...And Never Let HerGo

the street from the Faheys; and from that point on Jackie considered Anne Marie her best friend. During one period when things were rough at home, Anne Marie had lived with the Binnersleys for several months.
    A FTER she graduated from college in Rhode Island, Jackie persuaded Anne Marie to come up to Hyannis Port, on Cape Cod. It was another wonderful summer. They called each other silly nicknames and talked about their hopes and their problems. Anne Marie’s name was Annie Bananie, and sometimes Anal Annie because of her compulsive neatness.
    When Anne Marie returned to Delaware, that long, good summer of 1991 was not yet over. She visited a girlfriend who was sharing a house on the Jersey shore at Sea Isle City. She also made another friend who would be very important to her: Kim Horstman. Kim, along with Jackie, Beth, and a young woman named Ginny Columbus—whose brother, Paul, Annie was dating, the first serious boyfriend she had ever had—would remain part of the inner circle of Annie’s friends.
    Still, even though Anne Marie had numerous close friends, there were perhaps only three or four in whom she confided, and those who felt they knew her intimately would have been surprised to discover how impenetrable the invisible wall she hid behind really was.
    O NE of Anne Marie’s professors had been particularly helpful in getting her back into Wesley. She was most adept at languages and was fluent in Spanish. The professor was married, but his wife was European and lived abroad. When Anne Marie expressed an interest in an internship in Spain, her mentor helped her facilitate that and found a Spanish family she could live with.
    Brian was her closest sibling in age, and perhaps in terms of bonding. She called him Seymour. It was an inside joke and he didn’t mind. He was a man of great sensitivity who could connect without words with people he loved, and now he was concerned that Annie’s teacher might have more than a professorlike interest in her. As it turned out, he was right. Brian warned his sister about the dangers of married men, and she just grinned. Didn’t he think she had good sense? After all the waitress jobs she had had, she was perfectly capable of spotting a come-on, and also of turning it away. She told Brian that the professor
had
approached the subject, but he had graciously accepted her answer when she told him she would not even consider such a relationship.
    “He turned out to be a nice guy,” Brian recalled.
    Her time in Spain was a good experience for Anne Marie, and she longed to go back one day. It had been like a vacation from her life. Afterward, she delighted in finding people who could converse with her in Spanish, and she sprinkled Spanish phrases through her conversation when she spoke English.
    Back in Dover, refreshed and feeling much more serene, Anne Marie got her degree in political science from Wesley College on May 9, 1992. She had broken up with Paul Columbus in the summer of 1991 after a three-year relationship, but they were still good friends. Although she had dated lots of men, Paul was her first serious boyfriend. He was an aeronautical engineer and a pilot now, and he had found a job in Denver. Their breakup was so benign that Anne Marie moved in with his family for a while after she graduated. She and Ginny Columbus had become dear friends, and Ginny and Paul’s mother thought of Annie as another daughter.
    A NNE M ARIE got another waitress job—at T.G.I. Friday’s on the Concord Pike in Wilmington—to see her through while she looked for employment that would enable her to use her degree. A friend from Wesley encouraged her to apply for an internship with the OAS—Organization of American States—in Washington, D.C., and she was accepted. She would use her fluent Spanish to translate documents.
    Washington was an exciting and somewhat intimidating spot for a young woman. Anne Marie’s internship was funded for only four months, but it would give her an up-close look at national government. Because she didn’t know anyone in D.C., she went through the “Housemate Wanted” ads in the Washington papers and found a place to share with other women her age. She worked at the OAS on weekdays and commuted back to her job at Friday’s on the weekends, a two-hour drive. As frightened as she was of change and being away from the people who made her feel safe, no one in Washington ever knew it. Anne Marie had guts. Most young women in their early twenties