...And Never Let HerGo

her. On June 14, Tom filed suit against Linda Marandola, asking for $3,000 plus interest. She didn’t even try to answer the suit. There was no point; Linda didn’t have any money for an attorney and Tom had so much power in Wilmington. She allowed him to get a default judgment against her.
    M IKE and Anne Marie had plans to spend some time in Falmouth, Massachusetts, over the Memorial Day weekend, May 25–27; it would be their first real trip together. Jennifer Bartels Haughton’s in-laws had a place on Martha’s Vineyard, and Mike and Anne Marie planned to see Jennifer and her husband there. They could take the ferry from the mainland to Martha’s Vineyard, and it would be a chance for Jennifer to meet Mike, the man she had heard about in the frequent phone conversations she had with Anne Marie.
    But their plans fell through. The house in Falmouth where Anne Marie and Mike planned to stay was full, so after only one day, they headed out to visit Mike’s college roommate instead—and he lived too far from Martha’s Vineyard. On the way home, they stopped in Rhode Island to see Mike’s parents. Although Anne Marie had met them, this was the first time she was in their home. And she was the first girl Mike had brought home since high school. She was touched to see that his mother had placed pictures of Mike as a child in the room where she slept.
    Jennifer and Annie missed each other, a circumstance that would sadden Jennifer in a most profound way. And it wasn’t the best of trips for Anne Marie. She didn’t feel well over Memorial Day weekend. She had come to a point where it was almost impossiblefor her to eat, and she was getting weaker despite Dr. Sullivan’s careful monitoring of her electrolytes. Sullivan knew that Anne Marie was taking as many as fifteen laxatives a day and there was a very real danger that she could have a heart attack.
    Anne Marie was under siege. With so many forces attacking her, it was hard for her to fight. She was in love with Mike and afraid of losing him; she was afraid to start eating because she thought she would soon be obese; and she was fearful that she might die because she couldn’t eat. But most of all, Tom was haunting her again, despite her many attempts to keep things platonic between them. He had never meant it when he said they would only be friends.
    Returning to her job after her trip to Cape Cod, Anne Marie learned from Siobhan Sullivan that Tom had been looking for her over the long weekend. She wasn’t really surprised. “He paged me,” Siobhan recalled. “When I returned the page, he asked me if I had talked to Anne Marie, and I said no. And he asked me if I knew where Anne Marie was, and I said no.”
    Siobhan hadn’t encouraged any further questioning, but when she told Anne Marie that Tom had paged her and was asking where she was, Anne Marie was very upset. “He’s fucking stalking me,” she said angrily.
    Siobhan tried to calm her down. “Anne Marie, there is a charge. That’s a crime, there’s a law against that. We can give you protection.” She explained that she was, after all, a State Police officer and involved in protecting not only the governor but everyone in his office.
    “No.” Anne Marie sighed. “I can handle it. I just have to end it with Tom.” She confessed to Siobhan that she had been afraid that Tom might have been waiting at her house to confront her and Mike when they got back from New England. She had made the mistake of telling him she was going to Cape Cod for Memorial Day. But she hadn’t told him exactly where she was going or with whom. Tom had obviously figured out that she had gone away with Mike.
    He had been so insistent that they were going to have dinner at La Famiglia on Thursday night, May 30, that Anne Marie had stopped trying to dissuade him. They met for dinner and she tried to be pleasant, without giving him any signals that she felt more than friendship for him. But the morning after that “date,” he was E-mailing her to ask her to come to his house Sunday afternoon to make pasta. Or if she didn’t want to do that, they could have dinner at the Villa d’ Roma (the restaurant that Debby considered their “special place”). And, oh yes, Tom wanted Anne Marie to start playing golf with him.
    It had taken him only weeks to coil himself around her again. She felt the old pressure to report all of her activities to him. It wasn’t that she hated Tom—not at all; he was being so damned nice