my trip to see Lillian Sharpe in Windermere on Sunday morning, I stopped at the assisted living facility where Ethan’s grandfather was recovering. After the terse exchange with Glenda at the hospital, boundary lines had been drawn, and it was clear I was to leave Warren well enough alone. But he’d called me over the weekend. He missed me. For Warren, I decided to break the rules.
“How are you?” he said as I entered. He motioned me toward the bed. The room resembled a hospital with a few extra furnishings—a sofa, a mini-refrigerator, and a dresser and closet.
“I’ve been better,” I said. “I’m researching a story that’s turning out to be quite a goose chase.”
“Oh?”
Before I could give him the details, my phone rang. I pulled it from my bag. “Ethan,” I said to Warren, dismissing the call and tossing the phone back into my purse.
“I’ve been worried about you two,” he said. “Marriage trouble?”
I sighed. “Yes, I’m afraid so.”
“Let me tell you about my wife,” he said, smiling up at a spot on the wall, as if he could see his beloved there gazing back at him. “Annie was a lot like you. Spirited. Driven. A bit of a temper.”
I grinned. “I would have liked her.”
“You would have loved her, Claire. She was passionate about life, just as she was passionate about me.”
The phone rang beside his bed. “Now, who would that be?” he said, giving the phone a puzzled look. He picked up. “Hello?” He paused for a long moment, his eyes showing signs of disappointment. “I can’t believe you didn’t find it…. You thought this was it…. All right…. No, now is not the time for…I’ll call you later.”
I occupied myself with a magazine on the side table, wondering what Warren was talking about.
He turned back to me. “I’m sorry about that. Now, where were we?”
“Your wife,” I said.
“Ah, yes, my wife.”
I patted his arm. “I bet you miss her so much.”
“I do,” he said. “Losing your true love is like losing your right hand. It feels just like that. Everything takes more effort. Everything feels different when she’s gone.”
“I’ve never thought about it that way.”
He nodded. “I want to tell you something.” He clasped his hands together. “A few years after she and I were married, we separated.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “What happened?”
“She left me,” he said. “I didn’t have an affair, mind you, but I did have an inappropriate friendship with a woman. A secretary at the office.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Inappropriate?”
“I was dumb as a doornail. Thirty-year-old men are, you know.”
I nodded in agreement.
“It started out innocently enough,” he continued. “I’d stay late at work. We’d flirt. Then we started having drinks together after hours. I was playing with fire. Well, Annie found out, and you can believe she was livid. She packed her bags and moved back home with her mother.
“So you think I should move out?”
“No,” he said. “I’m just saying that when I lost Annie for that short period of time, I realized how precious she was to me. I never forgot that lesson. We both loved each other more for that early blip in our marriage. Annie came to appreciate it, actually.”
“I wish I could imagine that happy ending,” I said. “Ethan seems to have a different outcome in mind.”
A nurse came in and gestured to the clock. “Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Kensington, but it’s time for your physical therapy.”
He nodded and held up his finger. “Just a minute.” Then to me he said, “Call him back. Give him one more chance to prove himself. Think of me and Annie.”
I hugged him. “You’re right. Thanks, Warren.”
The nurse helped him out of his bed. “You know, they’re wasting their time on me,” he said playfully. “I’m an old geezer.”
“An old geezer who needs his physical therapy,” the nurse sparred back.
Warren winked at me. “We didn’t get a chance to talk about your article,” he said.
“Glenda will be glad,” I replied. “She forbade me from bothering you with any of my—what did she call it?—oh yes, ‘drama.’”
“To hell with Glenda,” he said without mincing words. He loved his daughter-in-law, I knew that, but not her meddling ways. “Come back and tell me about your story as soon as you can.”
I nodded. “I will.”
“Now, call that husband of yours,” he said as the nurse led him out the door. “Promise?”
“Promise.”
The cab dropped me off in front of Lillian Sharpe’s home in Windermere, the kind of neighborhood my parents might have driven