“Come on through. I’m out on the deck.”

Wade’s voice startled her, bleeding through the screen door before she could lift a hand to knock. She left her purse on the kitchen table and stepped out onto the deck where he was scrubbing a grill grate with a wire brush and a bucket of soapy water. He was barefoot, wearing a faded University of Virginia T-shirt and jeans that were drenched from the knees down.

“Excuse the mess. I thought I’d give the thing a good cleaning since I was having company.”

“Can I help?”

“Not unless you want to ruin those white pants. You can go in and get us something to drink, though. I’ll take a beer.”

A few minutes later, she returned with a bottled water and the requested beer. Wade dropped the brush into the bucket and grabbed his beer with wet hands. “Listen, I started thinking about it on the way home, and I realized you were probably just being polite the other night. I don’t want to be the writer who foists his work on everyone he meets, so if you want to back out, no worries.”

“You aren’t foisting anything on me. I volunteered.”

“I saw your face this afternoon. You looked as if you’d just stepped into oncoming traffic.”

“I think I was surprised that you actually want my feedback. Stephen stopped asking a long time ago.”

“I would have thought it rather handy to have you around. A second set of eyes, someone to bounce ideas off.”

Christy-Lynn looked up from peeling the soggy label from her water bottle. “Stephen never thought much of what I do—or the writers I do it for. As far as he was concerned, if you weren’t with one of the Big Five, you should be doing something else. In his eyes, it wasn’t real editing because my clients weren’t real writers.”

Wade took a pull from his beer then stood looking at her with something like bewilderment. “Can you help me with something? Because I’ve been wondering about it for the last four years. How did a jackass like Stephen ever manage to snare someone like you?”

The intensity in his tone surprised her, but not as much as the words themselves. “You’ve been wondering that for four years?”

“I guess it’s more like five now, but yes. That night at the alumni dinner, when you got in my face, all I could think was he doesn’t deserve her.”

Christy-Lynn felt her cheeks go pink but said nothing.

“Were you happy? Back then, I mean.”

She thought about that a moment—and about her need to think about it. Shouldn’t the answer be obvious? It wasn’t, though. Like everything else in her life the truth lay half in shadow, perhaps because that was how she preferred it. Things tended to be less messy that way.

“I think I was numb,” she said at last. “Not happy. Not unhappy. There were signs, I suppose, that it wasn’t Shangri-la, but there wasn’t any one thing. It was gradual, you know? Insidious. It wasn’t until he was gone that I realized I’d been married to someone I barely knew. I was holding on so tightly I never realized how much we’d both changed. Still, it wasn’t enough to leave. At least I didn’t think it was.”

Wade came to sit in the chair beside her, beer balanced on one knee. “Were you still in love with him? I asked once before, and you never did answer.”

Christy-Lynn looked out over the lake, watching the light play over the mercury-smooth surface. “I’m not sure I ever was,” she answered finally, realizing, perhaps for the first time, what she had never let herself see. “How’s that for an admission?”

“Then why marry the guy?”

“I was in awe of him,” she said with a shrug, not even sure she understood it. “And it’s what respectable people do, isn’t it? Grow up and get married? Respectability was important to me back then. Which is probably why I always gave up what I wanted—so I could be who and what he wanted. But after a while, the shine started to wear off. It was like going backstage after a play and seeing the star without his makeup.”

“But you stayed.”

Christy-Lynn looked at her hands, smoothing her nails one at a time. “It wasn’t because of the money.”

“I knew that,” Wade said quietly.

“Or the status.”

“I knew that too.”

“I don’t know. He was this larger than life guy, always so sure of himself. And back then, I wasn’t sure of anything. It was . . . attractive. And it made him the perfect place to hide.”

“From what?”

She met his gaze evenly. “Myself. And it worked. The day I became Stephen’s wife I stopped being Christy-Lynn Parker. And for a while, I was okay with it. They say ignorance is bliss, and I guess it was, because I never bothered to ask myself who I’d be if I wasn’t his wife.”

“You said you gave up what you wanted. What did you want?”

They were silent for a moment, sipping in unison as they watched a pair of egrets lift away from the shore. “I used to think about writing sometimes,” she said, finally breaking the quiet. “Not the great American novel, but something. I had a couple of ideas I pitched to Stephen, but he always squashed them. He said telling someone else what they’re doing wrong isn’t the same as being able to do it yourself.”

Wade eyed her stonily. “So that’s it? You just abandoned your dream because he said so? Stephen gets what he wants and to hell with your dreams?”