back. By ten thirty that night, he hadn’t yet called back. She tried him again, but he still didn’t pick up, and she resigned herself to brooding until she could question him about Danielle, though she would try to do it in a roundabout way. Nevertheless, she could not see him giving her a straight answer no matter how she phrased her question.
Tom was right that she should not get involved, and that given enough time, it would all blow over, if anything was going on in the first place. Her father would eventually tire of Danielle, and provided that she didn’t do anything drastic and brainless, the affair would simply end and neither Elise nor Billy would have to find out about it. Anna didn’t really understand why it bothered her so much, but she thought it might be because she was involved in something dishonest herself, though as Jill had said not long before Anna had started seeing Tom, it was he who had to answer to his wife and children, not Anna.
A convenient way to see things, certainly.
And not Anna’s usual way of going about her business either. How much she had learned about herself in the past several months, how many previously held assumptions about her character now had to be revised! Before she had met Tom Glass, affairs had always sounded to her like puerile self-indulgence, the most common adult cliché. There were plenty of single men and women to go around, weren’t there? Who really needed to get involved with someone who was married? She could not imagine falling for a man who lied to his wife on a regular basis, especially if the lie was told so that he could go off and have sex with another woman. How could she love a liar? How would she ever be able to trust him not to do the same thing to her? And if he had kids, wasn’t it just the most lowlife, selfish thing in the world to be risking their well-being and happiness by keeping a mistress? How could it possibly be worth it?
Ah, self-knowledge. She really had had no idea what lay beneath the veneer of her good intentions and good opinion of herself before she had started her internship. In more ways than one, Tom Glass was educating her.
The next morning around nine, when she was already two hours into her workday at the hospital, her father called her back. She could feel her phone vibrating in her lab coat’s pocket, and knew that it was him. As soon as she could get away from her group with the excuse that she needed to use the bathroom, she went into a visitors’ bathroom and called him back.
“Is everything all right, Anna?” her father asked. “I would have called you back last night, but I was out so late that I didn’t want to wake you up.”
Hearing the concern in his voice, she nearly lost her nerve. “I’m fine, Dad. I’m sorry if you were worried about me.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes,” she said, pausing. “I was just wondering about something. A couple of days ago Danielle Dixon called me, Billy’s ex-girlfriend. You remember her, I’m sure.”
There was a distinct pause before he said, “Yes, I remember her.”
Other than the pause, there was nothing telltale in his voice. She had to keep in mind that he was an actor, that he was probably capable of bluffing his way out of anything. “Have you seen her lately?”
“No,” he said. “Not since that night at Sylvia’s more than a year ago.”
“Really? She said you ran into each other at the Griffith Observatory not long ago.”
He was silent for a moment. “I haven’t seen her at Griffith. Why would she say that?”
“I don’t know. Is there any reason that you think she would?”
“Why was she calling you?”
“She said it was because she missed me.” Anna paused. “She had a number of questions about you too.”
“Anna, that’s strange. I have no idea why she’d be calling to ask you about me.”
“Don’t you want to know what her questions were?”
“No, I don’t.”
“She wanted to know where you were and how long you’d be gone. She asked if you and Elise were happy, which you can imagine I found rather odd. She also said that you had a friend who might be interested in hiring her. I guess she’s still doing that job where she organizes people’s homes.”
“I don’t remember telling her that I had a friend interested in