...And Never Let HerGo

interest.” He chided gently about her clumsiness with money.
    When Anne Marie found out that a new windshield would cost $460.55, Tom offered to pay for it. That $460 was a quarter of her monthly take-home pay, but Tom assured her it was nothing to him. He would always say, “Just add that to the running tab,” as if he actually enjoyed lending her money. He sent her an envelope by messenger, and when she opened it, a handful of brand-new, crisp bills fluttered to the floor. As the accompanying note suggested, it looked like Monopoly money. She didn’t want to keep it, but she finally did after Tom sent her an E-mail the next day: “Regarding the Monopoly money, we’ll talk about that in person as you suggest, but remember it’s not a gift; it’s only a loan with some pretty serious repayment provisions (I didn’t go to law school for nothing).”
    And indeed, there were serious repayment provisions. Tom rarely spent his own money without a payback in mind. Anne Marie insisted upon paying him back in kind, writing him checks whenever she could.
    Money was one of Anne Marie’s chief anxieties, and Tom knew it. He assured her over and over that they were only friends now but that he would always be there for her. If she had an argument with Kathleen—a sisterly certainty—he was there to take her side, just as he had always advised Debby that
her
sister did not have her best interests at heart.
    Tom prevailed upon Anne Marie to take $500 to pay for part of her therapy, although Robert was making $1,000 and $1,500 payments; she had had some insurance and she was paying as much as she could. She could consider it just another loan.
    Then Tom began to contact Kim and Siobhan and some of Anne Marie’s other friends to ask about her. She had always hated that; her pride made her furious to think that he was discussing her problems behind her back. It didn’t matter to Tom; he was back in Anne Marie’s life, and once he got his foot in the door, he was confident that she would see that Mike Scanlan wasn’t for her—and that
he
was.
    D ESPITE his efforts to win Anne Marie back, Tom had never left Debby MacIntyre’s life. And she had come to depend on him more than ever. In May, he invited her to go on another trip with him. He had a legal seminar to attend in Washington, D.C., and she went along. They didn’t have to slip around now the way they had on theMontreal trip, and she didn’t have to pretend she didn’t know him if someone they knew saw them together.
    Debby sensed that something was bothering Tom; he was more uptight and moody than ever, but he really didn’t want to talk about it. She knew better than to press him.
    A S hard as Tom was trying to break down Anne Marie’s defenses, Dr. Michelle Sullivan was helping her to stand up for herself and be assertive. In their sessions, Dr. Sullivan saw a young woman with a vibrant personality whose humor was so on target that it wasn’t easy for even a trained therapist to see the sad little girl peeking out from inside. Laughing at something Anne Marie said, Dr. Sullivan had to bring them both back to why she was there. Anne Marie needed desperately to be assertive.
    “If you spent most of your life trying to be compliant so as not to get into trouble,” Dr. Sullivan explained, “and when somebody is saying to you, ‘Let’s work on your assertion,’ obviously you are going to start to get panicky that if you
are
assertive, this other person is going to kick you out of their life, or they are going to hate you, or try to manipulate you into trying to go backwards.”
    In therapy, determined to change the way she had always dealt with her world, Anne Marie was alternately assertive and frightened. She wanted so much to get well, but even as she made progress, she scared herself.
    “She had always been compliant,” Dr. Sullivan said later. “People who got to know her and really loved her were used to saying, ‘Oh you know Anne Marie will go to the show. We will decide and she will just come along.’ And as she got firmer and firmer about what she would do and not do, we both knew that some people wouldn’t like it—and
that
resulted in increased anxiety.”
    Moreover, Anne Marie was keeping so many things secret from people she cared about that she must have felt as if she was about to explode. Mike didn’t know about Tom, and most of her friends still didn’t know that she was back in touch with Tom. They were all relieved believing