...And Never Let HerGo

“Codependency issues.” “Turns to conflict to avoid depression.” “Emotionally fragile—feels powerless.” “Self-esteem issues.” “Struggling with deeply held fear of abandonment, sense of aloneness, but with a core of ‘unlovedness.’ ” “So frightened of hurting others.” “Fear of rejection.”
    The Anne Marie she showed to the world was the envy of a lot of young women, who viewed her as having a wonderfully exciting life. Inside, she was fighting to rid herself of the self-image imprinted by her father’s drunken taunts. But she had had the guts to seek out help and to peel the scabs away from her blocked memories and deal with her problems. She had a great deal of inner strength and she was making progress. With Bob Conner, whom she trusted completely, Anne Marie was learning ways to assert herself, beginning to believe that she was a good person, a smart person, and that she deserved to be happy.
    And to be loved. She wanted so much to be loved.
    J ILL M ORRISON and Anne Marie went to the Tour Du Pont bicycle races at Rodney Square in May of 1994 and watched the cyclists who had gathered from all over the world compete. Afterward, they attended a party in the old Holiday Inn. One floor of the garage was closed off so the riders could bring their bicycles, and band musicbounced off the low ceilings. It was a chance to meet the cyclists, and Anne Marie looked for some of the Spanish-speaking competitors. She tried to make them feel comfortable in a country where they didn’t speak the language, surprising them with her fluent Spanish. She loved showing off her Spanish.
    Jill was unabashedly flirting with one of the coaches of the bicycling team from Spain. As she and Anne Marie walked out, Jill laughed and said, “He was pretty flirty, Annie. Maybe I should have kissed him. I’ve never kissed an older man before.”
    Anne Marie stopped, turned around, and said slowly, “Well,
I
have.”
    From the look on her face, Jill knew whom she meant. It had to be Tom Capano, and it sounded like more than the good-night kiss Anne Marie had described after she’d been to dinner with him six months earlier. She was apparently still seeing him, and that gave Jill a kind of sinking feeling. Annie could seem so together, but her good friends knew she wasn’t.
    T HERE were a lot of changes in store for Anne Marie that spring. Bronwyn was going back to New Zealand, and Jackie was getting married in July, so that meant the end of their sharing Jackie’s house. But it was more than that for Anne Marie; she was losing another home. She had no choice but to look for an apartment that she could afford on her own. She was saving her money, putting a little aside each month, for another reason, too. She and her brother Brian had decided that the best way to use their share of the inheritance from their grandmother’s estate would be to visit Ireland and walk through the places where Katherine McGettigan had lived when she was a girl. There was just enough for plane fare, but they needed to save so they could rent a car and pay for lodgings.
    Annie and Seymour in Ireland
—they both liked the concept and looked forward to the trip that summer of 1994. It was a positive goal for Anne Marie. She and Brian were so much alike and such good friends. If they could trace their roots in Ireland, they would not only honor Nan’s memory but also establish some continuity in their own lives. The two of them, who had been the last to leave the childhood home that had been sacrificed to debt and drink, would make new memories.
    In the spring of 1994, Anne Marie was already trying to keep from being too dependent upon Tom Capano. He was offering her so many of the things she needed: a listening ear, the protectivenessof an older man—something she had never known—and the things that money could buy, also something she had never known. It was so tempting and so easy for her to love him. But she knew he could never offer her what she
really
wanted. He couldn’t give her marriage or babies or self-respect. She couldn’t take him to her family’s holiday celebrations; he had a whole other life that would always keep him away from her when she needed him.
    It was very difficult for Anne Marie to turn away from
anyone,
so fearful was she that she might hurt their feelings. Tom was being very reasonable and very nice, but she felt the pull of invisible strings. He knew that she desperately wanted to make a side trip from