One More Time (8 page)

She fled. As she ran down the corridor, her mind turned over and over the improbable truth, trying to make sense of nonsense. She had forgotten a lecture.

She had failed.

And she had failed spectacularly. No half measures for Dr. Leslie Coxwell. No losing an essay paper or forgetting a well-turned segue. Nope, she’d forgotten an entire lecture in one fell swoop.

She made one stop en route to her office, at the vending machine in the lobby below the offices of the history department. She had enough change to buy two chocolate bars, and even though they were just Jersey Milk, she had inhaled one of them immediately.

Sometimes even a great bra wasn’t enough.

* * *

Leslie was shaking when she got back to her office: the aftershock was setting in. She was still mortified, but already thinking about the repercussions of her screw-up.

She could hear her phone ringing on the other side of the locked door, and haste made her drop her keys. Of course, the lock jammed again, fighting her attempt to open it. She finally got the door open and lunged into her office, half-convinced that whoever was calling would hang up as soon as she touched the receiver.

“Hello?” Leslie winced at her tone. Great. She sounded breathless, like a telephone sex provider—or at least how she imagined they would sound. She took a deep breath and tried for more professional tone. “Dr. Coxwell here.”

“Hi.”

One word and her knees gave out. The man’s power over her was frightening sometimes.

No, it was only frightening when she believed that what she had always been afraid would happen
was
happening, right this minute.

The fact was that Leslie had been blind-sided by Matthew Coxwell one random Wednesday morning a good eighteen years before and been smitten ever since. She hadn’t believed then that he—wealthy, handsome, wry, destined apparently for success—had been interested in
her
—middle-class (if you measured with your thumb on the scale), plain, destined for a dry-as-dust academic career.

She had spent much of their marriage (and all of their so-called dating) pretty much convinced that he was going to figure out at any minute that he’d made a mistake. His mother had figured it out right away, after all. Leslie had expected for eighteen years that the other shoe was going to drop at any moment.

She could hear that shoe hitting the ground somewhere, with Matt’s single word of greeting, and suddenly, the bottom fell right out of her universe. She had hoped and yearned and tried for eighteen years, and it hadn’t been enough.

She dropped into her chair, knowing she’d sound breathless again. “Hi.” She reached over and flicked the door shut with her fingertips, glad for once that her office wasn’t big enough to swing a cat. She could reach everything without getting out of her chair and on this day, that was an advantage.

“I’m in Chicago.”

Hope woke up and took a look around. Had he changed his mind? “I thought you were going to New Orleans.”

“I have a connection here, and a bit of time.”

Hope died, a writhing death on hot pavement with a stiletto through its heart. It was a nasty death, the kind of death nothing could ever deserve.

Leslie didn’t say anything more, couldn’t say anything because of the lump in her throat. Matt’s voice sounded gravelly, rougher than it usually did but maybe it was the connection.

Maybe it was the Scotch.

Maybe it was regret.

Maybe she’d never know for sure.

Leslie felt again the burden of things unsaid, secrets that she’d never meant to become secrets—no, there was only one thing she’d never mentioned to Matt, one thing that had grown in silence beyond all expectation. Her tongue was swollen with it now, especially given what she had just done.

But where do you start to talk, to
really
talk, when you haven’t done it for years? How do you begin to tell someone you love about the sacrifice you made to keep him around, especially when he’s going going gone? How do you admit that you haven’t told him what you were really feeling because you loved him enough to protect him from your nasty little truth?

How do you cough up the nerve to show your vulnerabilities, especially when he’s already out the door, maybe forever?

Leslie didn’t know.

Finally, Matt cleared his throat. “You’re so quiet.”

“I was always taught that if I couldn’t say anything nice, then I shouldn’t say anything at all.”

“But you’re usually quiet.”

Leslie kept silent, letting him work that out all by himself.

“You don’t get it, do you?” he asked softly. He sounded so close that his voice made the hair on the back of her neck rise. She could imagine him, leaning in a telephone stall, receiver tucked under his chin, hand braced against the wall. Maybe he’d loosened his tie again. She closed her eyes, imagining that he was whispering directly into her ear.

His next words were somewhat less than the romantic murmur that would have been ideal. “Laforini was guilty, Leslie. There was absolutely no doubt about it. I had to lose the case.”

“Had to?” She couldn’t bite back her sarcasm completely, not this time, not this day. “I thought it was your job as defense attorney to, um,
defend
your client.”

“Right. How could I have lived with myself if I had encouraged any mitigation of his sentence?” His tone hardened. “He was a mobster through and through. He’d killed lots of people himself and ordered the killing of many others—the charges were only the tip of the iceberg. The police reports were something else. Do you want someone like that on the streets? He didn’t deserve a defense, so I didn’t give him much of one.”

A new fear seized Leslie. “But wait, if he has mob connections...”

“Don’t worry about that.” Matt was dismissive. “He just thinks I’m incompetent. You know, I was sure he would change lawyers. I don’t think he had a lot of choices, though, or as many allies as people thought. You’re one of the few who know that it wasn’t stupidity on my part.”

Leslie wasn’t so sure that she was glad to be in on this particular secret.

Matt cleared his throat. “The point, Leslie, is that I couldn’t have done anything else. How could you have looked at me if I had kept the truth from getting its day in court?”

Leslie straightened in her chair, a spark of anger lighting within her. “You aren’t suggesting that you did this for me?”

“No, I’m saying I did it
because
of you.”

“I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t you want to win the case that was your golden opportunity to have a successful career?”

“A golden opportunity to become like my father.” He snorted. “Thanks, but I’ll pass.”

“But it was the one you had to win to permanently join the partnership with your father. You won’t blame me for your not having a high power career. I wouldn’t have stopped you...”

“But I didn’t want that partnership. I never did.”

Leslie fought to push her feelings back into their neatly labeled boxes. She never lost her temper, and she wasn’t going to start today. She pulled away the neck of her sweater, reassuring herself with a peek at the silvery Italian bra. “You might have mentioned as much,” she said, then balled the chocolate bar wrapper in her fist and flung it toward the garbage can.

She missed.

“Wait a minute. You can’t have really expected me to win.”

“Why not? You were his defense attorney, and I know you’re neither stupid nor incompetent.”

His voice rose in anger. “
You expected me to win?
”

Hers was not an unreasonable expectation. Leslie took a shaking breath. “Matt, you’re a lawyer. Winning court cases would be your job...”

“I never wanted to be a lawyer.”

One more time, Leslie was shaken not only by what Matt said but how firmly he said it. How could she not have known this? Her sense that he had become a stranger returned, redoubled. “But you went to law school,” she said more cautiously. “People who go to law school become lawyers. You must have wanted to be a lawyer!”

“I never wanted to go, but I never had a choice.”

“But, but, you never told me that!” Leslie was startled to learn that she wasn’t the only one who hadn’t been sharing secrets.

“Do you really think I’m like my brother, James?”

“No, but most lawyers—most men—aren’t like your brother, James.” Leslie rubbed her temple with her fingertips. Her words faltered. “Matt, you graduated at the top of your class. I thought you loved law.”

“Well, I don’t. I never did. I did what I had to do to get people off my back.”

He was so definite, almost accusatory, as if he was disappointed in her for not guessing what he hadn’t told her. And that made Leslie mad. “Funny you never mentioned it.”

“I thought you must know, on some level, that I wanted to do something else.”

“How would I have known that without you telling me?” What else had he wanted to do?

“Why do you think I stayed home with Annette?”

“You had a home office. Lots of people work at home when they have children: you had a choice to do so and I didn’t.”

“I had a home-based real estate law practice because I never wanted to play the game.”

“But if you didn’t want to play the game, what were you doing even taking the Laforini case? Then why didn’t you just say no to your father in the first place?” Leslie found her voice rising. This was not her fault! “Why didn’t you just decline the privilege of being his partner two years ago?”

Why did you have to give me such hope?
she wanted to shout at him, but bit it back.

“For the same reason I went to law school and wrote the bar exam. My father never took no for an answer when he wanted that answer to be yes. The only way to persuade him that I wasn’t cut out to be his successor and partner was to prove it to him in a courtroom. So, that’s what I did. He always wanted hard evidence, preferably from a court of law, so that’s what he got.”

It made a treacherous kind of sense.

Worse, Matt was proud of himself. Leslie spun in her chair, her frustration rising to dangerous levels. She should have hung up, she knew it. She should have just cut the conversation short before she said too much.

But she couldn’t do it.

Not today.

Not when she had hoped for so much and it looked as if she’d get nothing at all. Not when she’d spent two years hoping that he’d win the case, get himself a partnership that would pay a decent wage, and leave her with an option when Dinkelmann got demanding.

“So, you just decided,” she said, unable to hide her unhappiness with this. “You didn’t think that maybe we should talk about such a decision before it was too late? Or had you already decided that you were going to walk out of our marriage?”

The words were like poison on her tongue. Leslie was sure that her mouth would swell with hives just for letting them pass.

Matt’s voice hardened. “I was sure that we were in agreement. I thought you’d be glad that I hadn’t compromised my principles. I thought you’d be glad that I wasn’t following the Coxwell legal eagle career path.”

“You don’t maybe think you might have bent that principle a bit, just to get yourself a paycheck? Even just for a while?”

“What for? I don’t need fancy cars and big houses and acres of lawn to feel like a big man. I’m not my father, Leslie. I don’t measure my own worth by what other people think of my toys.”

“Well, maybe it’s time for you to think about what other people want,” Leslie said before she could stop herself. “Don’t take this wrong, Matt, I want you to be happy. I just wouldn’t mind if I got to be happy, too.”

“But you
are
happy. You’re the most content person I know. You love your job...”

How could he be so unaware of her feelings?

“Content? You make me sound like a cow!”

“That’s not what I meant...”

“I’m as far from content as anyone can get. I hate my job!” Leslie shouted, interrupting him, only realizing how true it was when the forbidden words left her mouth. “I despise it! But I don’t have a choice, do I? Principles don’t pay for groceries or property taxes or electricity or gas for the car or even the car itself.” Her voice rose with every sentence and she didn’t care. She had kept such a tight lid on these thoughts that they were almost revelations to her, as well. “Principles don’t cover mortgage payments or provide for university tuitions, much less retirement plans. Principles don’t mean
anything
!”

“You can’t possibly believe that...”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe.” Leslie took a deep breath. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll get back to work, so I can pay off the credit card bill for that new suit you’re wearing.”

Then, because she remembered belatedly that Matt was headed straight to Sharan, because she realized that she had given him a whole lot of reasons to not just hurry there, but stay there, and because she knew she was going to cry, Leslie threw the receiver back into the cradle.

Well done
, she had time to tell herself before her tears started. She never cried, though it was hard to remind herself of that truth when the tears were streaming down her face.

She dropped her forehead to her desk and wailed like a baby.

The only mercy was that her office door was closed.

Leslie hated her job. It was true, and now that she had uttered the thought, it was inescapable. She hated the lectures and she hated the politics and she hated all the energy she had to expend on people who really didn’t care about history. She hated that she couldn’t pursue her own research—and she despised Dinkelmann and his agendas.

But she was trapped here, trapped as surely as a rat in a cage. Annette and Matt, the house, the car, the 401K’s, everything was dependent upon her and her paycheck.

And if Matt was gone, her responsibilities were doubled. There wouldn’t even be a trickle coming in from his practice.

It was depressing to think that Mrs. Beaton was right: Leslie would have to sell the house to give Matt his half, and she and Annette would have to move to an apartment.

She’d have gone full circle, just as her father had always threatened. Maybe they’d end up in a grubby little tenement like the one she’d grown up in.