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know
what to believe.
    But he would find
the driver, no matter how unlikely it seemed, simply because he wouldn’t give
up. Then, and only then, could he imagine himself moving on.

A Bend in the Road

Chapter 6
    On Friday
evening, three days after meeting Miles Ryan, Sarah Andrews was alone in her
living room, nursing her second glass of wine, feeling about as rotten as a
person could feel. Even though she knew the wine wouldn’t help, she knew that
she’d nonetheless pour herself a third glass just as soon as this one was
finished. She’d never been a big drinker, but it had been that kind of
day.  Right now, she just wanted to
escape.
    Strangely, it
hadn’t started off badly. She’d felt pretty good first thing in the morning and
even during breakfast, but after that, the day had nose-dived rapidly. Sometime
during the night before, the hot-water heater in her apartment had stopped
working and she’d had to take a cold shower before heading off to school. When
she got there, three of the four students in the front of the class had colds
and spent the day coughing and sneezing in her direction when they weren’t
acting up. The rest of the class seemed to follow their lead, and she hadn’t
accomplished half of what she’d wanted to. After school, she’d stayed to catch
up on some of her work, but when she was finally ready to head home, one of the
tires on her car was flat. She’d had to call AAA and ended up waiting nearly an
hour until they showed up; and by the time she got back to her apartment, the
streets had been roped off for the Flower Festival that weekend and she’d had
to park three blocks away. Then, to top it all off, no more than ten minutes
after she’d walked in the door, an acquaintance had called from Baltimore, to
let her know that Michael was getting married again in December.  That was when she’d opened the wine.
    Now, finally
feeling the effects of the alcohol, Sarah found herself wishing that AAA had
taken a little longer with her tire, so she wouldn’t have been home to answer
the phone when it rang. She wasn’t a close friend of the woman’s—she’d
socialized with Sarah casually, since she’d originally been friends with
Michael’s family—and had no idea why the woman felt the urge to let Sarah know
what was going on. And even though she had passed on the information with the
proper mix of sympathy and disbelief, Sarah couldn’t help suspecting that the
woman would hang up the phone and immediately report back to Michael how Sarah
had responded. Thank God she’d kept her composure.  But that was two glasses of wine ago, and now it wasn’t so easy.
She didn’t want to hear about Michael. They were divorced, separated by law and
choice, and unlike some divorced couples, they hadn’t talked since their last
meeting in the lawyer’s office almost a year earlier. By that point, she’d
considered herself lucky to be rid of him and had simply signed the papers
without a word. The pain and anger had been replaced with a kind of apathy,
rooted in the numbing realization that she’d never really known him at all.
After that, he didn’t call or write, nor did she. She lost contact with his
family and friends, he showed no interest in hers. In many ways, it almost
seemed as if they’d never been married at all. At least, that’s what she told
herself.
    And now he was
getting married again.
    It shouldn’t
bother her. She shouldn’t care one way or the other.  But she did, and that bothered her, too. If anything, she was more
upset by the fact that his impending marriage upset her than by the upcoming
marriage itself.  She’d known all along
that Michael would marry again; he’d told her as much.
    That was the
first time she’d ever really hated someone. 
But real hate, the kind that made the stomach roil, wasn’t possible
without an emotional bond. She wouldn’t have hated Michael nearly as much
unless she’d loved him first. Perhaps naively, she had imagined