Of course, what I wanted most of all, I had no control over—Sebastian’s safety.
My parents stayed with me, waited on me. They made me give up my cell phone sometimes for them to watch, and they made me try to sleep.
Billy was around some of those days, too. But I can’t really recall if we had any conversations.
Mostly, I sat, book in hand, and thought about how I now understood that Sebastian had loved me in the past, even knowing my secrets and knowing I wasn’t sharing them with him. And he loved me now. He always had.
It was five in the afternoon when my father knocked on the door.
“Come in,” I called.
He stepped inside. I looked up at him. So did Baxter. His eyes were big, excited.
I put my book down.
“Jess,” he said. Then again, “Jess.” He held up my cell phone.
“Yeah?” My voice creaked. I cleared my throat, tried to clear the fear coating it.
“He’s out,” my dad said. “They released him.”
51
I was sitting just beyond the Welcome to Chicago sign at the airport when Sebastian came through customs, through the door and back into my life.
After we were notified when he would be home, I’d asked Barb if I could be the one to greet Sebastian, as long as I dropped him off at her house after. She’d reluctantly, but kindly, agreed.
His partner had returned on a separate flight, so Sebastian came through the door alone.
He smiled when he saw me. He walked toward me, but he was stopped by a young guy rushing into the arms of older men wearing turbans, all of them exclaiming with joy.
Next to me, a Mexican family spotted their relative or friend, and started waving and speaking loudly in Spanish.
Sebastian made his way around the first group, and then the second, and then he reached me. We hugged. Then harder. And then he picked me up and squeezed me to his chest, and I wanted so badly to kiss him.
After a minute, I said in his ear, “Welcome back.” I meant, Welcome back to our life, if you want it.
“Thanks.” He stared into my eyes and he grinned big, but I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. “Thanks.” He set me down, but we kept hugging.
“Are you feeling okay?” I asked.
“Fine.”
“Are you hungry?”
“I got upgraded on the flight, and I pretty much ate the whole way.”
I gestured toward the wall of windows that faced the arrivals area. “I got a town car,” I said. “But maybe we can talk here for a minute, before we get back into everything.” Back into the world. Whether it would be our world, I didn’t know. But either way I wanted to have everything up front, nothing hiding in the corners of us.
He pulled me by my hand to a bench near a huge plate glass window. Outside, it was brilliantly sunny, and flags from every country whipped in the breeze.
“You can ask me anything, Jess,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“I want to talk about it. And they’ve finally allowed me that with you. I’m ready, too.” He scanned the crowd. “Just give me a minute to take everything in.”
“Of course,” I said. “Of course.”
As his eyes searched for something, he spoke. “What have you been thinking about since we talked? While I was there?”
“Well...” I tried to review the chaotic thoughts that had coursed through my mind. “I have been wondering when you knew. About my being married, and my arrest.”
“I found out after we got engaged. I hadn’t told them I was proposing. I was always doing stuff like that to show them they didn’t own me.”
“But they did,” I said.
“They did,” he responded. “Past tense.”
I nodded now, too.
“The agency completed its background checks on you a few weeks after our engagement.”
“Yet you never told me you knew.”
Sebastian’s eyes landed squarely on mine and stayed there, almost daring me to look away. I didn’t.
He took my hand, stroked it. “I figured there was a reason,” he said. “Some wall you had put up. I didn’t know if I should pull it down.” He paused. “Did you not trust me enough to tell me?”
“It wasn’t that. Like I said, I was embarrassed, especially about the arrest. I thought it would lower your impression of me. Mostly, it was a dark time in my life—it was a version of myself I didn’t want to revisit.”
Sebastian studied me. He gently pushed my hair back from one side and pulled it over the other. Then he asked questions about Billy and me, questions he said he’d wanted to ask me for a while. I told him about my fear of losing Billy, my willingness to put up with so much, the favor asked from his brother Mick, my arrest, and finally Billy’s rejection and the humiliation of that.
“You could have told me,” Sebastian said.
“It was sordid.”
Sebastian shook his head a little. “Not to me. And not compared to what I’ve seen.”
We were both quiet for a moment.
“Your past didn’t make me love you less. It made me love you more,” Sebastian said. “In part because I had a past, too. I was ashamed, too. All journalists hate the use of reporters by the CIA to gather information.”
“Why?” I said. “Weren’t you just helping your country?”
“Maybe. Maybe. They never tell you, the reporter, the result of what you did for them. They never tell you if the information you gave them proved something or disproved another or maybe even led to someone’s death.”
Sebastian stopped then as if hearing his words and surprising himself. He glanced around. I wondered how he saw the room differently than I did. I only saw the group of people holding signs to the right of the arrivals hallway, and a man who strained his neck, holding a huge bouquet of flowers.
I sat back, wordless, wanting to hear more.
“The worst part, and the reason that reporters and news agencies hate it,” Sebastian said, “is because it gets other reporters, ones who aren’t working for the CIA, into trouble. The suspicion about reporters has led to people being kidnapped and tortured.”
I tried to take it all in. I tried to assimilate this new information, assessing it as if it were going into a database, piece by piece.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“You just said that my past made you love me more.”
He nodded.
“And I return that,” I said. “I think this...” I waved my hand near him “...what I’ve learned about you, well, it fleshes you out in my mind. I always thought of you as just Sebastian, star journalist.”
Again, his eyes were downcast.
I told Sebastian that his shame was misplaced. It would be different if he had understood the potential ramifications to other journalists. He hadn’t. He really had believed, deeply inside himself, that he was helping.
“There’s no shame in that,” I said. “Please, please don’t see shame in it. Because if you do...” I shrugged. “What am I supposed to do about the thing I feel guilty about?”
He grinned. “I missed you.”
I grinned back.
“No, like, I missed you,” he said.
I knew he meant more than just while he had been arrested, more than the time he had been gone on that trip.
“Me, too,” I said.
We both took in big breaths.
Then he leaned in toward me. The world whirled with memories, but mostly with him. Now.
“Okay?” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
And he kissed me. His warm, wide mouth touched gently onto mine. Then with increasing firmness, fervor.
After a moment, as if shy and surprised, we pulled
back.
I sighed. He did, too.
“Your Dogger is in the car,” I said.
“Let’s go, then.”
We walked outside. The town car driver, a guy named Trent, was standing outside the car but his head was visible in a back window, apparently petting the dog. Then Baxter’s head appeared over his shoulder.
“Dogger!” Sebastian said.
The driver stepped back and Baxy saw Sebastian. He yelped, then scrambled, jumping out the window.
Sebastian laughed and grabbed him.
The driver opened the door with a flourish of his arm. He smiled at Sebastian, but didn’t seem to recognize him. The news of Sebastian’s arrest and release (as well as being the dad of Superdog) had been publicized but only with mentions of his status as a journalist. Very few people but me would ever know he worked for the CIA. Sebastian and I had shared all of our pasts now.
I got in the car and my ex-husband followed with our dog.
“Where are we heading?” Trent said, getting in the front seat.
Sebastian smiled at me. “Let’s go to the dog park?”
I nodded, and we drove toward another new life.
* * * * *
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Amy Moore-Benson, my agent, my sometimes cowriter and, most important, my friend.
Thank you to Emily Ohanjanians, who shepherded and edited this book and made it shine. Thanks to Donna Hayes, who shepherded a publishing house and a ton of authors over the years. Thanks to everyone at MIRA—Craig Swinwood, Loriana Sacilotto, Margaret Marbury, Tara Parsons, Stacy Widdrington, Ana Luxton, Diane Mosher, Stefanie Buszynski, Evan Brown, Erin Craig, Stephen Miles, Emily Martin, Reka Rubin, Don Lucey, Michelle Renaud, Lisa Wray, Alex Osuszek, Andi Richman, Gordy Goihl, Dave Carley, Erica Mohr, Darren Lizotte, Fritz Servatius, Anne Fontanesi, Nick Ursino, Matt Hart, Audrey Bresar, Gaëtan Bélair, Nanette Long, Laurie Malarchuk, Heather Foy, Aideen O’Leary-Chung, Marianna Ricciuto, Julie Forrest and Carly Chow.
Finally, thanks to everyone who consulted on this book, including Anne Szatkulski, for answering questions about campaign offices and photo shoots, the team at Lincoln Park Dog and Cat Clinic, and Dr. Suma Raju of Roscoe Village Animal Hospital.
And for all the people who passed through Jonquil Park while I was writing this book, thanks for sharing your dogs with Shafer and your time with me. (And hey, thanks, Shafer!)
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ISBN-13: 9781460336649
THE DOG PARK
Copyright © 2014 by Story Avenue, LLC.
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