...And Never Let HerGo

planning to rent a house for the summer of 1994 in Sea Isle City with Eileen Duffy; Anne Marie felt she couldn’t back out on that. She explained all of her concerns to Tom as she gently refused his offer of support.
    Tom seemed to understand. He was so nice about
everything.
If something made her happy, he wanted her to have it. He told her again and again that he got a great deal of pleasure in seeing someone else happy. The money that was for him only a drop in the bucket was
supposed
to be used to make others happy. For instance, hadn’t she and Jill and Ginny enjoyed the lunch at Tiffin? That was the kind of thing he meant. He cared about
her
and was concerned only about
her.
    Anne Marie and most of her friends lived from paycheck to paycheck, with the end of the month often looking pretty lean. She made around $31,000 a year as Tom Carper’s scheduling secretary, less than $2,000 a month after taxes, and she tried to stay away from credit cards. Still, there always seemed to be something unexpected she needed to pay for. And she loved clothes. Anne Marie had gone through school wearing hand-me-downs, cheap imitations, and making do with what she could afford on a waitress’s salary. Nowshe attended so many functions where women wore wonderful clothes, and she longed for them herself.
    The first spring she was secretly seeing Tom, Anne Marie went shopping with Jill Morrison to find a dress to wear to a family wedding. They went to Talbot’s and Anne Marie tried on a pale peach linen dress that suited her perfectly. But when she and Jill looked at the price tag, they gasped. It was way beyond Anne Marie’s means. Nothing else she looked at could compete with the peach linen, so they left Talbot’s without buying anything.
    “About a week after the wedding,” Jill recalled, “I asked Anne Marie, ‘What did you end up wearing?’ and she said, ‘The peach linen dress.’ She explained that Mr. Capano purchased it for her.”
    A NNE M ARIE had begun an emotional roller-coaster ride. On April 22, Tom invited her to his house “to eat.” She did not tell her diary if they were alone or if he had somehow managed to make her appear a casual business acquaintance. She only wrote, “My friend and I went to his house to eat. What a house! He enchants me. During the weekend, my thoughts are devoted to Tomas. I am afraid because I am in love with a man who has a family. I need to realize that our relationship will never be anything other than a secret.”
    On April 26, Tom came to Anne Marie’s house to have dinner, and afterward, he told her gently that she deserved to have a man without children, a man who had a lot of time to spend with her, because she was “very special and deserved much more.” She was bereft when he said that they could not go on seeing each other. And she watched from her window as he got into his car and drove away, probably, she thought, for the last time. She blamed herself, as she always blamed herself when someone left her behind. “I know it is my problem and my fault, because from the very beginning, I knew what I was getting myself into. After he left, I was so empty, sad, lonely. I [had] told him things that were hidden inside me. I feel so comfortable with him—I can say anything. I went to bed and cried myself to sleep.”
    Anne Marie grieved for two days and then Tom was back, calling to tell her that he loved her and could not stay away from her. They agreed to keep seeing each other, and her world seemed temporarily brighter, although she felt sorry for him because he told her he had to go to some stupid law seminar that he dreaded. “He is going to Canada from Wednesday to Friday for law school,” she wrote in her diary. “Poor thing. Ciao Tomas, I love you.”
    B OB C ONNER had known about Anne Marie’s eating disorder for some time, but she had never really admitted it to him, and he was waiting for her to bring it up. On this Thursday, the same day she and Tom had agreed to continue their affair, she confessed her obsession with food to Conner.
    I cried a lot as well as informed him of my eating disorder. I realize how poor of an eater I’ve become, and that it’s not healthy. However, it feels great every time I get on the scale if the needle has decreased from before! My ideal weight is 125. I can do it. I now weigh 133. Eight more pounds. I could easily do that in a week! I also feel that my world is so out of control, and the only thing I can control is