Marriage by Mistake

believed their marriage would last, when it would have. If left alone, it would have.
    Perhaps she was crazy.
    Out on the smog-scented concourse, Kelly got a cab. She gazed dully out the car's window on the drive home. No, she concluded. She wasn't crazy. The marriage would not have lasted. Dean didn't trust her. He couldn't believe that she loved him .
    She couldn't have lived with that. If she'd tried, she would have ended up desperately unhappy. And Dean would have been unhappy, too.
    The cab pulled up outside Kelly's apartment building. She looked at the familiar faded lemon siding. It was a far cry from Dean's mansion outside of Boston but it was home. Yes, home, where she belonged.
    ~~~
    The morning after Kelly left him, Dean went to work the same as any other day. Why not? He was fine. Nothing unusual or unexpected had occurred, after all. At work, he even paid attention and accomplished something. At the end of the day he came home. No one jogged along the winding entrance drive in her sweat suit. No one played video games in the entertainment room. And no one to came down to the dining room for dinner.
    Dean took his usual seat at the head of the table and waited for Roberto to bring in the soup. Not even Troy showed up. Dean's cousin was probably off having a good time with one of his thousand friends.
    Alone then, Dean looked down at his soup. He was fine, he had to be fine. Nothing unusual or unexpected had occurred. But that soup wasn't going to go down his throat. His stomach rebelled at the very idea. Dean pushed his chair back from the table. All right, then, no soup. No food at all. But he was fine, perfectly fine. He was simply...on a diet. In fact, instead of eating, he'd go work out.
    But in the basement gym, Dean realized working out wasn't such a good idea, either. While lifting weights, he was left to stare at the treadmill, which had been Kelly's favorite. How many times had they come here to work out together and he'd lasciviously watched her trotting nowhere? Too many times, clearly. Dean got up from the bench seat.
    In fact, he left the gym entirely and went upstairs. It was no surprise Kelly had left him, he reminded himself. There was no reason to have a big emotional response here. Wives left their husbands every day of the week. And Dean had known from the beginning his wife was more likely than most to be a leaver. Lord, she hadn't even married him, really. Not him .
    In his bedroom again, Dean stripped and turned on the shower. He pressed his lips together because after he and Kelly had worked out together, they'd often taken a shower together, too. Those shared showers, not just sex, but fun...
    Never mind. Forget it. Gone now . Dean stepped under the spray and washed quickly. He'd be fine. Sex and fun were all well and good, but they weren't necessary. A man could live without them.
    He put on a sweat suit and went down to his study. The twenty-six inch television screen loomed at him as he sat behind his desk; Kelly's television, where she'd sat so many hours just wanting to keep him company. Dean drew in a deep breath, then another one. He told himself he was going to be all right. Suddenly he heard a loud, booming noise. The papers on his desk jumped and he felt a thudding pain in his hand. He looked down to find he'd slammed his fist onto the desk.
    Dean stood up. He breathed hard. He was not going to break down. He was not.
    The next second he was in his chair again and his head was in his hands. She'd left him. God, she'd left him, just as he'd always known she would. They all did, they all left, every last one of them, but Kelly, Kelly...
    He lowered his head until the back of his hands hit the desk top. It seemed the pain was going to come, whether he wanted it to or not. He was crumbling inside, just disintegrating. Oh, God, it hurt.
    He closed his eyes and wondered how he could have let this happen, when it was exactly what he'd been trying to avoid from the very beginning.
    ~~~
    When Felicia got the second big check for the Boston Family Aid shelter, she knew she was going to have to bite the bullet and thank Troy. Emery Hunsington wasn't as much of a penny-pincher as Joe Esterley, but it was still an achievement, and brought her ten thousand dollars closer to a down payment for the expansion of the Family Aid shelter.
    The easiest way to accomplish the thank-you gesture was to run into Troy at the Club. That way her acknowledgment could seem casual, spontaneous, and