Owen sighed. “I don’t know how I’m going to be able to live with this.”
“You will, Owen. If for no other reason than you have no choice in the matter.”
Owen’s graduation ceremony was held in the Metropolitan Opera House, the anchor of the Lincoln Center complex. The theater held close to four thousand, and still tickets were limited to four per family.
Jessica’s family needed only two. One for her and a second for Wayne.
Wayne sat beside her, midway back in the orchestra section. His face betrayed no trace of misgiving about the path that had led them to this day. If anything, he seemed like a man who had just ended a long journey and was satisfied his destination was worth the trip.
In the past few weeks, Wayne had become bolder in expressing his hope for them to share a future together. Jessica thought she’d made it clear that was not going to happen, but every so often he would say or do something that suggested the message hadn’t been fully received.
“He made it,” Wayne whispered to her in between the speeches offered by the valedictorian and the salutatorian.
She smiled but couldn’t confirm his assessment. If Owen had made it, it was only in the most literal sense. He wasn’t the same person he had been before. Even being sick had never so fundamentally changed him as his guilt did. You could get well after having cancer, but she knew all too well that there was no escaping living with the bad things you had done.
Perhaps that was only the pessimist’s view. After all, Owen was graduating from high school and heading off to college soon. Which meant that he would be free to live the life that they’d dreamed he would. Not so long ago, they’d have gladly sacrificed their own lives to give him that chance.
So maybe Wayne was right. Owen had made it.
The graduating class included more than eight hundred students, and they were called up by major: drama, dance, tech, art, instrumental, and voice, in that order. The applause for any individual graduate had fallen precipitously after the first few crossed the stage, so that by the time Owen was called to receive his diploma, Jessica thought that she and Wayne might have been the only ones clapping.
Owen’s hair had grown back, at least to the extent that he no longer looked like he had ever been bald. Jessica had asked him whether he planned on growing it out again.
“No, I don’t think so,” he had said. “Seems like tempting fate.”
Upon receiving their diplomas, some of the graduates turned to the audience, either holding up their arms in a prizefighter victory stance or engaging in some other gesture of joy. Not Owen. It was difficult to tell from so far away, but Jessica didn’t think her son even smiled in his moment of triumph. He took the diploma from the principal, shook his hand, and walked across the stage.
For the longest time, Jessica had been convinced that leukemia would shape her son’s life. Perhaps that was still the case, but she no longer believed it would be paramount in molding the type of person he’d become. His curse would be to live out his days with the knowledge of what he’d done. Ironically, escaping legal retribution for his mistake would be his lifelong punishment.
It was a sentence she knew all too well. When she’d left Wayne for James, she had felt, in some small measure, like she had gotten away with it. She had cheated on her husband, broken his heart, and left him without having to face his anguish. And what was her punishment for violating one of God’s own commandments? Bliss with another man.
Of course, there was no refuge from a self-imposed sentence. But she knew she’d gotten off lightly. A slap on the wrist, most people would have said.
Jessica had never believed in any afterlife. The existence she had now was the only one she ever would. She could make it heaven or hell. For her—like many people, she assumed—it felt like both at different times.
She wished she’d never been so naïve as to believe that she and James would live happily ever after. Not after what they’d done, the people they’d left hurt in their wake. How much they loved each other was irrelevant to others, after all.
Nothing born of sin ever ends well.
Watching her son leave the stage, Jessica hoped above all else that it was possible that he could live with the guilt and still find happiness. She’d managed that, however briefly. Perhaps Owen could as well.
And if he could, maybe she could too.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you very much for reading The Perfect Marriage. While I am writing a book, I feel very connected not only to the characters but to my readers as well. Then, when the book is finished, that connection abruptly breaks. So that we can reconnect, I encourage you to email me at [email protected] and share your thoughts. I promise I will respond, and more than one reader in the past has won a bet against a dubious friend that they’d ever hear back from that author they emailed.
Although my readers always deserve my first thanks, a great many people contributed to The Perfect Marriage before anyone turned the first page. The Perfect Marriage is my fifth book with Thomas & Mercer (and my ninth overall), and I have immensely enjoyed working with them. Throughout that time, my team has been rather fixed, and I wouldn’t have it any other way: Liz Pearsons has been my editor and friend since the beginning. Ed Stackler, who almost fifteen years ago read the very first thing I thought could be seen outside my family, still provides insightful suggestions that make everything I’ve published that
