Forever by Linda Cassidy Lewis Page A

had seemed annoyed that he’d interrupted to tell her he was leaving the house.
    All the air went out of him in a rush. What if Julie knew about Annie? What if she was just giving him enough rope to hang himself?
    “Hello.”
    “Oh! Uh . . . hi. This is Tom.”
    “Yeah. I’m about to pull into my driveway. Can you call me back in two minutes?”
    “Sure.” He hung up.
    (Don’t call back. Go home.)
    He braced his hands on the edge of his desk and rose halfway out of his chair before it hit him. Annie’s voice had chased away every trace of the anxiety he’d felt seconds before. Julie suspected nothing. He’d let his imagination get the better of him.
    Tom tilted back in his chair and watched the second hand on the wall clock, surprised how slowly two minutes passed. He’d read once that waiting in a room with green walls made the wait seem shorter. He supposed that bit of color theory was the origin of the “green room” in which the guests on talk shows waited. In any case, the walls in this room were white—what little wall you could see between the blueprints, schedules, permits, and notices tacked up everywhere.
    Two minutes and seven seconds passed before he dialed again. When she answered, he got straight to his reason for calling. “I’m sorry I upset you earlier,” he said. “I had no right to kiss you like that.”
    “It wasn’t the kiss that upset me. It really had nothing to do with you.”
    “Oh? It was Jacob. I mean, did you have another vision?” Until that moment, it had never crossed his mind her reaction could have been to something she’d seen. Although he hadn’t seen or felt anything when he kissed her, maybe she had.
    “No. Well . . . not from a past life anyway.”
    “Okay. So . . . it was something from your past in this life?”
    She sighed. “I was married. I guess I told you that, but I didn’t tell you that he . . . he abused me. When you grabbed me like that . . . well . . . it was like a flashback, and I reacted out of instinct.”
    “I’ve never hit a woman in my life, Annie.”
    “I believe you. Like I said, I wasn’t reacting to you . I was reacting to Gary. Even after all this time . . .”
    “How long has it been?”
    “A year and a half.”
    “Were you married long?” In other words, Annie, how long did you let him knock you around ?
    “Seven years. That’s a long time to stay in a bad marriage, huh?”
    Yes. It sure as hell was. A lot of damage could be done to a person in seven years.
    “I’m sure it . . . wasn’t easy,” he replied. Then without thinking he added, “Do you need to talk about this?”
    “I’ve never really talked to anyone about it . . . except Kate. And she already knew most of it.”
    “You never got counseling?”
    Her laugh jangled like a tumble of empty cans. “Counseling is not exactly a family tradition, though we probably needed it more than most.”
    Tom didn’t know how to respond to that. Suddenly, he recalled something she’d once told him. “You said you’d been in line for a promotion but had to quit the job. Did that have anything to do with your divorce?”
    “Divorce? Well, yes and no,” she said, and punctuated her statement with another hollow laugh. “I lost the job because of him, but he left me after that. That was the best day of my life, but I didn’t know it then.”
    “Oh.” Tom sensed she was about to give him details, information his intuition told him he did not want. Please, don’t say another word .
    “I worked as a secretary at the bank headquarters, and I loved that job. One day the head secretary took me aside. ‘I like your work,’ she said, ‘and I know you’d be capable of taking over my job when I retire in two years, but —’ Let me tell you, my heart sank at the sound of that word. ‘But,’ she said, ‘it’s evident you have problems at home that interfere with your work.’ She reminded me that my position was a visible one, and I’d be even more