Coming Home to Greenleigh

Chapter 2

2

“I’m supposed to see Elisabeth Burnham this morning. Do you know her? Beth Burnham.”

Richard Murray, Senior was speaking with his mouth full of jelly doughnut, coffee balanced atop a thick stack of documents. He coughed slightly, and Shawn tried not to wince, imagining what would happen if he suddenly choked on jelly doughnut and had to spit it out all over himself, as well as the red oriental carpet below.

“She knew my daughter,” Ricky Senior continued, chewing and swallowing, then swiping at his mouth with his shoulder. Shawn tried not to wince again.

“She’s a good kid, always liked her. She was supposed to come in this morning but she didn’t show—and now she’s out front. I’ve got this brief to get filed by five or this case isn’t going to trial and I’m in a lot of hot water. Will you see her for me? Tell her I’m sorry I missed her.”

“But—” Shawn stammered, suddenly panicked. Meet Beth Burnham? Now?

He wasn’t ready. He’d repressed all thoughts of Beth for years. He hadn’t arrived at his new job this morning with even the vaguest idea that Beth would be on his agenda today, or ever.

“She knew my daughter,” Ricky Senior added again, unhelpfully. He backed carefully out of the doorway, nearly knocking over a passer-by, and cursed gently as the coffee slopped over the sides of his cup and trickled down onto the stack of papers.

“Tell her I’m sorry,” he repeated, his voice echoing down the hall. “Hey, I need someone to run to the courthouse for me,” he boomed. The sound of his footsteps quickened, then faded until it disappeared.

“Right,” Shawn muttered. He got up and shut the door.

Elisabeth Burnham. Did he know her?

Excellent question, he thought grimly. Did I ever know her?

He paced in front of the desk a few steps, stopped, then went to peer out the window. It was a generous corner office, with a separate sitting area some distance away from his desk, surrounded by leather armchairs and oriental rugs. It was the very least that a managing partner of a venerable old New England firm deserved, never mind that it was in tiny Greenleigh.

It was also a sight better than his old office in New York, he acknowledged, turning around to admire the handsome mahogany desk and matching credenza. While he had made the cut for partner in New York, space there was at a premium, and a junior partner in a firm of 150 attorneys was not exactly a candidate for a corner office. The pay here was never going to have the possibilities that practicing in New York offered, but of course life here did not cost what it did in New York. The thought entered his mind regretfully as he contemplated the evenings at the opera and the grand art galleries he had left behind.

He shook his head. No point in being morose about it. His father needed him home, and so he had come.

And of course, the truth was that he was done with New York. He’d run out of Greenleigh as fast as he could, the moment he’d had his diploma in hand, thinking that New York would be the cure for Greenleigh. In the end, it had not been. He had loved its arts, its culture, its status as a welcoming beacon for soul searchers everywhere. But he couldn’t fight it any longer. Greenleigh was calling him back, and as much as he wanted to resist it, age had made him honest.

And part of the honesty thing was admitting that he’d never stopped thinking about Elisabeth. Somewhere deep inside of him, in the back of his mind and in the depths of his heart, he had kept thinking about her. He’d wondered about her life, her well-being. He hadn’t reached out to her even once since that warm August evening so many years ago. He’d visited his father faithfully every Christmas and occasionally for summer weekends, but he hadn’t seen or spoken to Elisabeth. He hadn’t run in to her around town, hadn’t spoken of her to anyone, hadn’t heard a single thing about her.

What he had done was resent her bitterly. He’d almost hated her for what she’d done. But something inside still wondered how she was, where she was.

But never why. That was one question that had never floated into his mind. He had never once wondered why she hadn’t left Greenleigh with him. Because he knew the answer. Greenleigh got its claws into you and never let go. Just look at him now—back to stay.

Shawn walked back to his desk and sat down, but on the edge of the chair. It swiveled forward, and he nearly lost his balance because he’d been too tentative. He grabbed the edge of the desk.

Now he would have to see her, to talk to her. It was the last thing he’d expected and possibly the thing he dreaded most. He was angry and bitter, and he was afraid he might say something he unforgivable.

His mother was so fond of Beth, he thought. She’d died with such regret that she wouldn’t be alive long enough to see them marry.

The pit in his stomach told him that his walk down memory lane had gone too far, so he wrenched his mind away from thoughts of his mother and the horrible year she’d spent battling leukemia when he was in college. And now, he’d come home to make sure he didn’t have any regrets. His father was getting older and starting to fail. No way in hell was he going to make things worse by mooning over Beth, his mother’s last months, and past mistakes and the consequences of past mistakes.

He felt a sour taste in his mouth and took a quick swig of the lukewarm coffee on his desk. I should be ready for this, he said ruefully to himself. It’s been a long time. And it’s been over for a long time.

He shrugged into his suit jacket, and strode toward the door.

He walked out into the reception area, prepared to greet Elisabeth with icy formality. But no one was there. He checked with the receptionist.

“Ms. Burnham is in conference room A. But I thought she was waiting for Mr. Murray Senior?”

“He couldn’t make it, so I’ll speak to her instead. Would you pick up my phone for a few minutes? I’m sure I won’t be long.”

Shawn had no idea where conference room A was. He walked down the hallway, past the mail room, past the library. He could hear a low rumble of conversation coming from one office, a group of laughing voices in another. After a week at his new job, he still wasn’t sure of everyone’s names, and since he’d taken the aggressive step of banning most pointless meetings, he hadn’t yet been in a conference room. But he found it, a few steps away from the kitchen. The door was shut.

Shawn was startled to discover that his palms were sweating. He paused outside the door, wiping them surreptitiously on his pants and adjusting his tie. He knocked softly. There was no answer. He cracked the door open, then went in, closing it quietly behind him.

Her effect on him was instant, and he wondered briefly if it was because he was already nervous, or if she really still had that power over him. He knew her immediately from the angle of her head, the intensity of her concentration on something out the window. She was dressed in a drop-waisted, wide-skirted blue floral print dress, with a bit of lace collar evident. Shiny brown curls, tinged slightly gold in the morning light, were neatly caught up in a ponytail knotted with a dark blue bow. From the back, she still looked like a schoolgirl.

For one brief moment, his heart ached terribly for what might have been. It was as if time had stood still. When he left Greenleigh, she was twenty-two, he was twenty-six. They were both so young. The world was full of options. There was no reason to let Greenleigh hold them back, to let the sadness of the cycle of life and death bring them down. Go, go, his mother would have urged. Go live your life, go do new things, go see the world. Greenleigh will always be here.

He could see now that this last sentence was the nail in the coffin for Beth. Greenleigh will always be here. That had been the problem all along.

And he hadn’t been enough for her to break through that barrier. Greenleigh was much older, stronger, and wiser than he was.

Almost as quickly as the thoughts had passed through his mind, he felt the searing pain of rejection and disappointment, and the intense emotion in his gut registered in his brain as resentment and contempt. He refused to let her imagine that he had cared beyond that one moment, all those years ago, when he had realized that she was not going to go with him to New York. Damn her, he would not give her the satisfaction of supposing that she had wounded him so profoundly by holding him more cheaply than her nag of a mother and her stupid library clerk job.

“Elisabeth.” What the hell? He’d never called her by her full name. She’d always been Beth to him.

When she heard him speak her name, she turned around in surprise. For an instant, she looked shocked, but then her clear, brown-eyed gaze settled on him in dismay.

So she has the grace to be upset, does she, he thought. He evaluated her coldly, as if he were picking over produce at the supermarket, but his chest felt as if it would explode with tension and stress.

She didn’t look well. Her color wasn’t very good, and there were shadows below her eyes. She was thin, too thin. He felt instinctive fear, the way he had since those days of his mother’s illness. He and illness would never have an easy relationship.

Shawn tamped down his fear with ugliness. She’s probably still doing the fetch-and-carry routine for her mom, he thought sardonically. Working double shifts at that clerk job. Being the model dutiful daughter and throwing her life away. Doing exactly what she had been doing all those years ago. A life she had preferred to a life with him.

He couldn’t stop his biting tongue. “You look surprised,” he said.

“I am—” she stammered. “I—I didn’t expect to see you here.”

I’ll bet you didn’t, he thought. I’ll bet you didn’t expect to ever see me again.

“So sorry to disappoint you,” he snapped. “I didn’t expect to see you here, either. This isn’t any more pleasant for me than I’m sure it is for you.”

“I didn’t suppose that it was. I must have the wrong room. I’m supposed to be meeting Mr. Murray.” There was a frosty edge to Elisabeth’s words.

“I’m sorry. But I’m the one you’ll be dealing with.”

To his surprise, his words caused more distress than he’d expected. Sure, he wasn’t eager to have this meeting, and he knew she wouldn’t be, either. But he hadn’t expected her to look as if she were about to faint.

“What do you mean?” she gasped. Her face had blanched, and the fingers of one hand grasped the edge of the conference table. He moved involuntarily toward her, concerned for a moment that she might actually pass out.

But she did not faint; she merely continued to stare up at him, knuckles whitening as she gripped the table.

“Does Mr. Murray know I’m here?” There was a choked quality to her words, but her voice was under careful control.

“He does. He said you had an appointment this morning.” Elisabeth’s cheeks reddened. She had put her briefcase on the shiny conference table, a worn, sad leather thing with a tarnished brass buckle. It looked like it had sat in an attic for fifty years, which Shawn realized it probably had. He knew exactly what her attic looked like, and that it was filled with old Burnham hand-me-downs.

He could see her reflection slanted across the surface of the table, the troubled bent of her head. What was wrong with him? It was as if he was outside of himself, able to evaluate her every gesture, as if he wasn’t the one she had dumped so easily.

“I apologize for being so late,” she said. “I had a visit from a client just as I was walking out the door.”

Client? Shawn suddenly felt odd, as if the ground beneath him had buckled. Stupid as it was, he couldn’t think of Beth as having gone on with her life without him. In his mind, she was still the Beth of so many years ago. Was it possible that she had gone on with her life, had indeed created a new life without him over the past years?

He’d assumed that the problem was with her, that she’d preferred the dullness of her safe, small town existence over the adventures she would have at his side. It had wounded him badly to imagine that her passion for him took second place to being a clerk at the library and running errands for her shrewish mother, but it had also justified his anger, and his dropping all thought of her from his existence.

He hadn’t thought at all that perhaps she had altered her own life, that she might have been able to achieve that on her own, without him.

He suddenly realized that she was speaking.

“I’ll just call Mr. Murray again for a new appointment. Please tell him how sorry I am for being late.” Elisabeth was drawing herself up to leave. She reached for the worn-out briefcase, took a step back from the table.

“Actually, Ricky Senior asked me to speak to you today. About whatever it was you were going to talk to him about.” Shawn did not give up his place in front of the door. He watched curiously as she looked up at him in obvious panic.

“What?” she exclaimed.

Shawn shrugged. “He said he had some idea of why you were here, and that you were better off speaking to me about it. Something like that.” He itched to pull out his phone to check the time. His impatience was growing. This encounter was both unpleasant and mystifying. Spit it out, Beth, he wanted to say. Is this some kind of stupid errand for your mother?

“Oh.” Elisabeth slowly put her briefcase back down on the table. She looked tentative, as if she were reorganizing her thoughts. Just as Shawn was about to give in to the urge to make an excuse and flee, she spoke.

“Shawn. I—I wonder if we can sit down. If you don’t mind.”

She spoke quickly, but quietly, and Shawn saw her press her lips together in that brave mannerism that he knew so well. Life had been so hard for her, he thought involuntarily. Damn it, why hadn’t she let him just take her away from it all?

She was looking up at him, almost desperately.

He caved. But angrily.

He hadn’t asked for this. It wasn’t fair. He wasn’t a saint. And he didn’t want any part of whatever this was. He wanted her to go away and let him get back to his life. The life where he made smart decisions, not dumb ones like hers.

“All right,” he replied. “But I haven’t got a lot of time. Is this an errand for your mother?”

“My mother died a few years ago,” Elisabeth said.

Shawn stood where he was, staring at her and feeling foolish.

“But it’s okay. Of course you wouldn’t have known that,” she continued.

Shawn bit back the automatic words that sprang to his lips. Why had he not known? Dead? He couldn’t imagine Beth without that albatross of a family.

So she was alone, then. All alone, presumably in that gigantic old house. He wanted to apologize for his cruelty, but he didn’t know how.

Actually, he did know how. He needed to start over. This meeting, thrust upon him unexpectedly, had gone all wrong. He was too busy feeling sorry for himself, and he hadn’t been paying attention to what was going on in the actual moment. That was poor behavior on his part, and he knew it. He also knew why he was feeling so angry and so cruel, and he was ashamed. She hadn’t loved him enough to escape the Greenleigh trap, and he was humiliated. Well, he could be the bigger person. He could be generous.

They needed to start over. At least right now.

“I’m really sorry, Beth. I didn’t know. And yes. Let’s sit down. And talk,” he agreed.