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 everyone'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 alcohol- or 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
Beaufort 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?"
Warren regarded her with an unblinking gaze. "We were
only engaged for a few weeks, Maggie," he reminded her
in that same annoyingly patient tone. "You were the one
who was in a rush to get married. Neither one of us had much
time to think."
"I was in love with you!" she practically shouted,
irritated by his determination to be logical when she was an
emotional wreck. "Why would I want to waste time on a
long engagement?"
Warren's tolerant expression never wavered. It was one
of the things she'd grown to hate about him. He
wouldn't fight with her. He was always so damn
reasonable. It might be a terrific trait in a shrink, but in
a boyfriend it had been infuriating, especially for a woman
who enjoyed a good argument.
"Maggie, as much as I would love to think that you fell
head over heels in love with me so quickly we both know the
rush was all about keeping up with Dinah and Cord. The
minute they got married, you started to panic. You hated
being left behind and I was handy."
"You're wrong," she protested stubbornly, not
liking the picture he was painting.
"Am I?" he asked mildly. "We'd already
stopped seeing each other after just a few mostly disastrous
dates, but right in the middle of Cord and Dinah's
wedding reception, you decided we should give it another
chance."
"Because my family adored you, because everyone said you
were perfect for me. I was being open-minded," she
countered. "Isn't that what the sensible women you
so admire do?"
Cord tried unsuccessfully to swallow a chuckle. Warren and
Dinah scowled at him.
"I have to say, I think Warren is right," Dinah
chimed in. "I think you latched on to Warren as if he
were the last life raft in the ocean."
"Oh, what do you know?" Maggie retorted. "You
and Cord are so into each other you barely know anyone else
is around."
"We're here, aren't we?" Dinah asked,
completely unfazed by Maggie's nasty tone. "We
can't be that self-absorbed."
"How did you find me, by the way? I thought I'd
covered my tracks pretty well." The truth was, she
hadn't tried all that hard. In fact, in her state of
self-pity, she hadn't been able to imagine anyone caring
enough to come after her.
"I'm a journalist," Dinah reminded her. "I
know how to make phone calls. Besides, I know you. I knew
you'd never go too far from home. Charleston is in your
blood."
"More's the pity," Maggie grumbled. She really
did need to broaden her horizons. Maybe that was what was
wrong with her life. She'd never had any desire to be
anyplace except South Carolina's Low Country. Maybe if
she'd traveled the world the way Dinah had during her
career as a foreign correspondent for a TV network, Maggie
would have discovered some other place where she could be
perfectly happy. At least it would have gotten her out from
under her mother's judgmental gaze.
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