strangled, crazy moan would come out.

At last, they reached his floor—the top floor. The car stopped, the doors slid open.

He said, “This way,” for the second time. She walked beside him, down a hall that was also a long balcony overlooking the courtyard below. When they reached his door, she stepped back as he used his key card. The green light blinked. He turned the handle and signaled for her to go in ahead of him.

It was a suite, she noted with some relief. She wouldn’t have to try to talk to him in a room that was more than 50 percent bed.

They entered a small entrance hall that opened onto a living area done in forest-green and maroon. Soothing colors, she thought, though the last thing she felt at that moment was soothed.

He gestured at the forest-green sofa. Obediently she lowered herself onto one end of it.

“Can I get you a drink?”

Her stomach rebelled at the thought. Yet she heard herself answer, “Plain tonic water?”

“I can do that.”

He turned for the bar, which had a mirrored wall behind it, and got busy fixing the drink she’d asked for that she really didn’t want. Once he’d poured the tonic water, she watched him mix himself a whisky and soda.

She couldn’t help staring at his hands. Very fine hands, long-fingered and strong. They appeared much better cared for than in the past, the nails filed short and buffed smooth.

She found herself thinking how they used to hold hands all the time, thinking that she could still recall exactly the way his hand had felt in hers—warm and firm and rough.

And then she thought what she should not have allowed herself to think.