“You’re not crazy.” Tennyson walked over to the fridge and pulled out a crisp sauvignon blanc.
“I’m not?” Melanie’s tone suggested she already knew this.
“No, a woman’s intuition is a strong thing.” Tennyson rooted through the pantry, looking for the travel bag of goodies Andrew had stashed on a shelf. She was certain he had put peanut M&M’s inside. She found the bag, grabbed the family-size bag of candy, and reemerged. “You need to put an end to that shit, Melly.”
Melanie scooped up more salsa with a chip and popped it into her mouth. She chewed for a few minutes, making thinking faces. “Yeah, but I can’t. If Kit wants to cheat, he will. I can’t follow him around or guilt him into not doing it if he’s going to do it.”
“No, no.” Tennyson wagged her finger, grabbing two goblets and a bottle of sauvignon blanc. “I mean, yeah, technically you can’t stop him, but you don’t let him stay in the situation he’s in. It’s like leaving a hungry woman in a room full of donuts. Eventually, she’s going to eat a donut.”
Melanie’s face flashed with pain.
“Damn it, Mel. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have . . . that was a stupid analogy.” For a good half an hour, she’d forgotten what had happened that night. She’d forgotten about Hillary’s death and Melanie’s near breakdown. About how horrible she felt watching Melanie floundering around, looking for someone to throw her a rope. She hadn’t planned on bringing the woman back to her house, but she knew Melanie had needed someone to help her.
And there had been no one else there to do it but Tennyson.
Melanie schooled her features. “I know you didn’t mean anything by it. You don’t intentionally hurt . . .” Melanie didn’t finish her sentence. Instead she shook her head and ate another chip.
Tennyson poured the wine into the goblets and handed one to Melanie.
“I should go. I’ve avoided dealing with my mother and family for long enough. My mother may be a queen bitch, but she’s still my mother. She’s just lost her daughter, and that’s no easy thing, especially as it leaves her completely alone. Anne is a hard woman, but beneath, she’s not really as tough as she likes people to believe. I saw that with my father’s death.”
Tennyson’s stomach twisted. Albert Brevard had been a good man, never shouting at the girls when they rooted through his office looking for a stapler and willingly leaving his work behind to take them for ICEEs on hot summer evenings. He had been a gifted surgeon, very dedicated to his patients, but when she and Melanie had been around, he’d given them his total attention. Tennyson had been so angry, so bent on vengeance that she’d dragged that man down in order to hurt Melanie. When she’d uttered those fateful words into the microphone that night, she hadn’t punished Melanie as she intended; she’d punished the entire Brevard family.
As she’d walked away, dropping the microphone in Kit’s lap, she’d felt the absolute satisfaction of making her old friend pay for stealing her man, but then she’d caught sight of Albert’s face. At that moment, the horror of what she’d actually done had rolled over her. The full implication hit her in the parking lot, and she’d vomited behind the oleanders on the fifteenth hole.
Everyone in the Brevard family had blamed her for ruining Albert Brevard’s career . . . and some had declared her responsible for the man’s suicide years later.
Maybe that was true to some degree, but she also knew that eventually Albert’s short-lived career in porn films would have been discovered. Those sorts of secrets always found the light of day, especially once AOL dragged everyone into a whole new online world with databases and a massive porn network. Vintage porn was fairly collectible, and collectors loved the vampy, campy late sixties and seventies porn, which was exactly what Albert had done with titles like Barebackin and Bronco Willy.
Still, she’d played a part and couldn’t make amends for the promise she’d broken in a snit of outrage. Her words, so angrily declared, had been like the old adage about gossip. Pluck a chicken at the top of a mountain, and then try to gather all the scattered feathers.
Impossible.
“About that,” Tennyson said, running her nail along the veined marble. “I’ve never actually apologized for breaking my promise.”
“What?” Melanie looked confused.
“When we found that tape, I pinkie swore that I wouldn’t tell. That I would forget what we’d seen. I broke that promise.”
“In spectacular fashion,” Melanie murmured.
Regret prickled up her spine. “I was angry.”
Melanie snorted. “I actually figured that out.”
“You invited me to the wedding to rub my nose in the fact you’d won Kit,” Tennyson said, still refusing to look at her old friend. “I couldn’t believe you would do something so cruel, and I wanted to . . . hurt you.”
“But I didn’t invite you to rub your nose in anything. I invited you because I couldn’t stand the rift between us. We’d been best friends, and the thought of you not being there with me when I got married broke my heart. In hindsight, I guess it may have looked that way, like I wanted to hurt you, but surely you knew me well enough to know I wouldn’t do something so mean spirited. I just missed you, Teeny, and hoped you’d realized Kit and I loved each other. I thought maybe you’d get over it and want to be there.” Melanie’s voice had grown small.
Tennyson looked up. “You invited me because you missed me?”
Melanie lifted a shoulder. “Yeah. I thought if you came, you would see that Kit and I were . . . I just never expected you to be so cruel. That’s not you. You’re a lot of things, but you were never a mean girl.”
The thought that Melanie had sent the invitation because she missed their friendship had never crossed Tennyson’s mind. Maybe because she couldn’t fathom doing something like that. When she’d opened that envelope, she was three days off finding out she was pregnant. Panic wasn’t even the word for where she was in figuring out her life. She’d spent too many years hanging around a different kind of crowd—spoiled heiresses with spoons up their nose and dislike in their eyes and guys who hustled and thought nothing of stepping on people in their climb to the top. Tennyson had grown accustomed to people who had motives for everything they did. Reading that elegant script inviting her to the marriage of Melanie Elizabeth to Christopher Douglas Layton, she’d burned with fury. Then she’d crumpled into grief over losing the man she thought would be hers. She’d felt betrayed and angry enough to do something rash and uncaring.
And she’d done just that.
“It never occurred to me that you truly wanted me there. I don’t know why I didn’t see that. It was a hard year for me. No excuse for what I did, but maybe I could give you a little background on where I was in my life. You asked me about drugs. I was into that scene. Participating in that irresponsible selfishness led me to getting pregnant with Andrew. His biological father was a small-time director who had a coke problem and a wife. I had been booted off a low-budget horror film for coming in drunk. I didn’t have money, a man, or a clue about what to do about the baby. I just knew I wasn’t going to have an abortion or pretend my mistake away. I had already done that once before. So, yeah, it wasn’t good for me the day I got the invitation. But you didn’t deserve what I did. Nothing really justifies what I did. I can’t take it back, but I can say I’m sorry, Melly. I’ve been sorry for a long time.”