...And Never Let HerGo

off as if she was only some woman he’d spent a couple of nights in bed with and couldn’t wait to be rid of. They smiled and talked, and it was OK again.
    And then it was all ruined when they started the half-hour drive to Wilmington and Debby realized that she had left her purse on the floor beneath the table. They were on the south side of the Philadelphia airport before she reached for her purse and couldn’t find it. She froze, certain that Tom would be absolutely furious with her when she told him.
    And he was. “I can’t believe you could do something so stupid!” he snarled. “So unbelievably dumb.”
    She begged him to let her call the Panorama on the cell phone and he nodded, his jaw set.
    “And they had my pocketbook,” Debby said. “So we turned around and went back. And I apologized profusely. By that point in our relationship, I was constantly apologizing to him about something. I was sorry . . . sorry . . . sorry. I was sorry for things that I didn’t even need to be sorry for, and I was probably getting on his nerves. He made me feel like such an idiot. He was so verbally abusive that night.”
    It was not a propitious ending for their trip, and Debby got home feeling horrible. “He was obsessed with keeping our relationship secret,” she said, “and I had left my purse with all my ID in it for anyone to see.”
    She would have felt far worse if she had known that Tom was in the first stages of an affair with a woman seventeen years younger than she was. But it had never even occurred to her that there might be any other woman in his life besides Kay. Debby believed that she and Tom had achieved such a degree of intimacy that they were almost
closer
than a married couple. However cruel he might be when he was in a mood, she could always take comfort in the knowledge that Tom had chosen her to have an affair with out of all the women he encountered. He might get angry with her, but he always came back.
    A NNE M ARIE was seeing Bob Conner for psychological counseling every week that spring of 1994, although she didn’t want anyone to know. For that matter, few who knew her would have ever believed that she needed any therapy. She was consummately professional at her job, fun to be around, and she looked great. Her laughter often bounced off the walls of the governor’s outer office; it sounded like the laughter of a woman without a trouble in the world. She had a ribald sense of humor and could scatter profanity through her conversation and still look like an angel.
    Sometimes she dropped into O’Friel’s Irish Pub. She would stand near the bar and bellow
“Keveyyy!!!”
at the top of her lungs, and then laugh when the handsome redheaded proprietor popped his head out of the back room. With its brick walls and wooden floors, O’Friel’s might as well have been located in Dublin as in Wilmington; it was the headquarters for so many people in Wilmington, Irish and Italian alike. Many major political decisions had been hammered out at O’Friel’s. For the Faheys, though, it was more like home. Anne Marie felt completely at ease there, and she should have because they all loved her.
    Ed Freel liked to tease Anne Marie because she was working forthe governor. “We got you after all, Annie!” he said. “You said you’d never work for us—but we got you.”
    “I said I wouldn’t work
here,
Ed,” she replied with a grin. “And I’m not serving beer, now am I?”
    But for Ed Freel, the governor’s office was like the family business, too, and he was pleased that Anne Marie was doing so well. She was like a little sister to him and Kevin and Bud. They had known her since she was such a little girl, and now she was five feet ten, all grown up and beautiful.
    None of them knew how unhappy and anxious Anne Marie was behind her wide smile. She hid it so well; she had been hiding her true feelings for most of her life. She had constructed a facade that made her seem comfortable with bawdy comments, an earthy young woman who wasn’t easily shocked. Nothing could have been further from the truth. She was not nearly as worldly-wise as she liked to pretend, but she never batted an eye in public. Despite her belief that she was overweight at 133 pounds, she had a lovely figure. And yet she worried about every ounce she put in her mouth.
    Bob Conner summed up his sessions with Anne Marie in scribbled notes that were typically hard to decipher. But the same themes popped up again and again: