A Fugitive Truth: An Emma Fielding Mystery - By Dana Cameron Page 0,26
American culture. I poured a measure and Faith drank. As an afterthought, she said, “Thank you.”
“Not at all. Slàinte!” I toasted, and settled back into my chair. “So tell me about your name. I’m a little out of the Coolidge loop, I guess.”
“No, no,” she said, “it’s not you. I am Faith Morgan now. I took my maiden name back after the divorce. I needed to be someone else after that.”
I frowned; that was such an odd way of putting it. But at least now I remembered why Sasha’s description of her work sounded so familiar despite the different name.
“I left Paul over two years ago,” she explained. “You met him back in Michigan, I think. He was a year ahead of me, two ahead of you. He was in the English department too. I brought him to a couple of functions.” She took another sip. “We’d been married a long time. Far too long.”
I nodded, only dimly remembering her husband—ex-husband, I corrected myself. Fiancé, when I knew him. My impression of him was not an appealing one; a cold fish, calculating, appraising, demanding. Oh, dear. Now that I thought of it, I also recalled thinking how perfect a match he was for long, blonde Faith. Two icicles flavored with disdain. But I hadn’t known her well and only interacted with her under the most constrained of circumstances. She seemed different to me now.
“I’m sorry,” I said immediately, taking another big sip from my drink to cover my discomfort. I had friends and bracelets, after all.
“So am I,” she replied briefly. She demolished a good inch of liquor. “Tell me, where are you now?”
So I plunged in with a brief outline of the last twelve years, more than willing to help build the bridge she’d started. Oddly, Faith seemed genuinely interested in what I’d done, and this surprised me. I found myself responding to her more warmly than I expected, not with the inflated lists of achievement generally reserved for trumping unlikable colleagues at conference brawls, but a plain history. She nodded throughout my description, then she too filled in a brief resume: several teaching stints, sporadic work on the book she came here to finish, finally settling in to a good job and new life in California after the divorce.
It took more than fifteen years and a thousand miles from where we first met before we could sustain something like a real conversation, give and take of even this limited sort. Not a giddy reminiscence filled with “and what abouts” and “do you remembers”—our earlier relationship had extended no further than cool formality at very best—but a civil exchange. We each had another couple of fingers and I calmed down: My fear that my premature bonhomie would trap me with the Ice Queen gave way to a recognition that we both had moved away from the guerrilla warfare of graduate school. That’s all it is, I thought. People can change. The satisfaction of having repaired something mangled by youth has a comfortable heft and a subtle, almond taste.
The warmth of the drink eventually drew back to reveal my underlying weariness, and, swaying a little, I rose to bank the fire and say good night. Then I realized that Faith had asked me for another glass. Unwilling to jeopardize our fragile bond—we were going to be housemates for the next weeks, after all—I poured her another shot, and an eighth inch for myself, and resumed my former position. But was it the dying light of the fire, or was her face more flushed than I remembered? There was something behind her green eyes that troubled me. Her fingers kept twitching at the fabric of her jumper as though they had a life of their own, until she caught herself doing it, and carefully tucked her legs underneath her, replacing the skirt so that it covered her tights to the tops of her shoes.
She noticed that I was watching her, though, and with a hostile glare, she unnecessarily smoothed the side of her perfect chignon. In that instant, I was transported back to Coolidge and my first encounter with Faith, who had evaluated me in this same unsparing fashion. A shadow crossed her face, or maybe the firelight shifted with a falling log.
Whatever I had lacked then, I apparently now possessed, for she said, “You know, I never liked you. No one could possibly be that…enthusiastic, that eager, and be for real, I thought. I thought, I assumed, you must be