I read my name three times before I understood that it was not some legal phrase I had mistaken for something personal. Jill Marie Tolley. Not Jeremy. Not Lacey’s brother in Arizona. Not a hospital foundation or charity. Me.
“What is this?” I asked.
Neither of them answered quickly enough.
I looked at Jeremy first. His face had the pinched, defeated look I had seen only twice in our marriage—once when his mother died, once when a tornado took the roof off his brother’s house. He knew what the document meant. That much was obvious.
“Jill,” Lacey said, “sit down.”
“I’m tired of being told when to sit down.”
Her mouth tightened.
“Then stand.”
I kept reading.
The will left me a small house in East Nashville, whatever remained in Lacey’s savings account, a set of family photographs, and something described only as the contents of a safe-deposit box. The language was formal and dry. That almost made it worse. Lawyers had taken this impossible triangle of grief, betrayal, illness, and twenty-two years of silence and reduced it to numbered paragraphs.
“Why me?”
Lacey looked at Jeremy.
“No,” I said. “Don’t look at him. You wrote this.”
“Yes.”
“Then answer.”
Her fingers moved restlessly over the hospital blanket. “Because most of what I have came from people who are gone. My parents. My grandmother. I don’t need to pass it to Jeremy.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“More than you think.”
I stared at her.
She drew a careful breath.
“The house belonged to my mother.”
“I don’t want your mother’s house.”
“I know.”
“Then why leave it to me?”
“Because I spent years thinking you took my future. I wanted you to have something that came from my past.”
“That makes no sense.”
“It didn’t at first.”
Her voice had weakened, but not her attention.
“When I got sick, I started going through boxes. Photographs, old receipts, letters, things nobody keeps because they’re valuable, only because somebody touched them once. I found a photograph of us.”
I almost laughed. “There are no photographs of us.”
“There is one.”
“From when?”
“The county fair.”
The memory arrived reluctantly. I had been nineteen. Lacey and I had not been friends, exactly, but we had belonged to the same orbit of girls who knew the same schools, same grocery aisles, same church fundraisers. Somebody had taken a group picture near the Ferris wheel. Lacey had stood near one edge. I had been behind her, laughing at something outside the frame.
“You kept that?”
“My mother did.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
She looked tired suddenly.
“But when I saw it, I realized there had been a time before Jeremy became the only thing either of us remembered about the other.”
That landed somewhere I did not expect.
For more than two decades, Lacey had existed in my mind as the woman I had wronged. Perhaps I existed in hers as the woman who had stolen her boyfriend. We had flattened each other into one ugly summer.
“What’s in the safe-deposit box?”
Jeremy shifted beside the bed.
Lacey noticed.
“Not now,” she said.
I looked at him. “You know?”
He nodded.
“Of course you do.”
“Jill—”
“How many more things do you know?”
He closed his mouth.
Lacey said softly, “Enough to hurt you.”
“That's apparently the family specialty.”
Jeremy flinched.
I folded the will and put it back inside the envelope.
“I don’t want any of this.”
“You don’t have to decide now.”
“I’m deciding now.”
“No.” Lacey’s tone sharpened. “You’re reacting now.”
I looked at her.
For the first time, I saw the woman she might have been without the illness. Firm. Quick. Not fragile at all.
“Don’t tell me what I’m doing.”
“Then don’t confuse anger with clarity.”
Jeremy whispered, “Lacey.”
She ignored him.
“I spent years angry enough to know the difference.”
“So this is wisdom now?”
“No. Regret.”
The room quieted.
That word did what apologies had not.
I sat down again.
Lacey’s breathing had become shallower. The monitor beside her continued its indifferent rhythm.
“I regretted hating you longer than I needed to,” she said.
“You had reason.”
“For some of it.”
“All of it.”
“No.”
She looked toward Jeremy.
“He was not an object you stole.”
“I know.”
“You say that now.”
“I understand it now.”
“Then understand the rest.”
Jeremy stood near the window, arms folded tight across his chest.
Lacey said, “When Jeremy started visiting me, I wanted to punish him.”
His eyes closed.
I stared at her.
“You said you wanted companionship.”
“I did. Both things can be true.”
“How?”
“Because people are not neat, Jill.”
She turned her eyes toward the ceiling.
“At first I wanted him to see what my life had become. I wanted him to feel guilty. I wanted him to remember the baby. I wanted him to sit in those plastic chairs and imagine what might have happened if he had chosen differently.”
Jeremy whispered, “I deserved that.”
I rounded on him. “Stop helping.”
He looked away.
Lacey continued.
“But then he kept coming back.”
“Why?”
“Because guilt is one of Jeremy’s most stubborn forms of love.”
That sentence struck me as painfully accurate.
For years, I had mistaken his sense of obligation for steadiness. Maybe they were related. Maybe every kindness he gave contained a private ledger of debts he believed he still owed.
“He started bringing groceries,” Lacey said. “Then driving me to appointments. Then sitting through infusions. I told him to go home to you. He said he would after I fell asleep.”
“And instead?”
“Sometimes he stayed.”
My throat tightened.
“Did you want him to leave me?”
Lacey shook her head.
“Not by then.”
“Why not?”
“Because I saw the way he talked about you.”
I almost dismissed that as consolation.
She must have seen it on my face.
“I’m not being kind,” she said. “He spoke about you constantly. What you cooked. What you complained about. The way you sleep with one foot outside the blanket. Your tomatoes. That ridiculous ceramic rooster in your kitchen.”
I blinked.
The rooster had belonged to Evelyn. Jeremy hated it.
Lacey smiled faintly.
“He hated that rooster.”
“He still does.”
“I know.”
The shared knowledge felt intimate in the wrong way.
“You knew my life.”
“Pieces.”
“But I knew nothing about yours.”
“Yes.”
“That is what I can’t get past.”
“You shouldn’t.”
Jeremy finally spoke.
“I thought if I told you, I would make you choose whether to let me keep helping her.”
“That’s exactly what you should have done.”
“I know.”
“And you thought I would say no.”
“I didn’t know.”
“So you didn’t trust me.”
His face crumpled a little.
“I was afraid of the answer.”
“Same thing.”
He nodded.
No defense.
That hurt more than resistance.
I turned back to Lacey.
“Why marry him instead of asking somebody else for help?”
“Because by then there wasn’t anybody else.”
“Insurance wasn’t the only reason.”
“No.”
“You said you wanted to die as his wife.”
“I did.”
“And he agreed.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Lacey looked at Jeremy.
This time I let her.
He stepped away from the window.
“Because I thought I owed her.”
“Marriage?”
“Something.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I know.”
His voice shook.
“When she told me she was dying, I thought about that summer. The baby. Everything I had walked away from. I thought if she asked me for one impossible thing and I could give it to her, maybe I could stop being the man who had abandoned her.”
I stared at him.
“And what man did that make you to me?”
He looked at the floor.
The question remained there between us.
Lacey closed her eyes.
“I told him it was wrong.”
“After asking him to do it?”
“Yes.”
“That’s convenient.”
“Yes.”
Again, no defense.
I had spent the last twenty-four hours preparing myself to hate them. Their refusal to excuse themselves made hatred surprisingly difficult.
A nurse entered and checked Lacey’s infusion. She asked if the pain had increased. Lacey said no. The nurse did not appear convinced.
When she left, the room felt smaller.
“How much time?” I asked.
Lacey understood immediately.
“Doctors stopped giving exact numbers.”
“Days?”
“Maybe weeks.”
Jeremy sat beside her.
I watched him take her hand again.
This time I did not look away.
“What happens to the second marriage when she dies?”
Jeremy looked at me.
“Legally?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know.”
“You never asked?”
“I had a lawyer look at it.”
Of course he had.
“And?”
“He said the situation is complicated because our marriage came first.”
“Our marriage.”
“Yes.”
“So you knew yours to her might not even be valid.”
Lacey gave a weak smile. “That wasn’t why I wanted it.”
I looked at the ring on her finger.
“No.”
Her hand trembled slightly in Jeremy’s.
“I knew what it was,” she said.
“What was it?”
“A promise he should never have made.”
The honesty of that nearly broke something in me.
My phone buzzed. I ignored it.
Jeremy’s rang seconds later.
He glanced at the screen and stood.
“It’s Mark.”
“Your foreman?”
“Yes.”
“You told him where you were?”
“I told him there was an emergency.”
“There has been an emergency for three years.”
He closed his eyes.
Then he stepped into the hallway to answer.
Lacey and I were alone.
For the first time since entering the room, there was no man between us.
She studied me.
“You want to know whether he would have left you for me.”
I hated that she knew.
“Yes.”
“No.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because I asked.”
My pulse jumped.
“When?”
“The night before we married.”
“And?”
“He said if I required that, he would walk away.”
I stared at her.
“He told you that?”
“Yes.”
“Then why did you go through with it?”
“Because I did not want your life. I wanted one piece of the life I thought I had lost.”
The answer was ugly.
And human.
I sat back.
“Did that make you feel better?”
“No.”
She smiled without humor.
“It made me feel ridiculous.”
“Why?”
“Because the morning after, I woke up with a ring and cancer. Nothing else had changed.”
The rawness of it silenced me.
Lacey reached toward the nightstand and pulled open the drawer.
Inside was a photograph.
She handed it to me.
The county fair.
There we were.
Young enough to believe choices disappeared once they were made.
Lacey stood near the front beside two other girls. I was behind them in a white T-shirt, laughing, one hand on someone’s shoulder.
Jeremy was nowhere in the frame.
On the back, in faded blue ink, someone had written the date.
1999.
Before all of it.
“My mother wrote that,” Lacey said.
I traced the edge.
“What do you want me to do with this?”
“Keep it.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want the only version of me in your memory to be the woman in that hospital bed who married your husband.”
My throat tightened.
“And what version of me do you want to remember?”
She looked at the photograph.
“The girl who laughed before she decided she was my enemy.”
I closed my eyes.
When Jeremy returned, I was still holding the picture.
He saw it and stopped.
Lacey said, “Tell her about the box.”
His face changed.
“Not today.”
“Today may be all I have.”
“Lacey.”
She turned toward me.
“The safe-deposit box contains letters.”
“What letters?”
“From Jeremy.”
He went pale.
My attention shifted to him.
“When?”
Lacey answered.
“From twenty-two years ago.”
I stood.
Jeremy whispered my name.
Lacey continued.
“He wrote them after I moved to Nashville.”
I looked at him.
“You told me you never contacted her after she left.”
He could not meet my eyes.
I heard my own voice harden.
“How many?”
Lacey answered quietly.
“Thirty-seven.”
The photograph bent slightly in my hand.
Thirty-seven letters.
A hidden courtship after he supposedly chose me.
Another sealed room in our marriage.
I looked at Jeremy.
“You wrote to her thirty-seven times?”
“Yes.”
“And she kept them.”
“Yes.”
“What did you say?”
His face had lost all color.
“That depends on which letter.”
I stepped toward him.
“No more careful answers.”
He looked at Lacey, then back at me.
“In some of them, I begged her to come home.”
Click here to continue reading: PART 6: The Letters Jeremy Wrote After Choosing Me Revealed a Marriage Built on a Truth He Had Never Found the Courage to Say Aloud
Twenty-Two Years After I Won the Man I Wanted, One Ordinary Tuesday Made Our Marriage Feel Suddenly Unfamiliar
Part 5 of 15
