At six, running away from home had been a scary
proposition. It should have been easier and less traumatic
at thirty-two.
It wasn't, Maggie concluded with regret after three weeks
in hiding. Oh, the logistics were easier, but the
emotional wear and tear were about the same.
Way back then, lugging a Barbie suitcase packed with Oreos
and her favorite stuffed toys, Maggie had set out to show
her parents that she didn't need them anymore. But by the
time she'd wandered a few blocks away from their
Charleston home onto unfamiliar streets, and by the time
darkness had closed in with its eerie shadows, she'd begun
to wonder if she hadn't made a terrible mistake.
Still, she'd been far too stubborn to consider backing
down. She'd climbed onto a wicker rocking chair deep in
the shadows of a deserted front porch and, tightly
clutching her tattered Winnie the Pooh, gone to sleep. Her
frantic parents had found her there the next morning,
thanks to a call from the owner of the house, who'd been
alerted to her presence by his son. Leave it to terrible
Tommy Henderson to rat her out. No wonder no one in first
grade liked the little tattletale.
It seemed more than a bit ironic that twenty-six years
later, Maggie was running away from home again and that
she was still trying to prove things to her parents. The
only difference this time was that Tommy Henderson was
nowhere around. Last she'd heard, he was working somewhere
overseas as a CIA operative for the United States
government. At least he'd put his capacity for sneakiness
to good use.
Sitting in a rocker on the front porch of a tiny rented
beach house on Sullivan's Island, Maggie sipped her third
glass of sweetened iced tea and watched the fireflies
flicker in their endless game of tag in the evening sky.
The air was still and thick with humidity, the night quiet
and lonely. Even though she was all grown up, in many ways
she was just as scared now as she had been at six, and
just as stubbornly determined to stay away till she made
sense of things.
She couldn't recall exactly what had sent her fleeing into
the night back then, but now it was all about a man, of
course. What else could possibly drive a reasonably sane
and mature woman to run away from her home and business
and fill her with enough self-doubt to keep her on a
shrink's couch for years? She didn't miss the irony that
it was, in fact, a shrink who'd turned her world upside
down.
Safe, solid, dependable Warren Blake, Ph.D., had been the
kind of respectable, charming man her family had always
wanted for her. Her father had approved of him.
Predictably, her mother had adored him. Warren didn't make
waves. He didn't have any pierced or tattooed body parts.
He could carry on an intelligent conversation. And he was
Southern. What more could they have asked, after the
parade of unlikely candidates Maggie had flaunted in front
of them for years?
Basking in all that parental approval for the first time
in her life, Maggie had convinced herself she loved Warren
and wanted to marry him. The wedding date had been set.
And then, with the invitations already in the mail, Warren
had called the whole thing off, saying he had come to his
senses and realized their marriage would be a mistake.
He'd done it so gently, at first Maggie hadn't even
understood what he was trying to say. But when the full
import had finally sunk in, she'd been furious, then
devastated. Here she'd finally done the right thing, made
the right choice, and what had she gotten in return? Total
humiliation.
She'd packed her bags — Louis Vuitton this time — and run
away from home again. In terms of distance, it really
wasn't that much farther than she'd run all those years
ago, but Sullivan's Island was light-years away from
Charleston in terms of demands on her shattered psyche.
She could sit on this porch, swatting lazily at
mosquitoes, and never once have to make a decision that
she'd come to regret the way she regretted her decision to
get engaged to Warren.
She could eat tomato sandwiches on white bread slathered
with Miracle Whip for breakfast and an entire pint of
peach ice cream for lunch. She could play the radio at top
volume and dance around the living room at any hour of the
day or night, if she could summon the energy for it. She
could go for a swim without waiting a whole hour after
eating, and she could track sand through the house, if she
felt like it.
In fact, she'd been doing all that for a while now and,
she was forced to admit, it was getting on her nerves. She
was a social creature. She liked people. She missed her
art gallery in Charleston. She was almost ready to start
seeing her friends again, at least in small doses.
But she'd made up her mind that she wasn't going home
until she'd come to grips with why the devil she'd been so
determined to marry Warren in the first place. There had
to be a reason she'd talked herself into being in love
with a man who was the complete opposite of every other
male she'd ever dated in her life. When she was willing to
give Warren credit for anything, she conceded that he'd
only saved them both a lot of misery. So why had the
broken engagement sent her packing?
It wasn't the humiliation. Not entirely, anyway. Maggie
had never given two figs what anyone thought of her,
unlike her mother, who obsessed about every-one's opinion
and had been horrified by her daughter's broken engagement.
It certainly wasn't a broken heart. Her ego might have
been a little bruised, but her heart had been just fine.
In fact, in a very short time she'd found herself
breathing a sigh of relief. Not that she intended to admit
that to Warren. Let the man squirm.
So, if it wasn't her heart or her pride that had been
wounded, what was it? Maybe nothing more than watching a
last desperate dream crash at her feet, leaving her with
no more dreams, no more options.
On that disturbing note, Maggie dragged herself out of the
rocker and went inside to retrieve another pint of ice
cream — chocolate-chocolate chip this time — from the
freezer. At this rate she'd be the size of a blimp by the
time she decided to go back to Charleston. She shrugged
off the possibility and dipped her spoon into the decadent
treat. If she never intended to date again, what
difference did it make if she was the size of a truck? Or
a blimp?
She flipped on the radio and found an oldies station. She
preferred country, but wallowing in love-gone-wrong songs
at this particular moment in her life struck her as
overkill.
She was dancing her way back toward the porch when she
spotted three people on the other side of the screen door.
Unfortunately, even in the dark, she knew exactly who they
were — her best friend, Dinah Davis Beaufort, Dinah's new
husband, Cordell, and the traitorous Warren.
If she'd had the energy, she would have bolted for the
back door. As it was, she resigned herself to greeting
them like the proper Southern belle she'd been raised to
be. She could hear her mother's words echoing in her head.
Company, even unwanted company, was always to be welcomed
politely.
But even as she forced a smile and opened the door, she
also vowed that the next time she ran away from home, she
was going to choose someplace on the other side of the
world where absolutely no one could find her.
As interventions went, this one pretty much sucked. Not
that Maggie knew a whole lot about interventions, never
having been addicted to much of anything — with the
possible exception of truly lousy choices in men. She was
fairly certain, though, that having only three people
sitting before her with anxious expressions — one of them
the very man responsible for her current state of mind —
was not the way this sort of thing ought to work.
Then, again, Warren should know. He'd probably done
hundreds of them for his alcoholor drug-addicted clients.
Hell, maybe he'd even done a few for women he'd dumped,
like Maggie. Maybe that was how he'd built up his
practice, the louse.
"Magnolia Forsythe, are you listening to a word we're
saying?" Dinah Davis Beaufort demanded impatiently, a
worried frown etched on her otherwise perfect face.
Dinah and Maggie had been friends forever. It was one
reason, possibly the only reason, Maggie didn't summon the
energy to slap Dinah for using her much-hated given name.
Magnolia, for goodness'sakes! What had her parents been
thinking?
Maggie regarded her best friend — her former best friend,
she decided in that instant — with a scowl. "No." She
didn't want to hear anything these three had to say. Every
one of them had played a role in sending her into this
depression. She doubted they had any advice that would
drag her out of it.
"I told you she was going to hate this," Cordell Beau-fort
said.
Of everyone there, Cord looked the most relaxed, the most
normal, Maggie concluded. In fact, he had the audacity to
give her a wink. Because Maggie's futile attempt to seduce
him before Dinah's return to town last year from a foreign
assignment was another reason she was in this dark state
of mind, she ignored the wink and concentrated on
identifying all the escape routes from this room. Not that
a woman should have to flee her own damn living room to
get any peace. She ought to be able to kick the well-
meaning intruders out, but — her mother's stern
admonitions be damned — she'd tried that not five minutes
after their arrival and not a one of them had budged.
Perhaps she ought to consider telling them whatever they
wanted to hear so they'd go away.
"I don't care if she does hate it," Dinah said, her
expression grim. "We have to convince her to stop moping
around in this house. Look at her. She hasn't even combed
her hair or put on makeup." She surveyed Maggie with a
practiced eye. "And what is that she's wearing? It looks
as if she chopped off her jeans with gardening shears."
"I'm at the beach, for heaven's sake! And stop talking
about me as if I've left the room," Maggie snapped.
Dinah ignored Maggie and went right on addressing
Cord. "It's not healthy. She needs to come home. She needs
to get out and do something. This project of ours is
perfect."
"In your opinion," Cord chided. "Maggie might not agree."
Dinah frowned. "Well, if she doesn't want to help us with
that, then she at least ought to remember that she has a
business to run, a life to live."
Maggie felt the last thread holding her temper in check
snap. "What life is that?" Maggie inquired. "The one I had
before Warren here decided I wasn't his type and dumped me
two weeks before our wedding? Or the humiliating one I
have now, facing all my friends and trying to explain how
I got it so wrong? Or perhaps you're referring to my
pitiful and unsuccessful attempt to seduce Cord before you
waltzed back into town from overseas and claimed him for
yourself?"
Of all of them, only Warren had the grace to look
chagrined. "Maggie, you know it would never have worked
with us," he explained with great patience, just as he had
on the night he'd first broken the news that the wedding
was off. "I'm just the one who had the courage to say it."
"Well, you picked a damn fine time to figure it out," she
said, despite the fact that she'd long since conceded to
herself that he'd done exactly the right thing. "What kind
of psychologist are you that you couldn't recognize
something like our complete incompatibility a year before
the wedding or even six months before the wedding?"