As You Wish Read online

  She looked back at him. “We’ll have to find someone to take it over. Don’t you have some relatives who’d like to run a little local theater?”

  Kit smiled. Olivia had teased him about his huge family and he had been as glad to get away from them as she was. “I’ll put out the word and see who wants the place. Maybe the town will have a new play every few months. It could bring in some revenue. Are you ready to go?”

  She realized he’d done what he’d planned to and had replaced her tears with a smile. It was why he was so good in the diplomatic world, why “the prez” called and asked his advice. “Thank you,” she said as he pulled her chair out for her.

  “Anything for you.” He took her arm in his.

  After that day, their boundaries were set. They would never mention the very personal things that had happened to them in the years they’d been apart.

  But still, Kit had said that he’d come to despise his ex-wife, Gina. “Every rotten thing she screamed at me was true—and I hated her for so clearly seeing the worst parts of me.”

  “When you don’t love someone, everything they do is intolerable,” Olivia replied.

  “Exactly!”

  That had been the extent of their discussion of his marriage and divorce. As for Olivia’s marriage, she never mentioned it and Kit didn’t ask.

  She was glad of that because she didn’t want to confess that her husband had had a long-term affair. Actually, he’d had a whole other life. What was especially humiliating was that Olivia was sure it was her fault.

  The year after her summer with Kit, Alan Trumbull, a recent widower, had hired her to work in his family’s appliance store to answer the phone and take care of the accounts. She saw that he was overwhelmed with a baby and a store that was going downhill. But Olivia meant to keep to herself and not get involved in other people’s problems. She just wanted to work hard enough that she wouldn’t have the time or energy to think about the rotten deal Life had handed her.

  But after weeks of sitting quietly in the store, she broke. Watching Alan fumble with a baby and invoices and salesmen made her admit defeat. She couldn’t continue to sit there and do nothing. She pulled the baby from Alan and began directing his life, his business, his child, his house. As the months went by, Alan stepped back and let Olivia handle it all. He never actually proposed. He just mumbled, “I guess we better make it official,” and two weeks later, they were married. Their wedding night had been quick, perfunctory. Loveless. She’d stayed in bed until Alan went to sleep, then she got up and went over the quarterly tax reports. It was either do that or spend the night crying. Night after night, she thought, Kit, Kit. Where are you? Why did you leave me? Why was I not enough for you?

  Over the years, she’d used work and domestic duties to try to block out those questions, but her lack of help made her anger rise. Alan used to say, “You’re so much better at business than I am, Livie. You don’t want me holding you up.” Then he’d go off to play golf.

  It was only when he was dying of cancer that she found out that Alan didn’t know which end of a golf club to hold. She’d sat beside him in the hospital and listened to his story of how he’d had a secret life with a quiet, plump, sweet-tempered woman named Willie. They’d had a daughter together. And it was Olivia’s hard work with the appliance stores that had supported mother and daughter. There’d even been enough to send the girl to a good university.

  His confession about his love for his other family had so shocked Olivia that she couldn’t speak. Alan had taken her hand in his. “Please, Livie, don’t be angry and punish me. Let me see them. Please.”

  But she hadn’t been angry. She’d stood up and looked down at him. “Alan, I never knew you had such courage in you.” She started to leave the room, but then turned back and kissed him on the forehead.

  She would never have predicted it, but she was glad to find out that he’d had some joy in his life. Heaven knew she had never given him any. She’d fulfilled all the work and duties, but nothing she did came near to achieving true happiness—for him or herself.

  Willie came to the hospital, her pretty daughter drove in from Florida, and Alan’s son, Kevin, put his arms around all of them. In an instant, Olivia became the outsider.

  She wanted to walk away and leave them alone, but Willie was as incompetent as Alan was. The two of them, Alan dying and holding on to Willie with her endless tears, looked to Olivia to take care of everything.

  And she did. Doctors, medicines, alternative treatments that for a while gave them hope. They all fell onto Olivia.

  After Alan’s death, she made the funeral arrangements, and she was the one who held Willie while she cried herself to sleep.

  At the funeral, Olivia knew there would be questions about who Willie and her daughter were. If she told the truth, all sympathy would go to the wife. Olivia was the wronged woman. She’d given her life to Alan and his son, Kevin—and everyone in town knew that. And what thanks did she get? Her husband had set up housekeeping with a woman who was older, plainer, and less intelligent than Olivia. Unappreciative bastard!

  Yes, Olivia could have made people hate Alan Trumbull. She could have played the martyr and gained lots of sympathy.

  But only she knew the truth about her part in it. She decided not to sully her husband’s memory.

  It was only when the will was read that Olivia got a true shock. With the help of a prestigious law firm in Richmond, starting the moment he knew he was dying, Alan had managed to get everything put into his name—and he’d left the entire business to his son. Olivia got the house that she had found and remodeled, and she got the retirement plan that she had set up. But everything else went to Kevin. As for Willie and her daughter, Alan had made a trust fund for them years before.

  For a while, Olivia had been so angry at how he’d tricked her into signing papers, that she was tempted to tell people about his second family. To destroy the memory of Alan being a “nice guy” would get him back in a big way.

  For the second time, she didn’t do it. Alan, so very cowardly in life, had found the courage to tell Olivia what he thought of years of being on the receiving end of her managing his life. In death he’d taken away what had kept Olivia so occupied that she couldn’t think about the summer of 1970—and the aftermath of it.

  She turned the keys over to her stepson, then tried to occupy herself. Gardening, church work, cooking for fund-raisers. She did them all. She became the person who was asked for help whenever anything was needed.

  The town considered her a saint. She’d done so much for Alan and Kevin, and now she was dedicating herself to the town. Did the woman ever think about herself? they wondered.

  As for Kevin, Olivia did her best to stay out of his life. When he left the stores to run themselves, she said nothing. When he married a woman who ordered him about, Olivia felt it was her fault. It’s what she had made Kevin think a wife should be.

  Nor did she speak out when she saw Kevin and his wife, Hildy, spend masses. House, cars, trips, lavish wardrobes. The appliance stores faltered, then failed—and Kevin was left deeply in debt.

  When Olivia sold her house, cashed in her retirement plan, and bailed her stepson out of debt, the townspeople began to speak her name in whispers. A true saint of a woman.

  Olivia moved into a back bedroom of Kevin and Hildy’s big house—the one Olivia had paid off—and “helped out,” meaning that she more or less became their unpaid servant.

  That had lasted for fourteen months, then Kit Montgomery had returned to town, put up his theater, and everything changed.

  Except for the damaged lives, Olivia thought. Broken lives could never be fully healed.

  Chapter Three

  “Hi.”

  Startled, Olivia sat up and saw young Elise standing a few feet away.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you. I was out walking and I saw a bit of