Olivia was swallowing hard, trying not to let the tears overwhelm her. They’d had full lives. They just hadn’t been with each other.
Kit kissed her index finger. “What...” He kissed her second finger. “The hell...” Kissed her ring finger. “Am I going to do...” He put her little finger between his lips. “With that bloody theater?”
His question made her laugh and the tears disappeared.
It was a relative who’d brought Kit to Summer Hill in 1970, and it was another relative who brought him back many years later. Kit told her he hadn’t been worried about returning and possibly seeing her. He’d thought that if he did meet her, he’d feel nothing. Surely, all those years apart, with the lives the two of them had experienced, would make that one summer seem long ago and far away. Maybe they could even laugh about it. Become friends.
But it was the opposite. Kit saw Olivia walking on the street and everything fell away.
To his eyes, she was as beautiful as she’d been when he met her.
He was afraid to approach her, afraid she’d tell him to get out of her life. And too, Kit knew himself well enough that he feared his pride might make him leave and never return.
Instead of direct confrontation, he set up a trap to lure her to him.
“Like a spider,” Olivia had said later.
“Exactly,” he said. “A huge and very hungry spider.”
During the first, long-ago summer they’d spent together, Olivia had been preparing for a Broadway show. She was to play Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice. She would have been on the stage that summer but there’d been a fire in the theater. While it was repaired, the play had been put on hold until the fall.
In his attempt to rewin Olivia, Kit bought an old warehouse in Summer Hill and turned it into a theater. He then set about casting the play—Pride and Prejudice, of course—even finagling his famous actor cousin into playing Darcy.
There were a lot of hiccups along the way, and one of the players ended up in prison, but Kit got what he wanted. He and Olivia married not long after the final performance, and that day they set out on their long honeymoon.
“Really,” Kit said. “That warehouse cost me a fortune and the remodeling cost even more.”
With his every word, Olivia was smiling more broadly. What sixty-plus-year-old woman had a man do all that to win her?
“Want to run it?” he asked.
“Me?” Olivia sat back in her chair. “You mean be director, producer, stage manager, and...?”
“Actress. All of it. Why not?”
“No,” she said. “That’s not for me.” In that long-ago summer they’d spent together, she’d believed she wanted to become an actress. When she’d won the lead role, she was sure that was the beginning of her glorious career. But once she was there, all she thought about was home—and Kit. He had disappeared without a word and it had taken the heart out of her.
She looked back at him. “We’ll have to find someone to take it over. Don’t you have some relatives who’d like to run a little local theater?”
Kit smiled. Olivia had teased him about his huge family and he had been as glad to get away from them as she was. “I’ll put out the word and see who wants the place. Maybe the town will have a new play every few months. It could bring in some revenue. Are you ready to go?”
She realized he’d done what he’d planned to and had replaced her tears with a smile. It was why he was so good in the diplomatic world, why “the prez” called and asked his advice. “Thank you,” she said as he pulled her chair out for her.
“Anything for you.” He took her arm in his.
After that day, their boundaries were set. They would never mention the very personal things that had happened to them in the years they’d been apart.
But still, Kit had said that he’d come to despise his ex-wife, Gina. “Every rotten thing she screamed at me was true—and I hated her for so clearly seeing the worst parts of me.”
“When you don’t love someone, everything they do is intolerable,” Olivia replied.
“Exactly!”
That had been the extent of their discussion of his marriage and divorce. As for Olivia’s marriage, she never mentioned it and Kit didn’t ask.
She was glad of that because she didn’t want to confess that her husband had had a long-term affair. Actually, he’d had a whole other life. What was especially humiliating was that Olivia was sure it was her fault.
The year after her summer with Kit, Alan Trumbull, a recent widower, had hired her to work in his family’s appliance store to answer the phone and take care of the accounts. She saw that he was overwhelmed with a baby and a store that was going downhill. But Olivia meant to keep to herself and not get involved in other people’s problems. She just wanted to work hard enough that she wouldn’t have the time or energy to think about the rotten deal Life had handed her.
But after weeks of sitting quietly in the store, she broke. Watching Alan fumble with a baby and invoices and salesmen made her admit defeat. She couldn’t continue to sit there and do nothing. She pulled the baby from Alan and began directing his life, his business, his child, his house. As the months went by, Alan stepped back and let Olivia handle it all. He never actually proposed. He just mumbled, “I guess we better make it official,” and two weeks later, they were married. Their wedding night had been quick, perfunctory. Loveless. She’d stayed in bed until Alan went to sleep, then she got up and went over the quarterly tax reports. It was either do that or spend the night crying. Night after night, she thought, Kit, Kit. Where are you? Why did you leave me? Why was I not enough for you?
Over the years, she’d used work and domestic duties to try to block out those questions, but her lack of help made her anger rise. Alan used to say, “You’re so much better at business than I am, Livie. You don’t want me holding you up.” Then he’d go off to play golf.
It was only when he was dying of cancer that she found out that Alan didn’t know which end of a golf club to hold. She’d sat beside him in the hospital and listened to his story of how he’d had a secret life with a quiet, plump, sweet-tempered woman named Willie. They’d had a daughter together. And it was Olivia’s hard work with the appliance stores that had supported mother and daughter. There’d even been enough to send the girl to a good university.
His confession about his love for his other family had so shocked Olivia that she couldn’t speak. Alan had taken her hand in his. “Please, Livie, don’t be angry and punish me. Let me see them. Please.”
But she hadn’t been angry. She’d stood up and looked down at him. “Alan, I never knew you had such courage in you.” She started to leave the room, but then turned back and kissed him on the forehead.
She would never have predicted it, but she was glad to find out that he’d had some joy in his life. Heaven knew she had never given him any. She’d fulfilled all the work and duties, but nothing she did came near to achieving true happiness—for him or herself.
Willie came to the hospital, her pretty daughter drove in from Florida, and Alan’s son, Kevin, put his arms around all of them. In an instant, Olivia became the outsider.
She wanted to walk away and leave them alone, but Willie was as incompetent as Alan was. The two of them, Alan dying and holding on to Willie with her endless tears, looked to Olivia to take care of everything.
And she did. Doctors, medicines, alternative treatments that for a while gave them hope. They all fell onto Olivia.
After Alan’s death, she made the funeral arrangements, and she was the one who held Willie while she cried herself to sleep.