“Your name is Mrs. Piersall now,” he had said, his mouth close to her ears. “How does it sound?”
It sounded wonderful.
The lovemaking was gentle and fiery at once, a mutual meeting that words would only injure. It was fire and ice, softness and hardness, everything good and nothing bad. Bill was her husband, he had given her a ring, and now she was giving him a ring in return. It was perfection, utter perfection, and it washed away all the ugliness of her past.
The bad parts simply dissolved and disappeared. Danny Duncan was gone now. So was Craig Jeffers. And the night with Margo Long, the lesbian interlude conducted in horrid drunkenness on the chaise in Craig’s garden, simply ceased to exist. It was as though it had never happened at all. There was only Bill, Bill her lover, Bill her husband, Bill her man.
Nothing else.
They would have a good life now. They were in a town that accepted them as a decent pair of newlyweds starting life together. Bill had a good job and she was working part-time in a restaurant. They were saving money, money for a home and children.
Sometimes she lay awake at night after Bill had dropped off to sleep and her mind wandered back to Antrim. She had almost lost Bill. She had come close to running to New York, had come even closer to ruining and wasting her life with Craig.
She had been very lucky.
And she lay in bed snug at Bill’s side, listening to his measured breathing, and she thought about her luck. She had everything she had ever wanted now. She was going to hang onto it. She was going to stay happy forever.
She thought about the happiness that waited for them. The happiness of a house of their own, for example. The happiness of being parents, of having children. The happiness of growing old, not as Craig Jeffers would grow old, alone and bitter, but as two people aging together, side by side, always close, always in love.
She liked Birch Creek and she was incredibly happy there. But the town was immaterial. It might as well have been Cedar Hills or Brackle or Lipton’s Landing. Any town would do.
The background didn’t matter. She mattered, and Bill mattered, and that was all.