The Marriage Wish. Dee Henderson

see Scott measuring every step she took, measuring the growing exhaustion, the heaviness of the fatigue that made her veer off center time and time again. She could do little about what he saw. She was exhausted and she knew it and she had no reserves left.

      They’d gone more than a mile down the beach and were near a private boathouse and pier when he stopped. “This is my home.” He said the words, and she heard that he hated saying them. He didn’t want to go. He didn’t want to leave his questions unanswered. He wanted to help. She read all of those desires as he stood and looked at her. She did her best to look directly back, even if the intensity of his gaze made her want to drop her eyes and look away. “Could I walk with you a while longer? Would you like some company?” he asked, and she could feel the tug to let him do so.

      She shook her head. She suddenly realized what a mess she’d created, and the fact that she had no desire to fix it both amused her and made her sad. She smiled, and it was the first genuine smile she had formed in the past seventy-two hours. “No. I’ll be just fine, Scott. Thank you for offering.”

      He didn’t want to hear that answer. “You’re sure?”

      He was pressing her to change her mind, and her sense of fatigue grew all the greater. She needed to be alone now more than ever. There was no room in her life for company and conversation when there were memories demanding her attention.

      Jennifer nodded. “Go on. I’m just going to walk for a while longer,” she assured him.

      He reluctantly did as she asked. Jennifer watched as he walked up the path to his back patio. She turned toward the grove of trees and began to walk again, determined to not return home until her body demanded sleep and the memories were banished. A few minutes later she was frowning, angry with the fact she now suddenly missed the company. No, not company, him. She missed him. The sun was barely up, and she was thinking about a stranger. She would never see him again, but he had entered her life briefly on one of the toughest mornings of her life, and she would probably always remember him because of that one fact.

      Jennifer racked the balls, flipping them to solid, stripe, solid, the eight ball in the center, and sent the cue ball rolling to the far end of the table. The college kids at the next table to the right were laughing at rather crude jokes, and the group of six guys at the bar were boisterous and drunk. Jennifer ignored them with the ease of practice. The first two tables to her left were empty, but Randy and William were playing at the third, and she occasionally tuned in to their conversation, a rather fascinating discussion of a drug case that had been in the papers the past couple of days. The two cops were serious players, and she often played one or the other during the course of an evening. Tonight she preferred to play alone. She broke the rack of balls with a vicious stroke—short, explosive, centered.

      She had killed Thomas Bradford tonight.

      The chapter, written an hour ago, sat in her briefcase, scrawled by hand on a tablet of white paper while she sat at the back corner booth, shelling peanuts and nursing a diet cola.

      The only thing she had left was her career and she had just hung it out to dry. Ann was going to kill her; her agent would not appreciate having the golden goose killed. Jennifer smiled tightly without it reaching her eyes and drilled the seven ball into the rail to send it the length of the table and into a corner pocket. He was quite dead, her detective, Thomas Bradford, the bullets having hit him in the middle of the back and ripped through his chest. He was now as dead as her parents, as dead as her husband, as dead as her three-month-old daughter. Dead.

      Maybe she should sell the house.

      She contemplated the idea as she moved around the table, laying out her next shot with the precision of someone who had learned to see the game as an interesting study in geometry.

      “Jen, what happened? Who hit you?!” The jacket dropped onto the stool next to her, the detective’s shield flipping visible. Randy and William both looked over at Bob’s words and immediately left their game, heading her way. Jennifer looked up at her friend, annoyed, and then looked back at the cue ball and laid her next shot with finesse, nudging the ten ball into the side pocket without disturbing the eight ball. She wasn’t surprised to see him. It was midnight, and Bob Volishburg got off at eleven-thirty. He knew her car. This place was on his way home. He would come in to talk with the other guys from the force, maybe play her a game and then see that she got safely home. He had a mission in life to see that she always got home safely. Compliments of her brother, Jennifer was sure.

      “I walked into a door,” she replied flatly.

      The honest answer went over about as well tonight with the three cops as it had done four days earlier with Scott.

      “I was wondering if you would come back,” Scott said, stopping a few feet away from her so as not to crowd her space and startle her. His voice was calm and steady while inside his reaction was one of elation. She was back. He had been praying and hoping and working toward this day. She was sitting out on the pier behind his house, dangling her feet over the edge, her hands tucked into the same windbreaker she had worn the last time he had seen her.

      He had spent ten days trying to track her down. His conscience had given him no rest. He had finally decided she must have an unlisted phone number. He had tried every St. James in the phone books for the surrounding area. He had ended up calling every battered women’s shelter in the surrounding county—not that they would tell him anything, but he had had to try. He had been ready to consider calling the police and the local hospitals, she continued to weigh so heavily on his mind. Then, three days ago, he had his first bit of what he knew had to be providential luck.

      He had been browsing a local bookstore when he had chanced upon her picture. She was a writer. The author of a mystery series about a detective named Thomas Bradford. Scott had held the book in his hand and looked at the picture and been stunned at the change in her from the picture on the back of the paperback to the woman he had met on the beach. The book was the paperback release of a previous hardback so he figured the picture was about four years old. The difference was painful to see. Her face was gaunt now. The light in her eyes was gone. What had happened to her in the past few years? Calling her publisher had managed to get him the name of her agent, but there his luck had run out. Her agent—Ann something or other—had refused to give him any information about Jennifer. All he’d been able to hope for was that she would deliver a message.

      Jennifer turned now on the pier, drew her knees up to drape her arms across them and quietly looked up at him as he stood at the top of the steps to the pier. “Hello, Scott. I understand you have been looking for me.” Her voice was dry and her smile slightly amused.

      She looked awful. The black eye had faded to an ugly dark bruise that marred her cheek, and the tenseness in her body and in her face reminded him of a rubber band stretched to its limit for a very long time. “I was worried about you,” he said simply.

      She nodded and looked down to spin her wedding ring for a moment before looking back up. “Don’t be. I’m fine.”

      Fine compared with what? Her black eye was now an ugly bruise, and she looked as brittle as toffee. She had been exhausted the last time he’d seen her, and the past ten days hadn’t made much of an improvement. She looked well past worn out. He walked down and sat on the steps to the pier, close, but not so close as to crowd her. The last thing he wanted to do was give her reason to move. “Been taking another walk?”

      “Sort of,” she replied. She smiled, and it was a real smile. “I haven’t gotten very far.”

      “Which message finally reached you?” he asked, interlacing his fingers and watching her.

      “My agent called. Relayed your message. Really, Scott, ‘Come stay with me’ does raise a few eyebrows among my friends.”

      She was embarrassed now; he could see the blush. He knew that his message might cause her some embarrassment with her agent, but it was what needed to be said. He was serious. His home had plenty of guest rooms. He would prefer she accept a place with his sister and her husband, but he would make whatever arrangements she considered reasonable. The idea of someone, her husband, hitting