Forever by Linda Cassidy Lewis Page B

visible, if I became the president’s secretary. She didn’t come right out and say it, but I understood the warning—makeup can’t hide a swollen, black eye or a split lip.”
    A mental picture of a bruised and battered Annie threatened to form, and Tom struggled to keep from yelling at her to shut up. He did not —did not —want to hear any more of this.
    Annie continued. “I told Gary about the warning, but less than a month later, he slammed me against the brick wall of the restaurant we’d just left and gave me a black eye and fractured cheek bone. I didn’t even know what I’d done wrong, but that never mattered to him. I couldn’t face going back to work looking like hell again, so the next day, I called my supervisor and told her that because of ‘family problems’ I wouldn’t be back to work—ever.”
    Despite his efforts to prevent it, a full-color image of Annie’s ravaged face soared before him, and he was unable to turn his mind’s eye away. He felt sickened, and angry, but most of all, he regretted he had that knowledge. What had possessed him to ask about her past? Annie waited for him to comment.
    “Uh . . . I . . . don’t know what to say.”
    “I know . Isn’t it awful how Gary’s temper ruined everything? And then, he had the nerve to act like losing my job had nothing to do with him! He was so cruel. You know what he said when I told him I couldn’t go back to work?”
    Annie deepened her voice in imitation of her ex-husband’s. “As soon as you get your goddam face looking decent, you damn well better get yourself another job ‘cause no wife of mine is gonna lay around the house getting a fat ass.”
    The story she told had stunned Tom back to silence, but the words were rushing out of her, and she didn’t stop for a response anyway.
    “By the time my face healed, Gary decided he didn’t want a wife at all—fat or thin. He walked into the house one Friday evening after cashing his paycheck, threw half the money on our kitchen table, and told me I could have the house, but he was taking the car, his clothes and whatever else he damn well wanted. He’d found some seventeen-year-old blonde who knew ‘how to make a man feel like a man’. That’s how he put it. And on his way out the door he turned back to me and said, ‘I’m filing for divorce, and you’d better not contest it, or I’ll make you sorry you ever met me’. God, I almost laughed when he said that. As if I hadn’t been sorry for years that I’d ever met him!”
    Annie paused, but Tom was still too horrified to speak. If his silence disappointed her, her voice didn’t reveal it when she continued.
    “It’s scary to think what might have happened, if I had laughed at him. You know? I guess it’s a good thing I kept my mouth shut. Anyway, as much as I hated being married to him, it was still a shock when he left me. I pretty much spent the next week just lying in my bed wishing I was dead.” Annie laughed; it was a sound without humor. “But he died instead. Ten days after he left me, he was killed on the job.”
    Finally, something Tom could respond to. “What . . . how did he die?”
    “He was an electrician, and someone forgot to cut the power to one of the circuits being repaired. He was electrocuted.”
    “My God,” Tom said, not because of the way Gary died, but because if Gary worked as an electrician on construction crews, he might have known the creep. He tuned out Annie for a moment while he searched his memory for the names of electricians he’d worked with. He breathed easier when he couldn’t remember one named Gary.
    “. . . to do, but I decided I didn’t want to die. I considered trying to get my job back at the bank, but I felt sort of like Gary’s ghost might be waiting there. Lucky for me, Gary forgot to change the beneficiary on his life insurance. So, with that money, I paid off my mortgage and spent the next few months redecorating my house—removing every trace of