Part 7 (1/2)
”Did he cheat on you?”
Jill sighed, inwardly. A couple of tourists got up from a nearby table. ”I'm not sure we should get into this here and now, honey.”
”Mom, I can take it. I'm not a baby.”
”Frankly, it's not your business. Or Abby's. Or anybody's but mine.” Jill wanted to stand her ground. It wouldn't help for Megan to know more, and it was too emotionally charged a day. ”I had to divorce him, and I did, and we're better for it.”
”Mom, tell me, please?” Megan leaned forward, putting her hands on the table, palms down. ”William told Abby and Victoria. He thought they could handle it.”
”William lied to Abby and Victoria.”
”Trust me, Mom. Trust me enough to tell me.”
”It's not a matter of trust.” Jill tried to s.h.i.+ft gears. ”I wish we would use this day, and the fact that he's gone, to put this chapter behind us and go forward.”
”We can't go to the next step until we understand this one.”
Jill blinked. Either Megan had read that somewhere, or she was getting smarter.
”You told me that, last week. When you were helping me with equations. You said you can't go to the next step until you understand the last one.” Megan leaned over, bearing down. ”Now tell me what happened. Why did you and William really break up?”
Jill felt her resolve weaken. She spotted their waitress, coming toward them with their meals. ”Hold on.”
”Here we go, ladies,” the waitress said, setting salads in front of them, filling the air with the tang of balsamic dressing. They both thanked her, and Jill waited for her to leave before she spoke.
”Honey, I don't know if he cheated, and it really doesn't matter to me.”
Megan's eyes flared. ”Of course it does. It should.”
”Let's keep the drama to a minimum,” Jill said, though she doubted it was possible. Mothers and daughters were automatic drama, and if you add dead ex-husbands, it rose to operatic levels.
”So what went wrong?”
”We were happy for a while, but then the trouble started, and I didn't notice it at first. I ignored things, like symptoms you minimize when you don't want to change your initial diagnosis. Cla.s.sic confirmation bias.”
Megan nodded, used to medical a.n.a.logies by now.
”You remember William, right? What was he like, to you?”
”Fun. Silly. He liked to do things.” Megan smiled. ”Like when he got the bouncy house, and the trampoline.”
”And the red convertible. Remember that day? He took you all for rides?”
”Right. The Mustang.” Megan smiled more broadly, and Jill hoped she hadn't made a mistake, having her recall such happy times, but that was the point.
”Well, somebody had to pay for all that. William made money, but not as much as I did, and he wanted that lifestyle. He wanted to buy cars and trampolines, whatever he wanted, you name it.”
Megan frowned. ”So what's wrong with that?”
”Nothing, but he began to run up huge credit bills and wanted to take loans against the house. I'm not a big spender, and married people are supposed to agree on things.” Jill tried to explain, but it was impossible to explain divorce to a teenage girl, with a head full of The Bachelor. ”He wanted more money, so he was always investing in things. He wanted to buy into a biotech start-up, and when I gave him that, he wanted to buy a t.i.tle insurance company. He was all over the place.”
”So it was only about money?”
”Not only about that, but money matters.”
”He was trying to follow his dream, Mom.”
”Not exactly.” Jill wasn't surprised by Megan's defending William, because she always did, which was why these conversations were no-win. ”It's not 'follow your dream,' like American Idol. You can follow your dream, but you have to be practical, too.”
”So he couldn't afford to pay for his dream.”
”No, he didn't really have a dream. His only dream was being rich, and that doesn't count as a dream. That's just plain greed.”
Megan blinked.
”Pretty soon I could see a pattern, and I knew it would never end. No matter how much money I gave him, it would never be enough. If I let him, he would bankrupt me.”
Megan frowned. ”So that's it? That's all?”
Jill felt her chest tighten. ”One day he asked me for a lot of money, for another business venture.”
”How much did he want?”
”$325,000.”
”Wow.” Megan's eyes flared, though Jill knew she had no idea how much or how little that was. If it was as much as an iPhone, it was a lot.
”I said no.” Jill wouldn't tell her that the money William asked for had belonged to Megan. It was her inheritance, since Gray's parents had established a small trust for her after his death. Gray hadn't had any life insurance; they both thought he was too young to die, and in fact, he was. ”And when I said no, he asked me to take out a loan for it, and I refused. Then he did something that broke the camel's back.”
”What?”
Jill hesitated, but maybe it was time. ”He used to come to the office at night and bring you. He'd wait for me, and you'd play with the toys in the waiting room, then we'd go out to dinner.”
”I remember, it was fun.”
”I thought he came by to see me, but he didn't. It turned out that he was stealing from my office.”
Megan's lips flattened, and Jill could see hurt flicker across her face.
”Petty cash went missing, and drug samples. It took us a long time to notice, because we weren't talking to each other about it, with all the work we had to do. He did it in small amounts, especially the pads.”
”He took pads? Like school supplies?”
”No, prescription pads. People sell them to other people so they can get prescription drugs, illegally.”
”Really?”
”Yes. You can get as much as fifty dollars for a blank prescription, and they're usually bought by people addicted to pain meds, like Oxycontin and Vicodin. We didn't know who was stealing ours, but it was William.”
Megan fell silent, wounded, for William, and Jill kicked herself for starting the story. She decided not to tell Megan about the money William had taken from her purse, or his trick of using her ATM card before she was even awake, withdrawing amounts too small to notice, until too late.