...And Never Let HerGo

attractive, but felt she’d been brushed off.
    She hadn’t. Eight days later, they had a real date and got along fine without an audience studying them. And by October, Anne Marie’s calendar was full of dates with Mike. Her entry for the fifteenth read, “1st Night w/Mike,” and that night marked the end of a long, hurtful relationship and the beginning of one that she had longed for most of her life. Anne Marie didn’t mean that they had spent that night together, but this was clearly the beginning of a love match.
    The governor could retire undefeated as a matchmaker—he had guessed right. Anne Marie and Mike could not have been better suited. She took him to visit her family and he fit in as if he’d always known them.
    Everyone was happy for them. Almost everyone.
    Tom Capano had to be the one who chose when to walk away from a relationship. He could not permit anyone to leave him. Debby had never tried; she was too frightened of losing him. Anne Marie had made futile efforts to break up with him, but he knew her trigger points so well that she never succeeded. All he had to do was tap into her guilt, her loyalty, her distress that she might have hurt him, and she was back. She had chafed at the bonds that he began to tighten early in 1995, but usually she exploded only when she caught him tracking her movements.
    And then Tom would pull his double-reverse-psychology dialogue, telling her that she deserved so much more than a backstreet romance with a married man, with
him.
“You deserve your
own
Patrick Hosey,” he would say, referring to Kathleen’s husband, who was, indeed, a wonderful husband to her sister. “You shouldn’t waste your time with me.”
    And it had always worked. It wasn’t until Anne Marie met Mike Scanlan that she realized what she did, indeed, deserve. And Mike seemed to be her “own Patrick Hosey.” She didn’t have to slipout of town to have dinner with a married man. She and Mike could go out in Wilmington and see their friends. She could dream of living in her own house and have children of her own instead of just house-sitting and baby-sitting. She didn’t have to tiptoe around Mike’s moods; he was even tempered and good natured. He was thirty; Tom was almost forty-seven.
    But meeting Mike meant that Anne Marie still had to keep secrets. She knew that Tom mustn’t sense how much she liked being with Mike. He had never meant it when he told her to leave him and find someone she deserved. Indeed, she didn’t even mention Mike to him for a long time. But even more than that, she dreaded the thought that Mike would ever know just how involved she had been with Tom. Mike was a devout Irish Catholic, and she hated to contemplate what he might think of her if he knew about Tom. Once she met Mike, Anne Marie avoided compromising situations with Tom. She had always been ashamed of being intimate with him, and that was over for good. And now she would have given anything if she could just blink her eyes and make that part of her life go away.
    T HERE were other women who had tried to make their connection to Tom Capano just go away, only to learn that getting free of him was like trying to escape from quicksand. He had been married when they met him, too, but that hadn’t kept him from pursuing them. One of the most frightened of Tom’s women was Linda Marandola. She was twenty-five, beautiful in an earthy way, with a cascade of thick dark hair, when Tom first met her in the late seventies. Like Debby and Anne Marie, Linda had found Tom very nice and quite kind, but she had no interest in him as a man. At that time, she was engaged to be married.
    Linda was a legal secretary, working for one of Tom’s friends, attorney Ted Sprouse.* Sprouse and Tom both lived on West Seventeenth Street and they often socialized, and it had seemed natural enough to occasionally invite Linda to go along with them to lunch when Tom dropped into Sprouse’s office.
    Tom was five years older than Linda, but he always made an effort to draw her into their conversations and she liked him. When he showed up at Sprouse’s office one day and her boss couldn’t take time for lunch, Tom smiled and said, “I’ll just have to take Linda, then.”
    That was the beginning of their lunches together, and it was soon apparent that Tom was very attracted to her. If she was honest with herself, Linda would have admitted she felt a spark too—butshe
was
engaged, and he was married. He called her office