Never Say Never

Chapter 1

Oona Kelly Webster put the finishing touches on the Thanksgiving table with a critical eye, and made sure it looked as perfect as she wanted it, and her family expected it to be.

Everything in Oona’s life was orderly, and impeccably planned well in advance.

She didn’t like surprises, and tried to anticipate problems so that they would never happen.

She’d had an impressive career in publishing at Hargrove Publishing, a small but highly respected house that existed under the umbrella of a larger publishing conglomerate.

She had worked at the same company since she’d graduated from Princeton, and had taken classes from some of the greatest contemporary writers of our time.

From junior editor, over time she had risen to being the head of the small but most lofty literary imprint, publishing exceptionally fine authors.

The house was prestigious, although its revenues did not compare to those that published commercial fiction.

And as the publisher of her own imprint, Oona Kelly was a greatly respected, distinguished person in the literary world.

She was very proud of the talented authors she had discovered, even if their sales figures were not as high as the blockbuster bestsellers of commercial fiction.

Their work was for an elite readership who preferred obscure literary work, of a more intellectual nature.

Now almost forty-seven, Oona had discovered and published many very fine writers, several of whom were famous.

She nurtured and encouraged her authors with great care.

Unlike the world of bestselling commercial fiction, hers was not a dog-eat-dog existence.

It was one of dignity, finesse, and great literary minds.

As head of the house, she had a protected and very secure situation, with considerable prestige.

She didn’t abuse the power she had, but she enjoyed her position and all that it entailed.

In spite of the highbrow literary nature of the books she published, Oona looked a decade younger than her age, and the older authors whom she published were surprised and delighted to meet a pretty young woman with big green eyes, a youthful face, and a warm smile, who understood and appreciated their work, and had an excellent education and twenty-five years of experience.

She was dedicated to the imprint she represented and to its authors, and defended their interests fiercely.

She got them the best advances she could, given their somewhat limited sales.

The owners of the publishing house were a brilliant, astute family who had owned it for three generations and grown their overall publishing, including nonfiction, some carefully selected fiction, and academic textbooks that were lucrative, into a massive multibillion-dollar business.

They valued Oona’s contributions, and the high-end relatively small imprint she ran.

It wasn’t a big moneymaker but it gave them a great deal of prestige in the publishing world.

And keeping it small gave Oona the opportunity to run it impeccably, with full control of every detail, which was how she ran her personal life and home as well.

She had married Charles Webster six months after graduating from Princeton, and she was already working at Hargrove Publishing then.

Charles was twelve years older, and thirty-four at the time.

He was already a successful account executive in advertising and enjoyed it thoroughly.

They had met at a party in New York, where they both lived, and had grown up, and it was a whirlwind romance, which turned into a solid marriage, with their two children, Meghan and Will, who were twenty-two and twenty-four now.

Will was born on their first anniversary and Oona went back to work six weeks later because she loved her job.

Oona and Charles both had big careers, busy lives, and too little time together, but they tried to have dinner together once a week.

The kids were out of the house now.

Oona and Charles were about to celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary in December, and had decided to put off a big party until the spring.

Instead they had rented a very handsome house in France, an hour outside Paris, near Milly-la-Forêt in the department of Essonne.

She and Charles were going to spend a month there from mid-February to mid-March.

They were hoping that their children, Meghan and Will, would join them for a week, and the rest of the time they were going to enjoy three weeks alone in France.

It was something they had said they had wanted to do for years, so Oona had organized it.

The house looked beautiful and had a housekeeper who came on weekdays.

The home and property seemed grander than what they needed, but they had decided to spoil themselves.

It was owned by a Hong Kong Chinese family that rented the home out for weddings, and occasionally to foreigners looking for a comfortable, luxurious vacation experience in a lovely location.

Charles and Oona had both worked during their entire marriage, cared equally about their family and their careers, and had reached considerable status in their respective professional communities at a young age.

Charles had switched to a more dynamic ad agency a decade earlier, and was the number two person at Hills, Rockwell, and Klein advertising.

He’d been in line for the number one position for the past five years but had been passed over.

Now he had to wait for another round, until the current CEO retired, which didn’t appear to be imminent, but Charles loved his job and didn’t mind the wait for the top position.

He liked working there in the meantime.

It fed his ego and his mind.

He had status, respect, great perks, and fewer headaches than he would have had as CEO.

Their daughter, Meghan, was due to return to New York by the end of the year.

She had graduated from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., in June, with a major in Global Philanthropy, and she was currently finishing an internship sponsored by the Carter Foundation, which had several programs in Africa that interested her.

And she was looking for a long-term job, hopefully abroad for a few years.

Will had gone to UC Berkeley, graduated three years before, had stayed in San Francisco, and worked for Google, which he loved.

He thrived on the California life—the weather, the athletics, the outdoors.

He had no desire to move back to New York.

Their father, Charles, was fifty-nine, and was determined to become CEO of HRK before he retired.

It was his one major goal.

The status it would bring with it was important to him, which he admitted sheepishly to Oona at times, although his role as second in line to the throne was not an unpleasant one, and he had sufficient power to keep him happy in the meantime.

But he wanted to achieve the status of CEO before he retired.

Both their children were on well-thought-out career paths, having been taught since early on to do so, although Oona was less pleased with Meghan’s determination to spend the next several years in underdeveloped countries, improving the lot of suffering people.

She didn’t like the idea of Meghan going someplace dangerous, which was part of what appealed to Meghan.

She couldn’t see herself wasting her time in some insignificant underpaid glamour job, like many of her friends working for the assistant beauty editors of major magazines.

She wanted to make a difference in the world, face-to-face and hand to hand, on the ground, which Charles heartily approved of.

Oona was concerned about the dangers of being exposed to tribal wars, health risks, and the threats to any beautiful woman as young as she was.

But Meghan was strong-willed and almost sure to do what she wanted in the end, and Oona was bracing herself for it, once Meghan started looking for jobs in earnest at various foundations in New York that had projects and staff abroad.

Meghan and Will were both coming home for Thanksgiving, as they always did, and their parents were going to tell them then about the house they had rented in France.

Oona and Charles were both excited about it, and Oona, reading up on the local history, had already discovered that the house had an interesting history of its own.

It had been built by Louis XVI, the last French king before the Revolution, for his favorite mistress, and it was named after her, “La Belle Florence.”

It had numerous secret passages, and originally had a tunnel joining it to a nearby chateau, where the king had spent a great deal of his time, when that mistress was his favorite.

She had died young, in mysterious circumstances, and he was said to be heartbroken at the time.

The chateau where he had stayed had burned during the French Revolution and was gone, but the home of the king’s mistress was still standing, and had been lovingly restored and maintained by its various owners during the centuries since.

It seemed like a romantic spot to spend their anniversary, and Charles was amused by Oona’s fascination with it.

Their own relationship wasn’t romantic, or demonstrative, and never had been, but it was warm, comfortable, predictable, and solid.

With two busy professional lives, their paths often ran parallel rather than intersecting as often as they wished. But they tried to make up for it with family vacations in the summer, and dinner dates once a week, when their schedules allowed.

The intention was to catch up on what was happening in their respective lives. Sometimes they didn’t have a chance to talk at length for days.

There were times when Oona felt they didn’t communicate enough, but it was hard to stay on top of everything with business lives as demanding as theirs.

They saw more of each other when the children were home, but that didn’t happen often now, with their children living in other cities, with busy lives of their own.

Their careers mattered to all four of them. And success was something they were expected to achieve, even in philanthropy.

Oona and Charles had taught their children the value of work and set a strong example for it. Neither of the children was lazy, both had been good students, and they had gotten good grades.

Oona considered both their marriage and their family a success, which mattered to her even more than it did to Charles, who was a little less demanding of the children than his wife. Oona wanted her children to be happy, but she wanted them to work hard too.

Oona’s father had been a hard-driving venture capitalist who had flown his own plane on the weekends and had been killed in a crash during a winter storm when she was ten.

Her mother had never recovered, had withdrawn from the world, and died at an early age of cancer when Oona was in college.

Her mother was an intelligent, capable woman, but had never had a job.

She was a talented artist, but never showed her work, and Oona had often wished that her mother would do something to use her talents in some way.

Instead she had faded away like a ghost once her husband died, which made Oona even more determined to have a career, and never give up her job or her dreams that made her life worthwhile, gave her a feeling of self-worth, and grounded her, and she never had.

Charles had two brothers he wasn’t close to, and all three boys were highly competitive with each other.

In his family, they were expected to be outstanding athletes and have big careers, and were always pitted against each other by their domineering father.

He was a merchant banker.

The competition their parents fostered among them had driven the brothers apart at an early age.

They had little in common except a desire to excel.

Charles was the least aggressive of the three, and always had been.

One of his brothers was in investments, a star on Wall Street, and the other was in the oil business, and had made a fortune of his own.

Their wives were equally ambitious, embedded in various charities, serving on a broad variety of boards, and socially competitive.

Oona didn’t enjoy her sisters-in-law the rare times she saw them, and their children were as driven as they were.

Although Charles’s parents were moderately wealthy, enough to live well and educate their sons at the best schools, money was the driving force in the family, and Charles had always been more sensitive and humane than they were, which was why Oona loved him.

Both his brothers had told him to quit when he was passed over as CEO.

Charles preferred to wait it out until the next round, which seemed reasonable to Oona too.

He was a good father to their children and had been a good husband to her.

Their relationship had never been passionate—in some ways at times they seemed more like friends than lovers—but they had been faithful to each other and were respectful partners.

It seemed like enough to her.

He never interfered in her career, or with the choices she made.

He consulted her about the big decisions he made and respected her very sensible opinions.

As Oona looked the table over for the last time, she was satisfied with her family and marriage, and there was nothing she would have changed.

One of the things she liked about their life was that it was predictable and stayed the same—there were no surprises or fast moves, no sudden shifts of direction.

She knew what to expect, and what would happen when, which made her feel secure.

The children had come home the night before and were having breakfast together when she went back to the kitchen, to check on the progress of the turkey.

She cooked the Thanksgiving meal herself every year, which satisfied her need for domesticity.

Now that the children were gone, they had no set time for dinner, and no one to prepare it.

She and Charles fended for themselves when they came home at night, and only made a point of having dinner together once a week.

The rest of the time, Charles usually came home late, either after meetings or dinner with clients.

Oona frequently had dinner with one of her authors or came home with a manuscript to read and comment on.

On the weekends, she did errands or occasionally had lunch with a friend, and Charles played golf with clients or business associates.

They had a weekend house in East Hampton, which they went to in the summer, but rarely on winter weekends.

They used it less and less now that the children lived in other cities.

Charles and Oona both found the house isolating and depressing in the winter months.

“What are you two up to?”

Oona asked Meghan and Will, sitting at the kitchen table.

She basted the turkey and joined them.

“Just talking,”

Will said vaguely.

He was a handsome, dark-haired boy like his father, tall and well built, although Charles’s hair was streaked with gray now, which made him look a lot older.

Meghan’s hair was a dark auburn, unlike her mother’s brighter red, and she had brown eyes, while Oona’s were green.

The freckles that had been the bane of Oona’s existence as a child had faded with age.

Oona was a true redhead, with the lively personality to go with it.

Meghan was more reserved, although she spoke her mind when she wanted to.

Will was generally uncommunicative when his parents were around.

He never talked about his personal life except when forced to, often by his more extroverted sister.

“Can I tell?”

Meghan mouthed at him. He hesitated and then shrugged and nodded yes, and hoped he wouldn’t regret it. “Will has a new girlfriend,”

she informed her mother, and Oona looked immediately interested.

“What happened to the Chinese girl from Singapore?”

Oona asked him. She came from an important family and had gone to Stanford.

“She went home, to work for her father,”

he said in a dry tone. He didn’t seem upset about it.

“This one is from Salt Lake City, she’s twenty-seven years old, and Will works for her. She’s his Division Manager,”

Meghan reported, and Oona nodded and turned to her son.

“Is that awkward, dating your boss?”

“It could be. We haven’t told anyone at work. If it goes on, we’ll have to tell them, and they’ll transfer one of us to another section. I don’t mind.”

He had always been mature for his age, and it didn’t surprise Oona that the woman he was seeing was older than he was. Will was good-natured and easygoing, Meghan was more forceful about the subjects she cared about, and always the champion of the underdog and the underprivileged. Her internships so far had suited her, working for foundations involved with the indigent around the world.

“That’s too bad if you have to be the one to transfer,”

his mother said, and he didn’t comment. Oona wanted to ask him if she was worth his having to transfer but she didn’t dare. He was old enough to make his own decisions about his job, she thought, and his romances.

They each spent the Thanksgiving day relaxing and doing whatever they wanted. Meghan and Will hung out together and went for a walk. They hadn’t seen each other since a week at the house in the Hamptons in August, and they wanted to catch up.

At six o’clock they met in the living room of their spacious apartment on the Upper East Side, where they had grown up.

They each had a glass of wine, talking animatedly, in good spirits.

Charles had been out all day playing golf with friends.

They sat down to dinner at seven and enjoyed the meal Oona had been cooking all afternoon.

It was delicious, as it always was.

Oona had perfected the meal for years and eliminated the mistakes.

She included everyone’s favorites, and over dessert they talked about the house they’d rented in France.

Will promised to arrange for vacation time, and Meghan said she would tell anyone who interviewed her for a job that she needed the week off for a family event.

Charles was quiet when they talked about it, letting Oona do the planning she was so good at, and she told them about the history of the house, which interested her more than the others.

It was a lovely Thanksgiving.

And the kids were excited about the week in France for their parents’ anniversary.

The rest of the weekend went quickly, and on Sunday Meghan went back to Washington, D.C., and Will flew back to San Francisco. They would be home again for Christmas, and Meghan would be moving back from Washington then, unless she found a long-term job before that.

The house was quiet after they left. Oona made a light supper of leftovers, and she and Charles sat at the kitchen table. Charles was lost in thought, and eating slowly, picking at his food, and then he looked at Oona. He didn’t know where to start, but he knew he had to tell her.

“I didn’t want to spoil your plans in France with the kids, and I know you want them to come,”

he started.

“Don’t you?”

She looked surprised. “We said we’d spend a week with them, and three weeks on our own. That ought to be enough for us.”

She smiled at him, but she could see that he looked troubled. He looked pale as he gazed at her.

“I can’t come,”

he said quietly.

“You can’t? Why not? Something with a client?”

She knew it had to be important for him to back out of their plans. “Do you want me to try to change the dates for the house?”

He shook his head. Her world was about to crash around her and she didn’t know it. He looked at her again.

“I’m not going with you, Oona. I’m really sorry. I don’t even know where to start. I need a change. A big change. It’s been a hard decision. I’m going to take a sabbatical.”

“For a year?”

She looked shocked. He had never mentioned it before, nor consulted her about the decision. He presented it as a fait accompli, which wasn’t like him.

“Maybe. I’m going to start with six months.”

“And do what? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It’s complicated.”

And then something dawned on Oona that had never occurred to her before.

“Is there someone else?”

she asked in a choked voice, expecting him to say no. And instead he nodded. There were tears in his eyes. He knew this was going to be hard, but he hadn’t realized how hard until he was telling her.

“It’s been going on for a year, it’s been driving me insane. I can’t do this anymore, to you or myself. I need some time to figure out who I am, and what I want.”

“You’re my husband and our children’s father. What is there to figure out? Who is she? It’s been going on for a year? Is it someone at work?”

If he had shot her, she couldn’t have looked more shocked.

“It is someone at work,”

he said guiltily. “I never expected this to happen. I haven’t played around before. It just happened, and it grew to proportions I never even imagined.”

“Enough to throw our marriage away? Is she very young?”

Her heart was pounding as she asked him.

“Thirty-four. It’s been hard because we work together every day. I’m sorry, Oona, I know this is a mess. But I can’t lie to you and sit in a house in France with you for a month.”

She realized as she listened to him that he had been out every night for months.

It wasn’t unusual in his business, and she hadn’t paid attention to the increase in nights he was out.

She trusted him.

And whoever she was, she was thirteen years younger than Oona, and twenty-five years younger than Charles.

It was a lot.

Oona could easily imagine some sexy woman who had bewitched him. Charles had never seemed interested in other women before. Something had changed.

“Who is she?”

Not that it mattered if he was in love with her.

“That’s part of the problem,”

he said, exhaling slowly. “Something like this happened in college. It only happened once.

I never told you, and it never happened again. I thought I was just crazy, young and drunk. Apparently not. It’s not a woman, Oona. It’s a man.

I need to go away and figure this out, and what I want. I understand whatever you need to do about it. I have no right to ask for your indulgence on this. But I have to figure out the life I want to live. I can’t lead a double life the way I have for the past year.”

Oona sat at the kitchen table, staring at him, trying to absorb what he had said.

She tried to remember the last time they had made love and she couldn’t.

A month? Two? Three? Why hadn’t she ever suspected it, and why hadn’t he told her? “I thought it was just some passing insanity, but he’s a good person.

This isn’t his fault.

It’s mine.

I thought it was just physical at first, but it isn’t.

I love him.

Not the way I love you.

We don’t have history, but I love him.

It’s a completely different relationship, but it has value too.

There’s no way to be fair to everyone.

The whole situation isn’t fair.

Maybe I always had this in me, and I didn’t want to face it.

You and I have been like friends and roommates for twenty-five years. The physical side never seemed that important to either of us. We were busy with our kids and our careers. I don’t know what to say, Oona. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“And you’re leaving your job for him?”

She was as pale as Charles by then, as he nodded. “That’s a big step.”

She tried to sound calmer than she felt. She wanted to cry but was fighting not to.

“My brothers were right. I should have left when I got passed over for CEO. This is just a delaying tactic, a way to figure out my life and the job. He came from our office in Buenos Aires, and he has to go back. His visa expires in January. He could only work here for a year. I’m going to go with him when he goes back. I thought that would be better for you too. I won’t be making a spectacle of myself here and embarrassing you. I want to do this as cleanly and decently as I can while I figure it out.”

“What are you going to tell the kids?”

she said, dabbing at her eyes with a napkin on the table, as the tears snuck out.

“The truth. It is what it is. They can come and see me if they want, if they’re willing. I’m not going to force them to do anything.”

He didn’t have to deal with his parents, which was a mercy, since both of them had been very old and had died in the last two years. But his brothers would have a lot to say about his discovering he was gay at nearly sixty.

“So you’re taking a time-out from marriage, fatherhood, and your job,”

she said grimly. “A clean sweep, as it were. And what am I supposed to do? Wait, while you figure out if it’s him or me? That’s a little rough.”

She was part angry, part panicked, and part devastated.

“You have to do what you want, and what’s right for you,”

Charles said. “I’ll continue paying for your expenses, but I have no right to ask you to wait. If you want a divorce, you can have it. If you’d rather just be separated, I’m okay with that too. You have a right to see other people if you want,”

he said. He was in no position to object to that and didn’t want to. She needed to be free too. But dating someone else was the last thing on her mind as she listened to him. Or even their expenses. Their marriage, as they knew it, had just ended. She felt like a bomb had hit her.

“Never. I’m not going to date anyone in these circumstances,”

she said firmly. “Until half an hour ago, I thought we were married. You’re my husband, for better or worse. I think this qualifies as the latter. I never wanted to get divorced or be divorced. I thought people who love each other can always work it out, but this is pretty steep.”

“Roberto feels terrible about it too. He didn’t want to break up our marriage.”

“But he did,”

she said, bleakly, trying to adjust to everything Charles had told her.

“No, I am, because it’s the only fair thing to do. I don’t want to sneak around the way I have been for the last year, or lie to you, or celebrate an anniversary that I’m not honoring.”

It was honest of him, but she still felt awful.

“I suppose it’s decent of you,”

she said, wiping a tear off her cheek. Trying to comfort her would have been hypocritical of him. He wanted to be with Roberto now, not with Oona. “When are you leaving?”

she asked him.

“I’m going to move out tonight. I don’t think I should stay here anymore now that you know. I’ll stay here over Christmas when the kids are home, if you want me to. I want to tell them then. And we leave for Buenos Aires on January second.”

That was six weeks away. “You’ll know where to reach me. I’m not disappearing off the face of the earth,”

he tried to reassure her.

“Just out of my life. Didn’t you ever suspect this before?”

“Not since college, and even then I thought it was some kind of one-time slip. Maybe I never wanted to face it before. But I had to once I met Roberto, and knew I loved him.”

Hearing him say it so directly made her stomach turn over.

“Twenty-five years is a long time to lie to yourself, and to me,”

she said, and he nodded.

He didn’t disagree with her.

But it made sense to him now.

Once he met Roberto he realized he hadn’t been in love with Oona or even attracted to her in years.

There was nothing effeminate about him, but he realized now that he was powerfully attracted to a man, not a woman.

It was something he had never faced, until he was fifty-nine years old, hard as that was to believe. It had taken Roberto, a beautiful Argentine blond, blue-eyed man, of English origin on his father’s side, like many Argentinians.

“How do you think the kids will react?”

he asked her, with worried eyes.

“It’ll be a shock, not just that you’re in love with a man, but that you’re leaving your job and moving to another country for six months or a year, or forever.”

Her eyes searched his, but there were no clear answers now, except that he was leaving her, and whatever happened now, their marriage was over. There was no coming back from this.

“Do you want a divorce?”

he asked her.

“I guess it will come to that in the end, whatever happens. I don’t want to give you an answer now. I need time to think too.”

Oona stood up.

There was nothing more to say.

She went to her study, to avoid him.

He went to his dressing room to pack a few things.

He had already moved some of his clothes to Roberto’s apartment, without her knowing.

He felt like a monster, having told her, but there was no way to avoid it anymore.

She had taken it even more graciously than he had hoped.

Somehow, it made it all feel worse.

He was turning sixty, and he was leaving his job, his wife, his home, his country, and his kids, he was in love with a man, and changing his life completely in every way.

It was terrifying and yet he knew it was what he wanted, what he felt he had to do.

Oona knew it happened to others, but never in a million years had she thought this would ever happen to her.