...And Never Let HerGo

to her. But he didn’t seem to realize that he was almost choking the life out of her. She didn’t want all the things he was insistent about giving her, but she didn’t seem to have the strength to say no.
    Anne Marie was faithful in keeping her appointments with Dr. Sullivan, determined to win her fight for her health and her life. Sullivan was a strong ally. “I began speaking with her about her anger that the gifts were manipulative,” she recalled. “He might ask her to have some time with him having supper, and what might get added on to that is, ‘Oh, let me buy you a dress.’ And she found herself angry about that. She had a hard time enough saying no to going out, and she just felt like he kept piling it on and piling it on.”
    The two of them worked on exercises, using conversational ploys that would help Anne Marie be strong in her resolve.
    Tom had been currying favor with Kim and Jackie, and now he told Anne Marie that he had invited her brother Robert and his wife, Susan, along with Kim, to a Cézanne exhibit on June 15 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She was invited too, of course. It would be a grand affair, sponsored by Saul, Ewing—his firm had chosen the Cézanne function to celebrate its seventy-fifth anniversary.
    Anne Marie didn’t go to the Cézanne exhibition, but Robert and Susan did and had a good time. Susan wrote Tom a warm thank-you note. Robert had no idea that Anne Marie and Tom had been anything more than friends. Tom and Robert had known each other slightly for years, and now Tom raved about how much he liked Robert, calling him “my second-favorite Fahey.”
    Anne Marie was mortified. She didn’t want Tom pushing his way into her family. She didn’t want her family to know about Tom.
    On June 8, Anne Marie and Kim went to a wedding together. Tom had lent Anne Marie his credit card so that she could pay for her gift to the couple: twelve months of floral arrangements. She had repaid him before the wedding; on June 4, she wrote him a check for $122.50 on her Congressional Federal Credit Union account. It was another of the monetary transactions between them, the loans that she berated herself for accepting.
    A S Tom had predicted, Kim
was
shocked at the wedding to see how thin Anne Marie was. At the same time, she seemed very happy, happier than Kim had ever seen her. Anne Marie told Kim that she was falling in love with Mike.
    “Michael was redoing his kitchen,” Kim recalled, “and Annie said it was like they were married—because he let Annie pick out the tiles, and Annie was helping him decorate his house. Mike missed the wedding because he was swimming in a marathon the next day, but Anne Marie called to wish him luck and tell him she was thinking about him.”
    Mike had been training for the long-distance swim in Annapolis since January, and there was no way he could have gone with Anne Marie to the wedding and been able to compete. She understood.
    Four days later, on June 12, Anne Marie fainted in her office. She knew why she was so weak and sick, and she didn’t want to call Mike to take her back to her apartment. That would mean she would have had to explain how serious her eating problem was. She didn’t want him to know; she wanted to be well before she ever admitted all of it to him.
    Instead, Anne Marie called Tom and asked if he would drive her home. He was close by and he knew about her problem. He came immediately, scooped her up, and took her to her apartment. For him, it was a triumph, and another beachhead. He told Kim later that he had held Anne Marie in his arms as she lay collapsed on her kitchen floor, and that he had forced Gatorade into her to bring up her electrolytes.
    Maybe he did. The Tom who kept track of the insulin in case his friend needed it and the Tom who closed Debby’s mother’s eyes was good in emergencies. He thrived when he was in charge. It was his forte, and if he was called upon for matters dealing with life and death, so much the better. It was preferable to be the guy with the clear head who deftly took care of business than to be some frantic fool.
    Anne Marie insisted on returning to work that afternoon, despite Tom’s objections. She had had a moment of true awakening; she realized that she had come close to death as the cramps and nausea of severe potassium loss hit her. More than at any other time, she had chosen to live.

Chapter Twenty
    I N MID -J UNE , summer drops over Wilmington like a collapsing