...And Never Let HerGo

my food intake. I know one thing, Prozac is not for me. Bob is aware, so I suppose we’ll take it from here. Cheers—AMF
    Anne Marie did not expect to see Tom the next week, since he would be in Canada for the law seminar. It may have been a relief for her not to listen for the phone, wondering if he was going to start the come-here, go-away, come-here discussions again. She
knew
he had gone away, at least for a time.

Chapter Ten
    T HAT A PRIL OF 1994, when Tom told Anne Marie that he wanted to continue seeing her, he was hardly a man alone. Not only did he have a wife, but Debby MacIntyre had been his mistress for almost twelve years. Tom had made Debby understand that his marriage was unhappy, but divorce wasn’t even a consideration. “I’m miserable in my marriage,” he told her in a soft, hopeless voice, “but I can’t leave my kids. You know that, Deb.”
    Of course she did. From the way Tom described his situation, she pictured him living a life of quiet desperation. Kay was a truly nice person, but she and Tom were so different, and Debby had seen for herself how he doted on his girls. It would break Tom’s heart to have to walk away from his four daughters.
    Debby had been caught in an unhappy marriage and she had escaped—but then,
she
had her children with her. She couldn’t even imagine what it would have been like to live away from them. Shemade sure their father saw them as often as he liked. Victoria and Steve needed their father, too, and she and her ex-husband had worked it out. They saw him every other weekend and stayed with him every Wednesday night.
    “Tom loved his girls,” Debby recalled. “I thought he would do
anything
for them.” She could empathize with that; she would do anything for her children.
    Tom was a highly organized man and he liked things to move smoothly, with chores and events fitting neatly into the time slots assigned to them. From his comments to Debby, it sounded as though his home wasn’t run as efficiently as he would have liked, although she knew that it was
Kay
who saw that the girls got to school, to their games, to doctors’ appointments, to birthday parties. She couldn’t have been doing that bad a job, but how could anyone know what went on behind the walls of someone else’s home? Tom made an appearance at the girls’ games and meets, but his career rarely allowed him to attend an entire event, while Kay was always there.
    Debby’s own life revolved around her children—who were now in junior high and high school at Tatnall—her job, and Tom. He needed her to be his friend and confidante as well as his lover; and she tried to always be there for him, to listen to whatever was on his mind and provide a safe haven from the pressures of his world. She had been with him through his years with the city, through the time he advised Governor Castle, and now when he was back in private practice. He was so pressed for time and usually late for the times they had arranged to be together, sometimes
hours
late. But Debby always waited for him and never chided him, even though she was often terribly disappointed.
    In all the years of their relationship, Debby had never once given Tom an ultimatum or told him she wanted to end their affair. She was so afraid that he would leave her, and she could not imagine her life without him.
    Two or three times, Tom had alluded to some woman—a secretary at his office, she believed—who had taken too much for granted, pushed too hard. Debby thought that relationship had gone on a year or two before she came into Tom’s life; she recalled her ex-husband saying something about Tom’s having trouble over a woman. It hadn’t mattered to her then, and she hadn’t listened closely. But she knew Tom was like quicksilver; if anyone tried to trap him, he would be gone.
    “I never rocked the boat,” she remembered. “I always wantedto please him, because I wanted his praise. I wanted him to love me. I thought that was the way I had to be for him to keep loving me. There were a number of times in our relationship over the years when I knew that it was wrong, I knew it was going nowhere, and that I had to
try
and break it off, and I
couldn’t
do it. I didn’t have the strength to do it. I never threatened to leave him. I never, ever could say that. I was always afraid that
he
would leave me.”
    And she could not have borne that. One bleak October, he
had
left her for several weeks, but he had come back. Debby had