Page 17 of Memory of Murder (Colby Agency: The Next Generation #3)

Journal Entry

Thirty Years Ago

I realized by then that I had no true friends.

There were my colleagues at work who were nice and whom I adored working with, but we were not friends in the true sense of the word.

I was getting a little paranoid actually.

At least the other worry had passed. The lab results were what I had hoped for.

But I won’t talk about that since it worked out for the best. Thank God.

I don’t think I could have lived with myself if it had turned out differently.

Still, Neil was considering a new venture for after he graduated next year.

It was a start-up company that he felt would explode with opportunity in the near future.

He was offered a part-time position starting late July.

The trouble was that the company was untried.

He would be brand new out of law school and serving as the company’s head legal counsel.

It was quite the prestigious offer for him, except for all the reasons I just named.

By then you would have been born and maybe even trying to crawl.

But I didn’t want to go back to work that first year.

I really wanted to spend some time being your mom.

The health insurance was the issue. At the time, my insurance was with my work.

Who knew what this new company just starting out would offer.

If I took a year off, there might not have been any health insurance.

That would not have worked. I told myself that Neil would make the right decision.

Carin had not come back, and by this point Eve and I were not speaking. It was awful the way we had fallen apart. All for such stupid reasons…all because of one person.

By that point I realized I should have told Neil the truth when it happened, and this would have been behind us.

But I didn’t, and by mid-July I was living with that nightmare hanging over my head.

I had no idea what the right thing to do was.

I was so young. Neil’s life was so busy with his last year of law school and the decisions about our future. He had no time for distraction.

The best I could do was hope all would work out and we could move forward with our lives and never look back. Even then I had begun to believe we had outgrown our friends anyway. It was time to make new friends. I didn’t want to raise a child with friends like our old ones.

With that in mind, I told myself we would get through it and maybe in a couple of years we would try for another child.

It would have been so wonderful to have a boy and a girl.

I remember thinking these things. Although I hadn’t had a scan yet, I was convinced you would be a girl.

If that turned out to be the case, I planned to name you Marianne.

The Mari part after me, of course, and the Anne after Neil’s mom.

She was such a good mom and wife. Far better than her husband deserved.

I hoped I could be half as good as she was.

Just so you know, it wasn’t because my mother was a bad one.

She just wasn’t the kind of mom I wanted to be. I loved her, but I wanted to be better.

I often sat in our little cottage and wondered if one day we would have a bigger house. I even pondered the idea that I should be thankful Neil was considering that start-up company. If it went the way he believed it would, we could end up very comfortable. Possibly even rich.

Maybe some things were worth the risk.

I had decided to talk to him about it again. Just because we were having a baby we shouldn’t have been afraid to go for a better life.

I was happy with the decision, and I couldn’t wait to tell Neil.

But I had no idea what was coming.