The calendar may have read late May, but for Holly Lindsey it was Independence Day.

She had just come from filing for divorce from Fletcher Reade, her latest, and in some ways her greatest, mistake.

But then, it wasn't like she hadn't done this before. She really had to break the habit of marrying her rebound men. First Ed Bauer, what felt like a million years ago, and last year, Fletcher.

At least she was well versed in divorce procedures, and it wasn't nearly the bureaucratic headache in the United States that it was in Switzerland. (She would have liked to blame marrying Dietrich Lindsey on being on the rebound, but that wasn't the case. She hadn't even known Roger was alive when she had married Dietrich, not that she had married Dietrich for love, or even lust.) This was divorce number four.

Fletcher hadn't put up much of a fight, and what protest he had lodged had been strictly to assuage his own ego. When he had seen how determined Holly was to end their marriage (not that it was much of a marriage, really, since Fletcher was really already married to his job at the Springfield Journal), he had acquiesced and then promptly informed her that all of the details, including the filing, were up to her. He was too busy, what with a newspaper to run and a teenage son to raise.

That suited Holly just fine. Getting out of this mistake of a marriage with the minimum of difficulty was half the battle.

The other half was really up to Roger.

The face of all the world is changed, I think, since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul.

Since the instant Roger entered her life, she had never been able to read that particular sonnet of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's without automatically thinking of him.

Holly had cursed herself for a fool ten million times for believing Alexandra Spaulding when Alex made it look like she had gotten Roger into bed, which had pushed Holly to find solace in Fletcher's arms. Alex was at fault for trying to destroy Roger to keep him out of her family's company. Alan Spaulding was at fault for trying to use Roger to get the company away from Alex after Alan was released from prison. Roger was at fault for letting himself get so blinded by the promise of control of Spaulding that he put that above his and Holly's relationship. But Holly was at fault for cheating on Roger, and then for panicking and chickening out and going with the rebound man instead of seeing if she and Roger could actually work things out.

They had both made mistakes, but Roger marrying Dinah Marler was strictly a reaction to Holly marrying Fletcher. She knew that as well as she knew her own name, and that the sun rose in the east every morning.

One year. That was all the time they had together before Spaulding, stupidity, and poor choices on both of their parts had blown their relationship apart.

But in that year, Holly had never been happier, felt more alive, felt more at ease in her own skin, than she had ever been or felt in her life.

Roger hadn't married Dinah for love, that was certain. They were already maintaining mostly separate residences, Roger having taken a room at the country club and Dinah living in a swanky penthouse apartment when she was in town, which apparently she was a lot more lately than she had been for the past few months, according to Holly and Roger's daughter Blake, who also happened to be Dinah's stepmother. Dinah's father, Blake's husband, Ross Marler had nearly gone into an apoplectic rage when his daughter married Roger.

But Blake, with practically newborn twin sons and her own set of difficulties with Dinah, wasn't aware yet that Holly had filed for divorce from Fletcher, and that she wanted Roger back. But Blake might have an inkling of Holly's true feelings; she always had believed that Holly and Roger belonged together.

Now Holly finally knew that she and Roger belonged together too.

And she was willing to do whatever it took to get back together with Roger. After 30 years of fighting the tidal wave, she was finally honest enough and brave enough and just flat out ready to admit the truth: Roger was the only man she would ever love, and the only man she wanted to be with.

Before everything between them had imploded, Roger had asked Holly to marry him. She had wanted to say yes, but she hadn't. It seemed so long ago, but it wouldn't be two years until November.

Holly wanted to marry Roger. And this time, she vowed to herself, she would not let anything get in the way of their relationship, their hopefully eventual marriage.

Of course, they couldn't get married right away, and not only because she was still legally married to Fletcher.

They had to rebuild their relationship. Work up to marriage.

Whatever it took, no matter how long it took, Holly was finally ready to give Roger and a real relationship, a real marriage with him, everything she had and everything she was. Being married to the absolute wrong man (again) had a way of crystallizing what you wanted with the absolute right man.

She only hoped he would give her the opportunity to prove that this time she meant it, and would mean it for the rest of their lives.

She was sitting there in the park, trying to figure out what to say to Roger, when she heard people talking and walking on the nearby foot path. The bench on which she was sitting was partially obscured by a large hydrangea hedge, so she couldn't see the people as they approached, but she could hear them.

"I'm telling you, Hart, we've got Roger so turned around he doesn't know if he's coming or going. The gaslighting is working perfectly, and makes it worth the time I have to spend with him at the penthouse. At least it has two bedrooms, so we don't have to share a bed anymore."

"He's not turned around enough yet. We have to keep turning the screws until he's so convinced he's losing his mind that he checks himself into a mental hospital or a psychiatric ward somewhere."

"Piece of cake."

"I don't know, Dinah. He's stubborn. And he feels no guilt about draining your trust fund."

"True, but I know exactly where in the Cayman Islands he put my trust fund. And once he's in the loony bin, you and I can jet down there and get it back. I got him to sign the papers putting me on the account this morning, so I have full access to it. Nothing can go wrong, Hart. Everything is going according to our plan. We get the money, we get each other, and Roger gets up close and personal with the local version of Nurse Ratched."

"That's what I call win-win-win," Hart said.

Holly carefully, silently crept closer to the twelve-foot hydrangea hedge and peeked around the corner, and sure enough, there were Dinah and Hart, ambling lazily down the path, and holding hands as they walked, looking very, very familiar...downright cozy, in fact, and very much like a young couple in love.

Just as Holly was realizing this, the two stopped walking, and Hart pulled Dinah in for a kiss.

Great, so not only are they gaslighting Roger, they're sleeping together on top of it, Holly thought grimly.

He has to know about this. He probably already does. He's too smart not to realize what they're really doing...isn't he?, she wondered.

Hart and Dinah were in a full-on makeout session now. Holly kept her eyes focused on the ground, making sure she didn't step on any twigs or dry leaves or trip over any rocks, not wanting to alert them to her presence.

Now she had two excellent reasons to see Roger, she thought as she drove to the country club: to make sure he knew what Dinah and Hart were really doing...and to tell him that she was divorcing Fletcher and that she still loved him and wanted him back.

A few minutes later, she was standing in front of Roger's door at the country club, and with a deep breath and a hopeful prayer, she knocked on the door.

When Roger opened the door to find Holly standing there, his surprise was palpable. They just stared at each other for a long moment, and finally Holly asked, "May I come in?"

Roger wordlessly stood aside, and she entered the room. He closed the door and said, "What are you doing here, Holly?"

This was it. Holly set her purse on the desk, nervously wiped her sweaty palms on her slacks, and opened with, "Dinah and Hart are gaslighting you, trying to convince you that you're losing your mind."

Roger regarded Holly coolly. "Yeah, they're sleeping together too. I know," he said, "so if that's all you came here to tell me-"

"What are you doing about it?" she interrupted him to ask.

"I'm in the process of figuring out exactly what to do," Roger replied. "Thanks for the warning, though. Really."

Roger hadn't been this standoffish toward Holly since after Acapulco, after he had learned that she had gotten him alone down there as part of some plan to test his fidelity to Alexandra, to whom he was married at the time, even though Holly had abandoned the plan before it ever really got off the ground, and they had ended up hashing out their disastrous first marriage, analyzing and realizing for the first time why it had failed, and he had finally apologized and she had finally forgiven him, for the rape, for cheating on her, for all of it.

"I didn't come here just to warn you about Dinah and Hart," Holly said.

"Is your husband going to be pounding on the door in a minute to punch my lights out?" Roger asked then. "'Cause I've gotta tell you, I'm really not in the mood for that today."

The perfect opening. "What I do and where I go is none of Fletcher's concern," Holly said.

"How do you figure that?" Roger asked.

Holly looked Roger right in the eye. "Because I filed for divorce this morning."

Roger's standoffishness disappeared in a look of pure shock as he stared at her again, his mouth open. "You're getting divorced?" he finally asked, surprised.

"Yes." She held his gaze.

"Why?"

"Why?" Holly echoed.

"Yes, why?" Roger persisted.

"Because marrying him was a mistake," Holly said, "one of the biggest mistakes I've ever made."

"Is that so?" Roger asked.

"Yes, that's so," Holly replied. She closed the distance between them until she was standing right in front of him. "I don't love Fletcher. I don't think I ever really did." Their eyes locked, she said, "The truth is, I love you, Roger."

"You love me," Roger said, sounding dazed.

"Yes," Holly said.

"But Fletcher was the safe choice," Roger said mockingly. "You thought I cheated on you, so you ran into his arms. I knew something had happened. I'm not stupid."

"I've never thought you were stupid," Holly said.

Roger stalked away from her, ranting all the while. "I screwed up by putting Spaulding ahead of us, but did you ever once stop and think? For God's sake, Holly, I wanted to marry you! The proposal was on the table! I was going to get a ring to go with it! I had changed enough by then that you were it for me. I didn't want any other women, and no matter how much I wanted Spaulding, I never would have slept with Alex to get it, but you were so sure that I had. I knew you'd been with somebody else, but I didn't know who. I only knew it wasn't Ross this time, because you wouldn't do that to our daughter. Not now."

He stopped by the window and turned to look at her again, and this time pain was radiating from his entire being as he gave her a wounded look. "I didn't care. I just wanted you. I just wanted to be married to you. And then at that awards banquet, that son of a bitch got right up in my face and told me it was him, told me that he had made love to you, and that was what he called it."

Holly wanted to strangle Fletcher for that, because that certainly had not been how she had seen that night. For her, it was partly about revenge on Roger and Alex both, and partly about wanting to feel something other than abject devastation over what she had thought at the time was Roger's betrayal.

Roger continued, "He was so smug about it, too, so self-righteous. So determined to prove that he was a better man for you than I could ever be." The pain radiating from him grew more pronounced. "He stood up on that damned balcony in front of the entire town and declared his love for you, and you went running into his arms after he did. Do you have any idea what that did to me, watching that and hearing that, seeing you with him like that? Knowing that you married him, that you hadn't said yes to me, but you married him..." He trailed off, swallowed so hard that she saw his Adam's apple bobbing up and down, and swiped at his eyes with one hand before turning his back to her and looking out the window.

Holly's own throat was aching because of the tears she was holding back. She crossed to the window and stood behind Roger, resting her hand on his shoulder and hoping he wouldn't shake off her touch. When he didn't, she said tearfully, "I was wrong. I was so wrong, about all of it. Yes, I thought Fletcher was the safe choice. But I've been a zombie since I married him. Stuffing myself into a mold that's his idea of what his wife should be like, not able to be myself. You're the only one who ever took me as I am, and didn't expect me to try to live up to some impossible ideal. You love me for who I am."

"That's the hell of it," Roger said, turning to face Holly once more. "Even after everything that's happened in the past year, I still love you."

Holly's heart soared at this. Roger still loved her!

"Loving you isn't the problem," Roger continued. "Trusting you is, because right now, at this moment, I don't trust you. I can't." He raked a hand through his hair. "When we were young and I lost you, I drove you away. But two years ago, I watched you walk away from me, and it damn near killed me. I was just completely gutted emotionally. I couldn't survive that again. I barely did the last time."

Holly's heart crashed at her feet then. She understood Roger's feelings. Ironically, she had felt that way about him many times before. If he had felt as sick inside, as fearful, as self-loathing as she felt right now, then she had a whole new appreciation for what he had been through when she was shooting him down and shutting him out in the past, because it was the worst feeling in the world.

At the same time, though, Holly was determined to make it work this time, to make Roger see that he was all she really wanted, and that she would never leave him again if he would only give her one more chance.

"Let me prove it to you," she said then. "Give me one chance to prove to you that if you take me back, this time it really will be forever. You won't lose me ever again."

Roger's mouth twisted in a wry half-smile. "This is a switch," he said. "Usually I'm the one pleading for another chance with you."

"And usually I'm the one whose heart and head are at war over what to do about you," Holly replied.

"What's that saying about walking a mile in another person's shoes?" Roger wondered.

"I will gladly walk in your shoes for as many miles as it takes for me to earn your trust again, because I want you back, Roger. I want us back," Holly said fervently. "I was wrong not to believe you, not to believe in us, and I was wrong to cheat on you and I just kept making more and more wrong decisions. But that's done. I am so very sorry that I hurt you so deeply. But whatever it takes, no matter how long it takes, I'm going to make you see that we can make us work, and that this time it'll be for the rest of our lives...if you'll give me that chance. Will you?"

Roger looked at Holly for another long moment, so Holly looked back at him, her gaze steady and unwavering, and he saw in her eyes a blazing determination and an undisguised hope that he couldn't deny. He honestly didn't know if he could trust her again, but she had never come to him like this before. He knew her well enough to know that she was more serious about this, about them, than she had ever been before over all the years they had known each other, forever tangled, stumbling in and out of each other's orbits and lives no matter how many times they tried to stay away from each other or disavowed their feelings for each other. Roger had been honest when he told Holly loving her wasn't the problem. He had loved her since they were young, and he would love her beyond the end of his days. But if he ever got her back again, he couldn't live through losing her a third time.

But if there was any chance at all for them to get back together and never break up again, Roger had to take it, because life without Holly was no life at all.

"Yes," Roger said.

Holly's heart was no longer at her feet, but it wasn't quite back in her chest either; it was somewhere around her stomach. "Yes?" she asked hopefully, wanting to be certain she'd heard him right.

"Yes," Roger repeated firmly. She smiled then, and it was a smile that encompassed her whole face, chasing from her eyes the shadows of fear that had been so clear only a couple of minutes ago. He couldn't help the small smile he gave her in return. "The shoe is on the other foot now," he reflected. In the past, Roger had always been the one pursuing Holly, doing everything he could think of to get her to admit that she loved him, to get her to trust him, to get her to be with him. When he woke up that morning, the last thing he expected was for Holly to come to his door and tell him that she still loved him and wanted him back, and that she was divorcing that plaid-shirt-and-stupid-hat-wearing baboon she had married ten months ago.

"So it is," Holly said.

"I, ah...There's something you should know, in the interests of full disclosure," Roger said. "The reason that Dinah and Hart are gaslighting me and trying to drive me insane is because Dinah is angry at me for sort of...taking her trust fund."

Holly nodded. "How do you think I found out what they're really up to?" she asked. "I overheard them in the park, talking about it. Dinah mentioned that, and something about a Cayman Islands bank account where you put the money."

"She probably wants to take Hart down there and get the money and then celebrate locking me up in a mental hospital with him...since they're already sleeping together," Roger reflected.

Again Holly was unfazed. "That's their plan."

"You knew they were having an affair?"

"Considering the way Hart shoved his tongue down Dinah's throat, it couldn't have been anything else," Holly replied.

"Brazen little puppies aren't they, doing that right out in public now," Roger said.

"It was a deserted area of the park. They didn't know I saw and heard them," Holly replied, "which gives us the advantage."

"Us?" Roger asked.

"You're not going to let them get away with this," Holly pointed out. "You're already faking being gaslighted." She cautiously reached for his hand, and he let her take it. "Let me help you get proof of what they're doing."

"How?" Roger asked. "Leo's off sucking up to the Spauldings, and if I hire anyone else to tail them or bug Dinah's apartment, they could catch on easily. Dinah knows the usual suspects I pay for that kind of thing."

"So you don't pay one of the usual suspects. We go out of town and find somebody they don't know, and I pay for it. There has to be at least one top-notch private investigator in Bay City or Oakdale or Henderson," Holly replied.

"You're really going to help me with this," Roger realized.

"If you'll let me," Holly replied, praying that he would let her.

Roger seemed to be considering. Then he said, "I think we should leave Chrissy out of this until we have something definite. The last thing I want is for her to get caught in the crossfire. She'll have enough to deal with once Dinah and Hart have been exposed, because Ross will take Dinah's side no matter what. Our daughter is not going to be collateral damage."

"I agree completely," Holly said. She paused, then said, "About us...I don't think we should tell her that yet either."

"There's nothing to tell," Roger said. "Yet."

Holly clung to that "yet" with a figurative white-knuckled grasp. "It's just that we have the advantage over Dinah and Hart right now because they don't know that we know what they're really doing. Not that Blake would tell either one of them, but if no one knows that I'm trying to...well..."

"Win me back?" Roger inquired.

"Regain your trust so that we can have a future together," Holly corrected. "If we keep that just between the two of us until there is, hopefully, something to tell, then we will retain the element of surprise."

"I have to admit, no one would think that you would be helping me," Roger agreed.

"So we keep Blake out of the loop until we have something definite, and we work together to prove what Dinah and Hart are doing...with the help of a private investigator from out of town," Holly said.

"Agreed," Roger said.

"I'll make some calls," Holly said. "I'll get back to you as soon as I've found a private investigator we can trust."

"So first I trust the P.I., and then I trust you again," Roger said.

"I'll do everything in my power to make that so," Holly said earnestly. She retrieved her purse from the desk. "Are you going to be here later, or at the apartment?"

"Probably here," Roger replied. "They'll know downstairs if I am."

Holly nodded. "I'll call you later, then," she said.

"Okay," Roger agreed. She walked to the door and he followed her.

He opened the door, and she stopped and turned to face him once more. "We had something good once," she said. "We can have something great in the future. I know we can. I believe that, and I'm going to make you believe it too. I'm going to rebuild your trust in me, Roger, I promise."

"I hope you can," Roger replied, surprising both himself and Holly with his honesty. But he did hope that he could learn to trust Holly again. He wanted her back. But he had to be sure that she wasn't going to emotionally eviscerate him again. He wouldn't survive it a third time.

Holly looked at him again for a moment, seeming to be debating something, and finally she put her arms around his neck and gave him a careful hug. He hesitated, but then he put one arm around her waist, his heart racing at feeling her this close to him again after all this time, at feeling her arms around him. She held the hug for a moment, then stepped back. "'Bye," she said quietly.

"'Bye," Roger echoed. He watched her walk down the hall and disappear around the corner, then he went to the chest of drawers beside the bed, opened the middle drawer, and removed the framed photograph he had put there beneath his shirts. He sank down on the edge of the bed, and looked at the photograph cradled in his hands: he and Holly at Blake and Ross's wedding, after Holly had caught Blake's bouquet. Roger's eyes were twinkling in the picture, and he and Holly had matching mile-wide grins as she triumphantly held Blake's bouquet aloft.

They had been happy then. Could they be that happy again?

Could he trust Holly not to hurt him by leaving him for some other man, some safer, better-on-paper choice?

Time would tell.