Epilogue #2
applause. The host turned back to Sam. “For me the heart of the book is really the codependency. Talk about that.”
“Sure. Technically, it means anyone who’s ever concentrated on another person’s life instead of their own—”
“—which is every woman here, am I right?” said the host. She made boxer’s fists in the air. “I so related to this. Putting aside your own perceptions, beliefs, needs, even your identity for another person.”
“Yes,” said Sam. “I thought I was done with it. I’d done so much work, in therapy and group. I’d left a marriage—to a great
guy in recovery, hey, Hank!—to put my own needs first. And then I walked into the biggest wolf den of all.”
Her throat ached, and she looked at her hands, ringless now, in her lap.
“I remember thinking,” she said, “right before I met William, that I was so lonely I’d give up everything else in my life
if only I could meet the right person. My career, my books, everything I’d built, I’d trade it away just like that. And I
did. I left it for this shining dream he created, that he dangled in front of me like bait, that maybe we both believed in
but that never really existed at all. I abandoned everything to be with him—including my very self. And I’m—” Her voice wavered.
She touched her scratchy throat. “Still working to forgive myself for that.”
There was applause, and Sam tried to knuckle tears from the corners of her eyes without smearing her makeup. The host handed
her a Kleenex.
“Are you cured?” she asked. “Of codependency?”
Sam applied the tissue, using the movement to buy time.
There was something she had told nobody about, not Drishti, not her new therapist, not any of the doctors she’d spoken with about William, not even Emily.
And she never would. It was this: When William had been strangling her in the hot tub, when his hands were around her neck, pulverizing her windpipe, crushing her throat, what Sam had seen flash before her eyes was not her own life but the life they could have had.
The one they’d never have. Of dinners, of walks, of strapping themselves into airplane seats side by side to go to Hawai’i or France or Greece, of reading each other new books, of watching leaves bud and burst and bloom and wither, of watching each other’s hair whiten and thin and their skin wrinkle and droop, of smelling increasingly like mothballs and menthol, of growing stooped and achy and sitting together on the red Adirondack chairs on his lawn and holding hands when they were too old to do more in bed together but sleep.
Talking. Laughing. Ever touching. Keeping company.
And finally floating off into the nighttime sky like lovers, holding each other among the cold stars.
What Sam had never told anyone and never would was what she had seen right at the end, what heaven would be for her: She was walking along the lake surrounding William’s house, beneath the pine trees, and it was early fall and the sky was blue, the sun hot, the clouds reflecting in the water.
And there was a crunch crunch crunching that turned out to be William, walking over the pine needles and through the trees to her. As he came into sight, he ducked
under one of the boughs—he had to hold it out of the way because he was so tall—and he smiled, that sunshine grin that contained
his whole heart in it. It’s you, he said. And Sam said, It’s you.
Sam shook her head now. “No,” she said. “You’re never cured of codependency. Like any other addiction. You just learn how
to manage it. Hopefully, now I’ll value and trust myself more. I won’t make the same mistakes in the next relationship.”
“Hell yeah!” yelled someone in the audience, and Sam and everyone else laughed.
“That’s my sponsor,” said Sam, and the host said, “I hear that. Take a bow, sponsor,” and Drishti jumped up and twerked and everybody clapped, including Sam, and Drishti gave Sam the I’m-watching-you fork fingers, which Sam returned, then sat back down.
“Will you date again?” asked the host, and Sam said, “Hell yeah!” and the viewers laughed. She smiled. “I’m almost ready, I think.
So, ladies, send me your sons and uncles and dads and brothers. Nonsociopaths only, please.”
A woman wearing a rabbit-ear headband was waving her arms in the audience. The host nodded, and a staffer ran to her with
a mic.
“I have a question for Emily,” she said, and there were cheers and wolf whistles, signs bobbing in the semidarkness beyond
the stage featuring rabbits, We U Emily!, Emily Is My Shero. “Emily, how did you find the courage to do what you did?”
Emily was so red it was visible even beneath the thick pancake makeup. “Thank you,” she said, “but it wasn’t courage. I just
did the right thing.”
“You just did the right thing,” the host repeated, deadpan. “You just rearranged your life to track a murderer when nobody
would believe you, and incurred injuries and financial hardship, and gave up your job, and moved into his house, and risked your life to protect another woman you had never met, all because it was the right thing.”
“Well, yeah,” said Emily, grinning, and the audience gave her a standing ovation.
“I’ve heard you don’t think of yourself as a hero,” said the host when they settled down.
“I don’t,” said Emily. “I’m just somebody who knows what it’s like to be used. To have some man use her and throw her away.
William did that to me, and I thought it was bad, but I didn’t know I was one of the lucky ones whose book he didn’t want.
And once I figured it out, I knew I had to try to save the others.”
This time the applause and cheering and stomping went on so long that the host had to pat the air several times. “We could
never make as much noise as you deserve, Emily,” she said. “You deserve it all.”
Emily shrugged, and Sam took her hand. “Yes,” she said, “you do.”
The host smiled. “And obviously you two are friends now,” she said. “I mean, beyond the book. Beyond the time you spent together so Sam could give Emily voice.”
“Yes,” Sam said, and “Yup,” Emily said.
“But Emily, you’re a writer as well,” said the host, “you went to graduate school with William. You didn’t want to write your
own part of this book?”
Emily shook her head, her face reddening again. “I’m done.”
“You’re not going to write anything, ever?”
“Nope,” Emily said. “Being a writer’s way too dangerous,” and everybody laughed.
“Besides,” she said, “I’m perfectly happy working in my store.”
She grinned shyly at Sam, who smiled back.
“And thank God,” said Sam. She squeezed Emily’s hand. “We writers, all of us, need booksellers. And readers! What would we
do without you? You save our lives.”