The Swallow's Nest. Emilie Richards
notice, he’d taken a good look around while he considered.
“I’ve always counted on you to remind me how little I enjoyed being single.” Lilia realized she might be in that category again and soon.
“Devin was different. I met him in my senior year of college. We both headed for the same graduate program, and after a year together, it was clear we were also headed for a life together. Things seemed perfect. You’re sure Carrick never told you this?”
“I have a bad feeling this is the kind of story Carrick wouldn’t share.”
“Because I’m not going to look good after I tell it?”
“No. Because it’s personal to you and not a happy ending. I’m right?”
Regan didn’t answer directly. “That Christmas he gave me a ring. A really beautiful diamond. We decided we’d be married the next summer, something small and informal so we could spend whatever money we had on a backpacking trip through Europe. I wanted to see family in Ireland. His roots were in France. It seemed perfect.
“He was a top student. Lightning quick. A creative thinker. But in January he started not showing up for classes. A professor sought me out and asked what was going on. I was living with a family as a part-time nanny, and Devin and I had decided I should stay there the rest of that year to save for our wedding. Anyway, we weren’t living together, so I didn’t know he had been missing classes or why. When I asked him, he told me he was fine. He was using that time to catch up on another class. He said it was temporary, and he was getting good notes from another student.”
Lilia knew even if that had been true, it would have been a problem. “Did he take too many hours?”
“He’d moved out of accounting into corporate finance. I figured the work might be a lot harder, but Devin knew what he was doing. He’d found a way to handle things.” Regan faced Lilia. “I should have pushed him instead of just choosing to believe him. You can start counting the ‘I should haves’ now. After Devin died I spent an entire year starting every sentence that way. I’m better now. I know his death wasn’t my fault. But still...”
Lilia tried to read Regan’s expression. “You left out a lot.”
“Drugs.”
“Oh...”
“He was pushing himself really hard, so he started with the easy stuff, to give himself a way to unwind. Pretty soon that didn’t work, and he moved on. Prescription drugs, then cocaine. He was smart. He was sure he could beat it. He was even sure he could beat heroin.”
Lilia had seen too much addiction among family members and college friends not to understand. “How did you find out?”
“I should have seen it sooner, but remember what I said about myself? When he didn’t tell me what was bothering him, that just seemed natural.”
“Because that’s how things were for you.”
Regan nodded. “Of course there were more signs, but I wrote off his lack of appetite, his restlessness and everything else as exhaustion and stress over the future. I told him we could postpone the wedding, but he said no. And here’s the zinger. He told me he wanted to take my ring back to the jeweler to have it cleaned and the prongs repointed. He said a friend had lost the diamond right out of one that was newer than mine. So I gave it to him, and for weeks I didn’t even worry when he didn’t return it. When I finally asked, he said the jeweler was busy. He’d had to send it away because there was a problem...”
“He sold it.”
“Oh yeah. But not for enough to feed his habit, because about a week later he was caught in his academic adviser’s apartment stuffing anything that glittered into a pillowcase. He’d been given the key so he could study there. By then Devin didn’t care about anything except where his next fix was coming from.”
“You must have been devastated.”
“I was furious! I can’t begin to express how angry I was, except that I don’t have to, because you know what that kind of betrayal feels like.”
The analogy made Lilia flinch. “What happened?”
“Since it was a first offense the judge gave him a choice between jail time and a drug treatment center. You can guess which he chose, and he was lucky. His parents mortgaged their house to give him that chance. They loved him enough.” Regan lifted her hand in emphasis. “Me? I didn’t.”
“He hurt you badly.”
“Another thing about the Irish? We hold grudges. Just look at our history. Anyway, I can’t blame this on ancestry. The day Devin left for the treatment center I told him we were through, that I didn’t want anything to do with him ever again. And I meant it.”
Lilia was pretty sure what was coming next. “Whatever you said didn’t kill him, Regan. Wasn’t Devin in charge of his own life?”
“The statistics were pretty clear—40 to 60 percent of addicts relapse. He had ruined everything, and that was that. I didn’t write him. I didn’t take phone calls from his family. I finished my course work and took the job in Mountain View to be near Carrick. I told myself I didn’t love Devin anymore. I dated jerks. I was pretty sure I deserved jerks, considering how stupid I’d been not to see what was happening.”
Jerks or guys like Lilia’s brother Jordan, with whom Regan had absolutely no possibility of a future. But Lilia knew that revelation was out of place and waited for her to go on.
Regan turned to her back again. “He found me and called one night after I’d been in California for a couple of months. He was back in school in a different state but doing well. He knew addiction would be a lifelong battle, but he had tools to fight it. He wanted my forgiveness. That’s all he was asking for. And I couldn’t give it to him. I kept thinking he’d chosen heroin over me, that he’d ruined both our lives. I told him I didn’t want to hear from him again.” Her voice was suddenly thick with tears. “And I never did.”
Lilia moved closer to put her hand on her friend’s shoulder. “Did he die of an overdose?”
“No. He decided to spend his spring break in Haiti with some other guys from his program. They were helping build a new wing on a treatment center there. His program is big on community service as a way to return self-confidence and give back to the world. His second night there one of the residents got high, found a knife, and when he went after another resident, Devin stepped between them.”
“I’m so sorry.”
They lay that way for a few minutes until Lilia finally moved away. She was sure of one thing. Regan hadn’t traveled this far just to acknowledge her own past. “You’re trying to tell me I should forgive Graham and go home. That people really can change.”
“I don’t have any idea if you should go back to Graham. I really don’t.” Regan wiped tears off her cheeks. “Only you can know that.”
“Then what?”
“We never know whether change will stick or what the future’s going to hold. And we’re never under an obligation to play somebody else’s games. But I’ll be haunted forever because I didn’t tell Devin I was glad he’d made progress and wished him well. Even if I’d opened the door for another chance at a life together, he probably still would have gone to Haiti and died trying to help other addicts. But if I had just said those words? Both of us would have had closure. And who knows? Maybe we would have had that second chance.”
“Don’t marriages have to be built on trust?”
“We like to say that, but isn’t marriage just a merger between two flawed, fragile human beings who make mistakes, sometimes really terrible mistakes, and somehow come through them together? Trust is a shaky foundation because it can be so easily destroyed. The question is whether a relationship is worth rebuilding. Maybe more than once.”
Lilia cleared her throat, which was suddenly clogged