...And Never Let HerGo

deserving of such a good woman.
    A LTHOUGH she kept it to herself, there was a lot going on in Anne Marie’s life away from the office—some good things and some frightening to her. More than ever, she needed to have a sense of control over her world. But there were some elements that she couldn’t regulate. Her brother Mark had been in and out of rehab in a vain attempt to free himself of his addiction to alcohol. “He is worse now than he ever was,” she wrote in her diary. “I no longer have a brother Mark, because that person inflicts too much pain in my life. It’s much easier (emotionally) to leave him out. I spent too much of my life living with an alcoholic—that part of my life is over! Not forgotten—
over.”
    She didn’t mean the part about shutting Mark out; she loved him too much. But she was so afraid for him and for the rest of her family. She could not bear to see the dread cycle play out again.
    But far worse than her worries about her brother was Anne Marie’s own conscience when it nattered at her about the secrets she was keeping from her family. She was involved with a totally unacceptable and unavailable man. She wasn’t sure whether she would be—by definition—an adulteress or a fornicator, but both were forbidden by the Catholic Church, and her religion was as important to her as her family was.
    On her twenty-eighth birthday—January 27, 1994—Anne Marie gave her heart away to the man she trusted to take care of it. “I have fallen in love with a very special person,” she told her diary (but no one else),
    whose name I choose to leave anonymous. We know who each other are. It happened the night of my 28th Birthday. We have built an everlasting friendship. I feel free around him, and like he says, he “makes my heart smile”! He deserves some happiness in his life, and it makes me feel good to know that I can provide him with such happiness. Who knows if anything serious will ever happen between the two of us. (I only know what I dream.) Ciao, AMF.
    T OM C APANO insinuated himself into Anne Marie’s life like a bindweed, whose heart-shaped leaves look so innocuous at first but which wraps its runners around whatever it selects until it nearly strangles its host. Tom wanted to know every detail of what went on in Anne Marie’s life. Few women experience the kind of rapt attention he paid her, encouraging her to share her problems and her triumphs with him. And he wanted to meet all of her girlfriends.
    Sometime in the spring of 1994, Tom suggested that Anne Marie pick two of her best friends, saying that he would take them all out to lunch at Tiffin, a very fancy restaurant where they would never have gone on their own. Anne Marie invited Jill Morrison and Ginny Columbus. When Jill asked suspiciously why Tom was taking them out to lunch, Anne Marie replied, “Tommy likes to do nice things for people that they might not normally be able to do on their own.”
    The four of them did have a nice time. Tom was a charming host and he told them to order whatever they wanted. He was very warm and pleasant to all of them, but it was clear that his eyes darted continually toward Anne Marie to see
her
reaction to the splendid lunch and the ambiance of Tiffin. She just smiled, happy to see him with two of her dearest friends.
    But for all of her apparent happiness, Anne Marie was struggling with her life on many levels that spring of 1994. She was very grateful to her sister and brothers. As adults, they were determined to maintain solid family traditions and to create for
their
children the kind of childhood they had never known. Except for Mark, who was struggling with his own demons, they all had good jobs and nice houses. Good lives. Brian was a teacher and coach at the Friends School, Kathleen was the clinical coordinator of education at the Bryn Mawr Rehab Hospital, Robert was in commercial mortgage banking, and Kevin was a financial planner for Allstate Insurance. Anne Marie was part of everything they did, and they were all working hard to erase memories of the unhappy years. Robert, Kathleen, and Brian were happily married, and starting families. Mark’s marriage to Debbie Gioffre had ended in divorce, but Anne Marie had a very special relationship with their son, Brian, born in 1991. For the three years before she disappeared, she made it an unbreakable habit to have dinner with her nephew Brian every Monday night. She wanted him to feel that he was a very important