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Despite Juliet’s best efforts, she’d never been close to Marlys. But because of her love for her husband, she couldn’t overlook the old clothes or the shadows under his daughter’s eyes. “Have you been sleeping?”
Another shrug.
“Maybe you shouldn’t be rattling around that big house,” Juliet started. “Maybe you should think about sell—”
“No.” The word was fierce. “Maybe you can walk away so easily, but I can’t. I won’t.”
Grrrr. Juliet wanted to smack her forehead against the nearest countertop. Marlys never once gave her a break. Of course it hadn’t been easy for her to leave the house where she’d spent her married life. Of course it hadn’t been easy for her to…
…kiss another man.
The moment caught up with her in Technicolor, with surround sound and full tactile memory. Noah’s muscles, his heat, his soft groan, and then the taste of his tongue in her mouth. God. God. Hardly more than a week after she’d left the house where she’d lived with the husband she still loved, she’d kissed another man.
“By the way, your ex-grief counselor called.”
“What?” Juliet blinked, trying to follow Marlys’s next thread of conversation.
“That woman you used to see after Dad died. Did you tell her I needed help?” Marlys looked ready to spit fire at the idea.
“What? No, of course not. She has the home number and was probably just checking—”
The other woman cut her off with a slash of her hand. “Yeah, yeah. That’s what she said. Checking on you.” Marlys leaned over to toy with a tail of denim fringe on the edge of her ripped kneehole, so that her shiny dark hair hid her face. “Did you get anything out of that? The counseling?”
Mercurial was a good way to describe Marlys’s moods, and Juliet found her hard to keep up with on her good days. But now, rattled by Noah, rattled by that kiss—oh, God—she was struggling more than usual. “The counseling? You want to know about the counseling?”
“Yeah.” The dark-haired woman jerked upright and folded her arms over her chest. “Tell me about it.”
“I went for just a few weeks,” she answered, not sure what information the other woman actually wanted. “It let me know that my feelings were entirely normal.”
Feelings like the ones she’d been experiencing lately, Juliet realized. During their last session, her counselor had gone over what to expect in the upcoming months.
Deep loneliness and isolation. Check.
Then a lessening of the heavy grief. Check.
Finally, the renewal of sexual drive.
At the time, that possibility had seemed remote. Due to Wayne’s cancer and treatment, the physical side of their marriage had ended long, long before his death. She’d believed her urges in that direction were dead, too.
Okay, she thought, taking a deep breath and letting it out. So what had happened today wasn’t crazy or weird or even unexpected. Wayne would be the first one—as a matter of fact, he had been the first one. “Juliet,” he’d said. “You’re too young to have your future end with my life.”
But there wasn’t room in her heart for anyone else. There wasn’t.
“Well, I’m at least as normal as you,” Marlys declared.
Not even close, Juliet wanted to retort, but she’d managed to play peacemaker for this long so she swallowed the words. “If there’s anything I can do…”
“It’s too late for that, don’t you think? With the anniversary of Dad’s death coming up, the rumors are swirling again, you know. I hear it at the club, in the shop, around all the old family friends. Deal Breaker. Happy Widow.”
“Marlys—”
“If only you’d been there for Dad on the day he died. But I forget where you were again? Oh, yeah, a spa.”
Spa. How Juliet had come to hate those three letters arranged in that particular order. It had been all over the cable channels. They’d run footage of the place’s fancy double doors, zeroing in on the discreet placard that read CELL PHONES OFF BEFORE CROSSING THIS THRESHOLD.
Without thinking, Juliet had complied with that order. So when she returned home to the terrible news, she’d been glowing from a facial and sporting a fresh pedicure.
“Marlys, of course I didn’t know what would happen.” This wasn’t the first time she’d defended herself. But Marlys, the press, and many in her social circle had continued to look on her with suspicion.
“It hasn’t helped that you don’t talk to your old friends. Aunt Helen said you won’t return her calls.”
