...And Never Let HerGo

with Anne Marie; the three of them would go to La Famiglia in Philadelphia in mid-January. Despite his tendency to meddle in her business affairs, Jackie was grateful to Tom for all the help he had given her in setting up Java Jack’s and, because he seemed so sad, she really wanted to help him.
    Anne Marie was sad too—sad that she hadn’t known Mike was going to enter her life. Her friend Jennifer Bartels Haughton was in Wilmington for Christmas, and Anne Marie took Jennifer out to dinner at Toscana. Afterward they sat in Anne Marie’s car for a long time, talking. Jennifer gave Annie her Christmas gift, and Annie started to cry. She cried for a long time. “She was crying because she said she didn’t deserve Mike,” Jennifer remembered. “There were so many things about her that she hadn’t told him and she was really scared she would lose him if she was honest with him.”

PART TWO
    Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon
thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is
cruel as the grave.
    S ONG OF S OLOMON 8:6

Chapter Sixteen
    D EBBY M ACINTYRE WAS E XCITED about New Year’s Eve 1995. It was the first time that she and Tom would be together on this holiday. She had promised him a lobster dinner with all the trimmings, and he seemed pleased about that. It was wonderful to be able to have Tom visit when Victoria and Steve were home, and he was so nice to them. Steve particularly admired Tom, and Tom seemed to go out of his way to be, if not a father figure, a grown man willing to take time for a boy. This time, however, neither of her children would be home on New Year’s Eve. And Debby worked all day cooking and making sure that everything was perfect for her dinner with Tom. She set a graceful table with the china and silver that she rarely had occasion to use.
    But Tom was late, and when he arrived at Debby’s house on Delaware Avenue, he was in a foul mood. “He was moody, sulky, and depressed,” she would recall. “I asked him what I’d done wrong—and he would only say, ‘It’s not you.’ ”
    That didn’t help her feel any better. This night was to have been a celebration of their new beginning, the start of a year when they could be together all the time. Instead it was a disaster. Tom grudgingly ate the delicious meal Debby had prepared, picking at it indifferently. He didn’t brighten up the whole evening and generally acted as if they had nothing to celebrate.
    Debby didn’t know what was wrong; she wondered if Tom regretted his impending divorce or perhaps felt sad to be away from his daughters on New Year’s Eve. But she knew better than to question him too closely.
    A NNE M ARIE and Mike were also together that night for
their
first New Year’s Eve since they’d met. Anne Marie was able to forget for a while the lowering presence of Tom Capano; and she prayed that the year ahead, all the years ahead, would be with Mike. It seemed possible that night. It didn’t matter that Mike was fighting off a nasty cold and they couldn’t stay out as late as they might have; they enjoyed just being together. They watched Winterthur’s fireworks explode into a million cascading colors and then headed for home.
    But Anne Marie moved into 1996 apprehensively. Her friends and family knew that she was happy with Mike. Her very
close
friends knew she dreaded that Tom would destroy her new love. They also knew that she was hiding something else from Mike: her eating disorder. She realized that she had to tell him about that soon—but she hoped she would
never
have to admit to Mike that she had slept with Tom.
    The physical side of Anne Marie’s relationship with Mike was not nearly as intimate as it had been with Tom, and that was OK with her. Mike’s restraint was a sign that he cared about her and took his Catholicism seriously. But they kissed and hugged and held hands all the time.
    Anne Marie knew Mike was concerned that she was so thin, but unlike Tom, he didn’t pressure her to eat. She hoped she could gradually explain more about her eating problems to Mike—about how she sometimes felt as if her life was slipping away from under her and she wasn’t able to control anything but her appetite. But that could wait. It wasn’t as though she was lying to him; he could see she had lost weight.
    M EANWHILE , Tom would not leave her alone, and Anne Marie’s way of dealing with him was appeasement. He had been so angry when she refused to accept the ticket to Madrid