She waved at Perry and sat down at one of the booths that ran along the right side of the diner. “Just coffee, please,” she called as she reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a notebook. She carried it with her everywhere, using it to jot down notes and thoughts whenever they occurred to her. She didn’t see the look Marjorie gave Perry—but she didn’t need to. She knew she wasn’t well liked in Lebanon, and that was just fine with her.
She hated Lebanon, and she hated Wilbourne College even more.
It had seemed like a good idea at the time, even though her colleagues at Harvard thought she was completely insane. No matter how hard they tried, though, they just didn’t understand her need to get away from Boston, to get away from Harvard, to just get away. After watching her son die for two years of chemotherapy that didn’t work, of medications and drug protocols and marrow transplants, of watching him try to smile and be brave for her through enormous pain and suffering, Boston was just too much for Ginny. Her colleagues didn’t understand that every time she looked at one of her students, she hated them for simply being alive. Every time a young man walked into her classroom or through her line of vision, it was like the knife being twisted in her heart all over again.
Grief counseling hadn’t worked, drinking didn’t help, the pills did nothing except depress her all over again. And as Ginny suffered, her marriage crumbled around her as well. She knew her marriage was in trouble, she knew Jim needed her, needed more than a zombie who just wandered around in a coma not caring about anything, but she couldn’t do anything, couldn’t make herself care. Jim didn’t understand her, didn’t understand that she felt that “moving on” was just a politer way of saying, “Let’s forget Eric ever existed,” and when he finally sat her down and said, “Ginny, I’m not getting what I need from you anymore,” she just looked at him and replied, “And it’s never once occurred to you that maybe you aren’t giving me what I need?”
So when Jim packed and left, Ginny didn’t feel anything other than a passing sense of relief that she didn’t have to deal with him anymore. She just was numb everywhere, as though all her emotions and nerves had died.
She didn’t think she’d ever feel anything again.
So when Wilbourne College made an offer, she’d decided to take it. It was a surprisingly good offer—considering what she’d already been making as a tenured professor at Harvard who’d published best-selling works on the history of the Christian religion. Something about being in the woods—and teaching girls, not boys—had appealed mightily to her. She’d driven over to Lebanon on a three-day weekend to meet the other faculty and get a feeling for the town and college. That first weekend, she found Lebanon quaint and charming—it reminded her of her own hometown, Hammond, Louisiana—and she liked the college. The campus was beautiful, and she liked the idea of working with a student body that was over ninety-five-percent young women. There’d be no reminders of Eric everywhere she turned. The change was exactly what she needed.
She resisted every temptation to remain on the faculty at Harvard—her department chair begged her to simply take a leave, to keep her options open. Her agent thought she was insane—“Ginny, part of your appeal to publishers is your position at Harvard. You can’t give that up”—so she’d finally accepted emeritus status. But that was the only concession she made to her original decision to leave Boston behind. She sold her town house rather than renting it. She got rid of everything inside of it, not wanting to keep anything that would remind her of her son, anything that might keep the agony alive inside her.
I have to get on with my life.
That had been her mantra on the drive to Lebanon. She’d gotten a second floor apartment—small but cozy—just a few blocks off the town square. She arrived two weeks before that fall semester began, enthusiastic and ready to go to work. She had all of her research for her book—on hold for the whole duration of Eric’s illness—packed in the trunk of her car. She was eager to get back to work on it. In the peace and quiet of this small upstate New York town, she planned on making it the best work she’d done.
Those two weeks before school started, Ginny found some good used furniture and set her apartment up exactly the way she wanted. When the town paper, the Lebanon Herald, called requesting an interview, she’d been more flattered than anything else. After all, when you’ve been interviewed by The New York Times, what did you have to fear from the Lebanon Herald?
That was her first mistake.
The reporter had been a woman who looked to be in her mid-thirties. Her name was Gayle Honeycutt. Gayle had been kind of nondescript-looking, very pale, with white blond hair and no eyelashes. Short and running a little to overweight, she had tiny hands and tiny feet and a simple, straightforward manner that Ginny found appealing, especially in comparison with other interviewers she’d faced over the years. Gayle accepted a cup of coffee, and settled herself into a wingback chair. She smiled at Ginny.
“I’ve never met someone who’s been on the New York Times best-seller list,” Gayle said meekly. “It’s a bit intimidating.”
Ginny laughed. “I’m just a normal person, Gayle. No need to feel intimidated. I’ve just been very lucky with my work, that’s all.”
“I don’t really understand the point of your work,” Gayle had said, clicking on her tape recorder and pulling out a pad of paper with prepared questions on it. “I mean, I’m sorry, but I just don’t. I’ve read your books, but—”
“What is it you don’t understand?”
Gayle had smiled. “Well, why don’t you just tell me what you hope readers take away from your book?”
So Ginny had embarked on a spirited lecture about the importance of historical research into the Bible and religion. Her first book, the one that earned her the Ph.D., had been Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine, a study into how the early male-dominated Church had deliberately excluded women from its hierarchy. She explained to Gayle that the early Christians had twisted not only the Old Testament, but the teachings of Jesus himself to establish their own power base. She made a point to stress that she wasn’t attacking anyone’s faith—and that she herself believed in the teachings of Jesus. But historical evidence existed, she told Gayle, that showed how early Church leaders had, for political purposes, distorted and sometimes removed entirely large segments of the Bible.
“What if much of what you’ve ever been taught about Christianity is wrong?” Ginny had asked the reporter in her enthusiasm. Gayle had sat there dispassionately, taking notes. Ginny talked for more than hour, even if Gayle didn’t ask many questions.
When the article appeared, all hell broke loose.
For one thing, the headline simply read: CHRISTIANITY, SAYS NEW PROFESSOR AT WILBOURNE COLLEGE.
Dean Gregory had called Ginny into his office, and lectured her for over an hour about “dealing with the press”—which, considering Ginny had much more experience with the press than he did, was more than a little insulting. Not once did he even give her an opportunity to defend herself. Gregory had always been enthusiastic and friendly before, but from that moment on, Ginny and Dean Gregory kept as far apart from each other as possible.
Ginny’s name was soon anathema in the town of Lebanon. She’d hear the townspeople whispering whenever she walked into a store: “That’s the atheist, the heathen, the anti-Christian bigot.” A group called the Concerned American Women, New York Chapter, somehow got hold of the interview and started a campaign to get her fired. Televangelist Bobby Vandiver thundered from his television program on one of the religious cable channels for days about the “Christ-hating professor” at New York’s Wilbourne College.
At first, Ginny had considered it a badge of honor to be condemned by the man who’d blamed the “licentiousness” of New Orleans for causing Hurricane