...And Never Let HerGo

than both sides living a lie.’ So I reinforced what she was thinking. . . . I had no idea what she was trying to tell me.”
    Mike did have some idea of Anne Marie’s concern about her weight, but she hadn’t spelled that out for him, either. She was so afraid of losing him. She had been very thin when they met—it seemed to him that was normal for her.
    Since the first of the year Anne Marie had been frightened by her anorexia. She realized that she was
not
truly in charge of her own life and health, but she didn’t know how to stop. On many days, she scarcely ate two hundred calories. She didn’t vomit, but she spent hours at the Y exercising and took laxatives at night. She and Gary Johnson had agreed that she should see Dr. Michelle Sullivan, whose office was in the Center for Cognitive and Behavior Therapy in Wilmington. She had liked Dr. Sullivan, who was a pretty and petite woman with prematurely gray hair.
    Although she enjoyed being thin, Anne Marie was concerned by the way she felt, and she had confessed her need to control her surroundings by excessive dieting and exercise to her brother Robert. He immediately said he would help her pay for therapy.
    When Anne Marie and Dr. Sullivan began their work together, on February 28, 1996, she had not communicated with Tom for more than two weeks. She vowed to keep it that way. Still, a part of her may have missed the sense of security she had felt with the gentle, nonpressuring Tom who had always seemed to be around when she was frightened, lonely, or in some kind of distress. When he’d shown her that side of his personality, she began to distrust her own judgment. She had never wanted to hurt him—even during the times she was furious with him. The child inside who had rarely had presents from her father had enjoyed the things Tom gave her, always explaining that it made
him
happy to give her things. That side of Tom was like a very kind father—a role he was accustomed to. And she still hoped that they could have a platonic relationship.
    But then there was another side of Tom—a self-pitying, demanding, domineering, controlling side. Anne Marie described his recent behavior to Dr. Sullivan, how he called her fifteen to twenty times in a two-hour period, how he showed up at her apartment and demanded loudly to be let in, until finally she had to relent so her landlady wouldn’t hear him. She told Dr. Sullivan that Tom was “haunting” her. Indeed, most of their early sessions dealt with how Anne Marie might find a way to be strong enough to cope with him. She had not heard from him lately. But he never really went away. He was always somewhere in the shadows, it seemed, watching her and keeping track of what she was doing and who she was with.
    S T . P ATRICK ’ S D AY rolled round again, and Anne Marie and Jill Morrison had paid $35 apiece for tickets to a breakfast and mass sponsored by the Irish Culture Club.
    “The day before,” Jill said, “she told me she couldn’t go—didn’t want to go because Mr. Capano was on the executive committee and he would be there and she did not want to see him.”
    They didn’t go to the breakfast, but they did go to the Washington, D.C., fund-raiser President Clinton was putting on for Governor Carper’s campaign. Jill and Anne Marie got to meet the president personally, and that impressed them. The event went well and a number of people from Wilmington decided to ride back on the train together. All of it was exhilarating.
    “But before the train left,” Jill recalled, “a bunch of people went out to a bar across the street from the train station and just kind of celebrated the fact that it was a good night, a successful night for the upcoming campaign. Most of the people left on the 10 or 11 [ P.M. ] train. . . . It was just Anne Marie, me, Joe Farley, Brian Murphy, and Gary Heinz—so we decided to go to another bar. The five of us, when we got home, it was probably about three in the morning.”
    Tom heard about it; he seemed to know everything Anne Marie was doing, and he called her to tell her that she and Jill ought to be ashamed of themselves, “because we acted like ‘whores.’ ”
    Nothing could have been more innocent than a bunch of happy Democrats celebrating, but Tom saw whores and sluts wherever he looked.
    M ARCH passed without any more calls or messages from Tom. Anne Marie felt cautiously optimistic. She liked Dr. Sullivan and suspected that she was a therapist who would one day