The Trouble With Angels Page 0,68

claimed he'd kill Brian."

"You told Brian?"

"Of course. I was scared out of my wits. This guy was serious. Brian convinced me he had the wrong guy, and like a gullible fool" - she paused and raised her eyes to the ceiling - "I believed him." It astonished her how dense she'd been, how long it had taken her to wake up and accept reality. Denial was sometimes underrated as far as she was concerned.

"When did you realize the truth?" This too came in the same gentle, caring voice, almost as if Thom were afraid of hurting her by asking.

"It took far longer than it should have. I saw him with another woman. I don't think I would have believed it otherwise. Later, after I'd dried my eyes and composed myself, I confronted him." She stopped, remembering that scene and how naive she'd been.

"He admitted he was involved with the other woman, but claimed she was older and had set out to seduce him. He cried and told me how sorry he was, and then he begged me not to divorce him."

"Were you planning to leave him?" he asked.

"I don't know what I would have done. It was shortly afterward that we decided to have Karen. He was attentive and loving for a while, but that soon changed. This time I was a little smarter, a little wiser."

"The affairs continued?"

Maureen nodded. "After a while I began to pick up cues when he was going into another relationship. All at once his appearance would be important, and he'd spend more time in front of a mirror."

"Did you confront him?"

"Naturally. He denied everything. He claimed I was imagining things, that I'd become obsessively jealous. We had some real humdinger fights. Dear God, I can't believe I stayed in that sick marriage as long as I did. The love was gone long before the marriage ended."

"How was he with Karen?"

Maureen stiffened. "The same way he is with every other woman in his life. He used her. He'd build up her hopes with promises he had no intention of keeping."

"He left you."

"Yes." It was the one thing that plagued Maureen the most about her divorce. Brian had walked out on her. After years of infidelity, years of mental abuse, he'd had the unmitigated gall to empty the savings account she'd struggled so hard to build and leave her. It rankled still.

Thom didn't say anything for a brief moment, then asked, "The divorce was messy?"

"As messy as I could make it." Maureen had turned the other cheek with Brian far too often. In the beginning, revenge was what gave her the incentive to get out bed each morning. It motivated her now.

By the time the divorce was final, Maureen was relatively confident it would take Brian and his live-in lover the better part of the next ten years to pay off the attorney's fees. She wanted him to be miserable, as miserable as he'd made her.

Thom frowned. "How did Karen stand up through all of this?"

"As well as could be expected." Maureen had done her best to shield her daughter from the worst of the divorce. If she had any regrets, it was that Karen had been hurt in all this. She soothed her conscience by blaming Brian.

However, as Maureen looked back over her life since the divorce, she was forced to admit how much better off she and Karen were without her ex-husband.

"And since the divorce?"

Karen's nightmares had been much better since she'd started the horseback riding. But Maureen was well aware that a few lessons weren't the cure-all to Karen's troubles. It was just that she couldn't afford counseling on top of everything else.

"And since," Maureen repeated, "she's doing all right."

"All right?"

"She needs counseling. For that matter, so do I."

"It helped me tremendously after Pam died."

"You had counseling?"

Thom's hands gripped the mug. "I'm not ashamed to admit I needed it."

Maureen knew from previous conversations that Thom had been deeply in love with his wife. From what he'd told her about his marriage, it had sounded ideal, almost too good to be true.

"The counseling helped."

"I'm sure it did." She stared into the murky depths of her own coffee.

"As strange as it may seem, I had to work hard at forgiving Pam for dying."

"Forgiving her?"

"I know that must sound unreasonable. At the time I couldn't justify my feelings. One night shortly after the funeral, I was cooking dinner and the potatoes boiled onto the stove. It was a little thing, but I was so angry I