Million Dollar Road by Amy Connor Page A

fragrant armfuls of lilies he’d picked up at a discount market down in the Warehouse District. Both on impossibly tight budgets compared to the majority of the other, more privileged students, most nights they studied together in Emma’s dorm room before falling asleep in each other’s arms, twined together in her narrow bed.
    Sometimes Emma wondered why Con had chosen her, an agonizingly shy, orphaned girl raised by an elderly aunt and uncle in their decaying Garden District mansion. They’d died during her freshman year. Utterly alone then, she’d had no one—until Con found her. And so the weeks turned into months before Emma could at last believe it: she had fallen in love, she began to trust that she was loved in return, and over the course of that year she began secretly framing what had been a solitary life in unfamiliar, exciting terms of we, us, and ours .
    One cold December night washed with a gentle rain, Con asked her to marry him. They’d been walking in the French Quarter, and he’d just given his last five dollars, unasked, to an almost invisible woman who’d been huddled in a doorway.
    â€œMarry me, Em?” His face was grave, but his tone was light.
    Oh, how Emma had loved him then for his generous heart, how she had loved him ever after. They were married a year later, and as the years passed, except for the shattering grief of the miscarriage and Emma’s subsequent inability to have another child, theirs became a happy life, gilt-framed by marriage. Without the possibility of the large family she’d longed for, it was always going to be just the two of them, but Emma Costello had felt safe in that frame. She grew lilies in her garden, looked after her husband, and their life together was so very, very good.
    Emma had believed with all her heart that it was forever, that life.
    Forever lasted until the afternoon when Con told her their marriage was over. At first she couldn’t believe what he was saying to her. Like firebombs, his words hung in the air of their old, painstakingly renovated house in Covington, falling like a rain of napalm in her kitchen.
    â€œWhat?” Emma faltered.
    â€œI said . . . I . . . want a divorce.”
    Emma’s head was slammed with a vast ripping sound, as though a world-sized sheet of canvas had been torn in two. She couldn’t hear Con’s halting explanations, his reasons for what he was going to do to them, going to do to her, because that monstrous rupture brought Emma to her knees. Her hands covered her ears as she gasped for breath, lost in the throes of her first full-blown panic attack.
    Con went to his knees on the floor beside her. Gently, he pulled her hands away, his tear-filled blue eyes searching her face.
    â€œPlease listen to me, Em. Don’t blame Lizzie. She’s not the first. I-I’ve never been faithful to you and I can’t lie about it anymore. I know I’m a bastard. You deserve better.” A tear ran down Con’s cheek. “Please try to see that this is for the best, honey.”
    â€œIs this because of the . . . baby?” Speaking was almost impossible. “If somehow she’d . . . lived?”
    â€œGod, no. A baby wouldn’t have made any difference. It’s not about that.” Con knuckled his streaming eyes, moaning, “Oh, Em—I hate this.”
    And on her knees, Emma comforted him. God help her, she’d comforted him then even as she’d labored to breathe. But when he was done crying, Con rose to his feet and left, driving away to his girlfriend’s apartment to begin his new life. His bag had already been packed.
    Now Emma’s golden frame was broken, the picture she’d so loved wadded up in a discarded ball. In the days after Con left, she’d known herself only as a wavering outline floating in a solid world, vanishing like a gray fog in the bright light of day.
    And soon came the morning when, following