Chapter Thirty-Nine
‘My mother called me Freedom.’ But, slowly, resignedly, she took the seat beside him, sinking into the dark green cushion of the swing.
He sat absolutely still, as if she were one of the wild squirrels that skittered up and down the nearby sour gum trees and he knew that any sudden movement would send her whirling from the porch.
‘Your mother doesn’t even know who you are. Babe, we’re childhood sweethearts and I love you. I’m sorry that my pranks got me sent to jail and I get how hard that was on you. But I’m straightening myself out. I swear. We can begin with a clean sheet and I’ll be the man you want me to be. Stay home, Honor. Let’s try again. We can work things out.’
The softness of the swing cushion surrounded her, as if it thought she was back where she ought to be. She looked into his face. His tousled hair and eyes the colour of ginger. Thought of never seeing Martyn again and her heart gave a great spasm. She swallowed, noisily. ‘OK,’ she whispered. ‘I guess now Martyn’s careers are screwed because of me . . . You put those sites back as they were, right now.’
His smile turned to satisfaction. ‘OK, babe. It’ll just take me a few minutes.’
He put the bowl of ice cream on the floor to free both hands, his fingers flying over the keys. Honor watched, remembering Martyn’s face when he’d discovered what Stef had done to him. The thunder. The distress. And she knew that what she was about to do was worth it, to save his career. Careers.
It didn’t seem to take Stef long. He spun the laptop around and passed it over. ‘There.’
She checked out Martyn’s site and the site of Ace Smith Model Management. Martyn’s Facebook page. No porn. No defamatory messages. Her shoulders melted with relief and fatigue fizzed at the periphery of her vision like a waiting black swarm. ‘That’s good.’ She stooped to lay the computer down on the wooden porch floor, the planks shrunken and separated from decades of Connecticut summers, and picked up Stef’s ice cream bowl.
With a swift movement, she inverted it, dumping the contents on the computer keyboard.
‘ Honor —!’
She squished the melting blobs right between the keys, rubbing circles that forced it, creamy, shiny, into every crevice.
Stef rose slowly to his feet, his voice shaking. ‘That’s not even funny. My laptop — I spent a fortune on that, I doubled the RAM, the graphics card is—’
She clambered to her feet, swaying with weariness. ‘It’s a prank, Stef. Pranks aren’t funny. They cause pain and they screw with people’s lives.’
‘It’s criminal damage—’
‘Yeah.’ She folded her arms, leaning a hip on the porch rail to keep herself on her feet. ‘Call the cops. I have to speak to them anyway. To tell them about you committing identity theft again.’
He scowled. But there was uncertainty in his eyes. ‘They won’t be interested in something that happened outside of the state.’
‘Let’s just put it to the test.’
Standoff. She stepped forward, so that he could read in her face how deadly serious she was. ‘But I won’t talk to the cops — for you, babe . If you sign those divorce papers when they’re served and forget all about us giving our marriage another go.’
His face set like stone, eyes flat. ‘OK,’ he conceded, eventually. ‘I guess I don’t have a choice. What in the hell’s happened to you? This isn’t “Honor-able”.’
She pushed the laptop closer to him with her toes, the ice cream melting and dripping from the edges. ‘Sometimes, I’m really not in that “Honor-able” little compartment you try to squeeze me into.’ But her heart ached for him. For the Stef he used to be and all the Stefs he wouldn’t be, as long as he could only turn his intellect to mischief instead of making a life. She made her voice gentle. ‘There can’t be a marriage where there’s no trust or respect.’
She left him standing on the shady porch as she climbed into the car, turned around in the drive and headed for her father’s house.
By the time she pulled up, she was so tired she could hardly see. Her last shreds of energy had gone into the final Honor-Stef confrontation.
Karen was at the stove, sizzling something in a wok, and had already set one end of the table while Garvin worked at the other. He sprang up, lines of anxiety all over his face. ‘Where the hell did you skip off to this time?’
Honor hung her tired arms around him. ‘Sorry, Dad. I guess I stole your car. Do you mind if I don’t talk about it, just yet? I’m going upstairs and I’m going to sleep for a week. Karen, that dinner smells delicious but I can’t eat a thing.’
Garvin hugged her, hard, with all the unconditional, unquestioning love she’d had from him all of her life. ‘OK, honey. You go sleep.’