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I didn't feel ready to take on a wife. That was three years ago. I didn't have time for her then. I do now.”

“Was that the only reason you didn't marry her? Or were there things about her that worried you, Joe? Was she too needy, too demanding, did you feel trapped? Did you want to run?” Kate had told him all of it when she and Andy met again, but Joe couldn't know that as he listened to him. He felt a vaguely familiar sense of what it had been like then, and they weren't pleasant memories for him. He had felt everything that Andy had described.

It wasn't that Kate he wanted, it was the one she had become now. The one who appeared to understand what had gone wrong. “She's the same woman, Joe. She looks panicked every time I leave the house. She calls me everywhere I go. If I go out to lunch, she has my secretary track me down. When she was pregnant, she nearly drove me insane. I had to go home to see her in the middle of the day. Is that what you want? Is that the kind of time you have available, Joe? You must be a very successful man indeed to have that kind of time on your hands. You'll have to be with her night and day. How will you take her with you when you travel? She won't leave Reed. And she wants to get pregnant again. She wants more babies. And she'll get them with whatever ruse she has to use to see to it that that happens. I know Kate. She did it to me with Reed. I didn't mind. You will.” They were lies, all of them, but Kate had long since given him a map of all of Joe's terrors, and Andy was systematically playing each one of them. And he was winning. He could see it in Joe's eyes, although he felt some obligation to defend Kate. But he was scared. Andy could sense his terror heavy in the air.

“She's not in love with you,” Joe said firmly. “She'll be different when she's with me.” But he didn't sound quite as sure."

"“Really?” Andy asked, as he finished his scotch. “How different was she in New Jersey?” He knew all about the fights that had brought them down, her panic over feeling abandoned, his terror of being engulfed.

Kate had explained it all, in retrospect, to him. And Andy was using it all now. For a good cause, he thought.

“That was three years ago. She was a kid then,” but he no longer sounded quite as convinced. He wouldn't have admitted it to anyone, but he was beginning to wonder if Andy was right. He could feel a feather of terror tracing its way down his spine.