She wanted so badly to believe him. Of course he hadn’t had anything to do with Pru Zimmerman, but … She’d been a young girl, too, the first time he’d kissed her… . And Missy Lancaster … Pregnant. He’d said Missy’s baby wasn’t his, that he hadn’t been her lover. He wasn’t lying. Couldn’t be. He loved her. Her, Shelley. Still …
He took his hands off her shoulders, releasing her so quickly she nearly dropped to the floor. For a moment he stared at her averted face, disgust and heartache battling for supremacy. Shelley was never sure which was the victor.
He turned away from her and said to her father, “Bill was going to meet us at the chapel. I’ll head him off there and cancel the ceremony.”
When he turned back to her, she couldn’t meet his eyes. At that moment she didn’t feel anything. No anger, no pain, no disappointment, no despair. She was cata-tonic, completely void of feeling. Her spirit had deserted her, leaving behind a vast wasteland that once had been her heart.
When he left, Grant didn’t slam the door. But the quiet click of its closing couldn’t have sounded more final.
“Shelley, dear.” Her mother was the first to break the funereal silence in the room. Shelley didn’t know how long she’d been standing there, staring at the closed door. Her mother repeated her name.
Shelley lifted her head and saw that her parents were looking at her cautiously. Did they expect her to fly into a rage, gnash her teeth, tear at her hair, bang her head against the wall? Their wariness was justified. She felt capable of such acts. “I guess you drove down here for nothing.” She laughed harshly. “It doesn’t look like there’s going to be a wedding.”
Her parents stared back at her in sympathy. She couldn’t stand their pitying expressions. It was like a reenactment of the days immediately following her divorce. “I think I’ll lie down for … for a while.” She began edging toward the hall, and by the time she left the room she was running.
She fell across the bed, hugging the pillow tight against her face as she screamed into it. Her body twisted against the excruciating pain of her soul. She vented her fury with tears and curses, pounding her fists into the mattress beneath her. Never had she succumbed to such a fit of temper, but then, never had her world been so unmercifully destroyed.
But the rage was soon spent, and she became exhausted. And the exhaustion was accompanied by despair, black and encompassing and absolute, suffocating her.
She rolled onto her back, heedless of the rumpled state of the carefully tailored silk suit. Her eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling.
Why had she questioned Grant’s innocence? Suspicion had ruled her reactions. Why hadn’t she been angry at the wiles of Pru Zimmerman and offered her support to Grant? That was what he had expected her to do.
But she hadn’t. Why?
Because deep down she felt there was the slightest possibility that it might be true. She had told him repeatedly that the scandal with Missy Lancaster didn’t matter to her, but apparently it did. The seeds of mistrust had been planted in her brain to burst into life with the first breath of uncertainty.
Could everyone else except her be wrong about him? That didn’t seem likely. Was the love she’d always had for him blinding her to the duplicity of his true nature? Was she still no more than an infatuated teenager accepting everything he said as dogma?
She didn’t think he’d been with Pru Zimmerman since she had become his assistant. The girl could be lying just to make good her threat to get even with him for spurning her. But Pru had felt comfortable enough at his duplex to waltz right in… .
“Oh, God,” she cried and buried her face in the pillow again.
None of that made any sense. The way he’d looked at her from the first day he had spoken to her, the way they had loved so unrestrainedly that very afternoon, couldn’t be misinterpreted. He must love her. Passion of that magnitude couldn’t be faked.
For hours the thoughts swirled through her mind in a macabre dance. One moment she wanted to run to him, to beg his forgiveness for her lack of faith in him, the next she was remembering that he had kissed her when she was only sixteen. Missy Lancaster had been more than a decade younger than he. So was Pru.
In his mind, was she in the same category with them? No, no.
“Shelley?”
A light tapping on her door caused her to stir. Groggily she sat up on the edge of the bed. “Yes, Mom.”
The door was opened and a wedge of light sliced across the room. When had it grown dark? “I thought you might like some tea.”
She nodded absently. “Thank you. That sounds good.”
Her mother set a tray on the bedside table. “Here, dear, let’s get you out of that suit.”
Within minutes she was lying between the sheets in a nightgown much more prim than the one she had planned to be sleeping in that night. She looked at the pillow beside hers, the one Grant would have used. A lone tear trickled down her cheek. Her mother took her hand and pressed it sympathetically.
“Go to sleep, dear. You need to sleep.”
The dishes rattled slightly as her mother carried out the tea tray. When the room was plunged into darkness once more, Shelley soon found the oblivion of sleep too appealing to resist.
Her parents reluctantly left the next morning. They offered to stay with her for a few days, but Shelley preferred being alone. Feeling like a shell of a human body from which the heart and soul had been scraped, she maintained a solitary life for the next several days.
On the third day, she ate for the first time. She called friends in her various classes and asked for copies of their lecture notes, knowing that at some point in the future, she’d have to get on with the business of living again. She couldn’t afford to get too far behind in her studies. The building of her career would be the only thing she had to look forward to.