“Well, I wasn’t sure how disappointed to be at first, so I had to err on the side of caution,” she said. “Besides, what would you have thought of me if I just kind of shrugged and said, ‘Oh, well, you’ll do instead’?”
Finn laughed. “Touché.”
“What about you?” she pressed. “Were you actually disappointed?”
“Yeah, I actually was,” Finn said, still smiling. It was funny—that man already seemed like someone else now, someone he used to be. “But, oh well, you’ll do instead.”
Neither of them had been too drunk for the sex to be good. So, so good.
With a sigh, Finn forced himself to swing his legs over the side of the bed. He wasn’t even a little bit sorry anymore that she wasn’t the woman from the beach. He was just sorry she was gone.
He scanned the rumpled comforter, the floor, the armchair in the corner for some sign of her. A forgotten accessory. A hairbrush. Anything. But every trace of her was gone. It was as if she’d never been there at all.
Coffee. The only thing to do was make a pot of coffee.
Stepping into the kitchen, Finn stopped cold. The carafe of his brewer was already freshly filled, the burner light glowing red. He stepped closer. And there, underneath a clean mug sitting ready for him, was a note with her name, cell phone number, office number, home e-mail, work e-mail, home address, office address, Twitter handle, and Facebook page. At the bottom, she’d written: “This should be sufficient info not to miss the connection, but other data is available upon request.” He smiled, poured himself a cup, and called Maribel’s cell right then.
“What took you so long?” she greeted him.
9
AUGUST 2011
Violet peered into the bathroom mirror, wiping mascara from beneath her eyes with a too-rough, too-thin square of toilet paper. This was officially a new low point, crying over a man at work, of all places, moments before she had to start interviewing candidates for the graphic design job. What a disaster.
She was becoming a pro at breakups by now. They didn’t throw her the way they used to, didn’t make her question what was wrong with her and wonder if she’d ever catch up to her myriad of engaged and married friends. In fact, she’d almost come to expect them before they happened—and maybe that was part of the problem. But they were usually amicable enough. “It’s just not working out,” or “The timing isn’t right,” or some other cop-out. She would gorge on Ben & Jerry’s for a week or two, like a cliché, and at some point have a drunken night of sobbing alone in her apartment, or maybe at a friend’s, and then, her ritual complete, she would get over it.
But this one was nasty.
She forced herself not to take the cell phone out of her pocket, not to look at the text message again. It had contained a photo of a naked woman, asleep on her stomach, a sheet draped loosely across her buttocks. She’d instantly recognized Matt’s nightstand in the background, the iPod dock alarm clock she’d bought him for his birthday still in its familiar place.
“I’m moving on,” the text had read.
It would have been slightly less cruel if he hadn’t sent it in the middle of a workday.
She’d known he was mad at her—she hadn’t heard from him since that stupid fight had blown up Friday night. “Why do I always get the feeling you want me to be someone else?” he’d yelled.
“That’s not fair,” she shot back. “I always go along with everything you want.”
“Yes, you’re so damn easy to get along with,” he said. “Miss Go with the Flow. You think I can’t sense your disappointment? You’re nodding your head and agreeing, but it’s not because you really agree. It’s just because that’s what you do.”
She probably should have conceded the point. In truth, she had often wished he was someone else. But she didn’t think anything she’d done had warranted this. It was perfectly awful, Gram would say. Not that she could ever tell Gram something that was also so perfectly salacious—and perfectly humiliating.
“Are you okay?” Katie poked her head into the bathroom, looking worried.
“Yeah.” Violet sniffed. “Where do I find these guys?”
“Dicks R Us?”
Violet managed a laugh. She and Katie had worked together for years, and as the only two single women in the office, they’d taken to updating each other on their dating escapades as if it were a hobby. Katie had never been in favor of Matt. Of course, Katie had never been in favor of anyone Violet met ever since Violet came back from Sunny Isles Beach and told her the story of Handsome Stranger. Katie was convinced that he was the guy for Violet, and that their paths would cross again if only Violet was patient. After all, he lived somewhere in the sizable but not planetary Greater Cincinnati area. Outwardly, Violet always brushed this off as beyond unlikely, but in truth it was one of the few things she let herself imagine when things weren’t going well—and sometimes even when they were. Her eyes meeting Handsome Stranger’s across a crowded bar. Him making his way toward her, weaving through the clusters of people with increasing urgency, and when he finally reached her, engulfing her in an embrace and whispering in her ear, “I should have done that while I had the chance.”
“Violet,” she’d say before he could ask. “My name is Violet.”
“If it helps,” Katie said now, “you have some time to wallow. Your first interview canceled. He called over the weekend, but apparently no one in HR checked the voice mail until now.”
Violet sighed. At least that made time for the puffiness to go down around her eyes. But that still left three interviews scheduled back-to-back, each one forty-five minutes. It was going to be a long afternoon. “Am I allowed to be relieved? Which candidate was that?”
Katie made an apologetic face. “The one whose portfolio you liked the best. The amazing typography on the theater signage, with all those hand-drawn elements.”
Violet groaned. “Great. The only one who wasn’t borderline underqualified. Did he say why?”
“He just found out he’s going to be relocating for his fiancée’s job.”
“It’s official. Everyone but us is engaged. Even our job candidates.”
“Buck up, little camper. I slipped some of your favorite K-Cups into the conference room. The hazelnut ones.”
“You’re the best.”
“You’re going to want to be caffeinated when you get off work. I’m taking you out. We need to get you ‘moving on.’”
“The only thing I’m moving on to tonight is my couch. With the absolute trashiest thing I can find on TV, and a bag of popcorn in my lap for dinner.”
Katie let it drop. One of the best things about her was that she knew when Violet needed to be left alone.
* * *
Hours later, back in her office as she listened to the collective sound of her coworkers packing up and chatting as they headed in intervals toward the ding of the elevator, Violet buried her face in her hands. The interviews had gone horribly. One woman had even started crying halfway through Violet’s questions.
“I can already tell I’m not going to get it,” she’d whimpered. “Damn it, I really, really needed this job.”
She’d been right. She wasn’t going to get it. Violet had shared her own pocket pack of tissues with the woman and ended the interview right there. She hadn’t had the energy to fake it.
Violet checked her cell—no messages. She felt some last gleam of hope leave her, as if a part of her had been expecting a retraction from Matt. As if something like that photo was even retractable.
Sighing, she clicked through to her in-box and opened the folder of applicants. Maybe she’d overlooked someone who could be called in. Otherwise, it would be back to square one. Starred at the top of her folder was the cover letter and portfolio from the candidate who had canceled. Finn Welsh. Cool name. She’d never known a Finn before.
She opened up the PDF again. After the run of lackluster interviews, his work looked even better than she remembered. It wasn’t just that his was the most balanced, the
most intricate, the most high concept—there was something in it that she was drawn to in a way that felt almost instinctual. Maybe she could ask HR to call him back and dig around a little more, find out what his fiancée’s job offer was and if there was anything they could counter in salary or benefits that would make it worth his while to reconsider at least coming in for a face-to-face.
There was a URL to view more of his portfolio online. She hadn’t bothered to check it out before—his samples had been all she needed to see. But maybe something on his profile page would clue her in to what might win him over.
The page loaded, a wonder in flash animation, and there as the word cloud faded and the graphics parted to review his bio, she was staring into the eyes of Handsome Stranger.
It had been about a year since that day on the beach, but she knew him in an instant. She had known a Finn before. Finn Welsh. And he’d managed to get himself a fiancée. Or maybe he’d already had one. Maybe—and the thought had never once occurred to her before—maybe it hadn’t been any accident of fate that they hadn’t managed to reconnect that day. Maybe he’d never been looking for anything beyond those moments away from his obligations back home.
Well. It didn’t make a difference, did it? That was that.
Still, now that she knew his name, curiosity crept in. She looked for social media icons on his home page, but there were none. She typed his name into a search engine, but all she found were a few design credits here and there. If not through his job application, she could see no way or reason they would have crossed paths at all—not online, anyway.
She went back to the portfolio page and stared at it miserably. She almost wished she hadn’t seen it. Now it would never be this mysterious thing that just hadn’t worked out. Instead, she’d never again think of him without feeling silly—for a year’s worth of far-fetched fantasies, for allowing herself to pine over something that he probably hadn’t even given a second thought.
If only he hadn’t canceled the interview. She imagined herself rising from the conference room table, extending her hand, and looking boldly into his eyes. What might have happened then? What if, fiancée be damned, a part of him had been looking for her too?
But he had canceled. And she certainly wasn’t going to beg him back in now that she knew who he was. She thought of the humiliation she’d been spared—the eagerness she would have felt when she’d seen his face, the embarrassment of inviting him to coffee after the interview only to be turned down.
Violet wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting there by the time Katie poked her head through the doorway. Her neck felt stiff. Her eyes were dry with fatigue. “I’m gonna scoot,” Katie said. “Don’t worry—we’ll just hold out for more applications. We can keep freelancing stuff out in the meantime.”
Violet couldn’t bring herself to answer. Katie frowned. “You sure you’re okay to be alone tonight?”
She cleared her throat. “I’m thinking of canceling on Jerry and Ben and making plans with Tonic and Vodka instead. You in?”
10
AUGUST 2016
Caitlin sat in the too-stiff antique upholstered armchair that usually went unused in the corner of her family room, her legs crossed awkwardly toward the wall and her glass of chardonnay held as far as she could manage out to her side and away from the action. On the area rug that spanned the gleaming hardwood floor from the couches to the fireplace hearth, the boys were wrestling with George. She’d been in the kitchen doing the dinner dishes, but they kept yelling, “Watch this move, Mommy!” and “Daddy, do it again so Mommy can see!” until she gave up and came to perch here, in the only spot she could find that seemed out of the path of destruction but close enough to watch and applaud their every “point” scored. No matter that she couldn’t begin to understand the rules of this utterly masculine game the three of them had devised.
At the moment, George was on all fours roaring like a tiger, one boy hanging from each side of him. He swayed dramatically, as if about to try to shake them off, and they squealed with delight and tightened their grips on his T-shirt.
Caitlin didn’t often watch the three of them together this way without thinking about how lucky she’d gotten. Both Gus and Leo had chocolate brown eyes, a complexion that tanned easily—even through the SPF 50+ baby sunscreen she always slathered them with—and light brown hair that turned sun-bleached blond in the summer—all characteristics that fit with George’s own childhood photos.
It was a fortunate coincidence, as he was not their father, and was also not aware of this inconvenient fact.
Caitlin was used to the fear that she’d be found out one day. That part was not new. It was just that the threat had never been this immediate, this specific.
She had not been cruising easily through these early years of motherhood as if she’d forgotten the transgression that led to their birth. Instead, she protected those boys even more fiercely than she protected her secret itself. Because she knew that she and George were not compatible in the baby-making department. Years of trying had resulted in not so much as a faint line of maybe on a pee stick. She had undergone a litany of not-pleasant tests and received a clean bill of reproductive health, and George, in a move that would mark the one time she had really resented him for the pedigreed haughtiness that only on rare occasions surfaced in his behavior, had refused to have his semen tested or even to discuss the matter further.
In playing his high card, George had not chosen wisely. And so when Caitlin realized it was her move, she hadn’t acted with any better judgment than George had. She wasn’t proud of what she’d done. And yet her choice had led to Gus and Leo, and it was hard to see how that could be entirely wrong. She did know, though, that she could never, ever again do what she’d done and continue to live with herself. And that was why nothing must ever happen to the twins. They were her two and only children. There could never be others.
Leo slipped to the ground headfirst at an odd angle and Caitlin winced. He sat up, undeterred, and again jumped onto George’s back, and only when she saw the smile return to the boy’s face did she allow herself another careful sip of chardonnay. She knew that all mothers worried but also that other mothers did not worry quite the way she did. She envied them that.
No one would have believed Caitlin spent much time envying anyone. She had the family she’d always wanted, the family most people wanted. She had more than she’d dared to dream of. She loved George more than she’d thought it was possible to still romantically love someone after years of silly spats and bad haircuts and countless shared pots of morning coffee and almost as many evening nightcaps and endless loads of laundry and trash dragged down to the curb and cozy pajama nights on their couch and stuffy black-tie events and exotic trips together and too-long stretches forced apart. What she had done had never been out of a faltering in her love for George—only a solution for the thing that he would not do.
And so George must never find out the thing Finn had threatened to tell him.
Nor could she let Finn go after George’s family, or his career—wherever it might lead. How dare Finn betray her this way? What gave him the right to threaten their future just because he’d so unfathomably screwed up his own? It was ridiculous, even shameful, to feel hurt by him when he’d hurt Violet so much worse. But it was impossible not to still feel the sting of his words, so deeply had they cut.
On Caitlin’s phone on the kitchen counter, there was one new voice mail that she couldn’t bring herself to listen to. It was from Violet, and unless some miracle had occurred in the hours since Finn left early this afternoon, it wasn’t good news.
Violet probably just needed to talk. To her best friend. To her best friend who should have been calling her back right now without even bothering to listen to the message—because she was needed, obviously. But Caitlin dreaded making the call. She was not cut out for this. The guilt and fear would eat her alive—she knew that from her years of being unable to look at the boys without imagining some tr
agedy striking. Only this time it wasn’t just in her head. It was a very real threat that not only could cost Caitlin her most treasured friendship—and her marriage, and maybe even her children, and her whole life, really—but also could get her into very real trouble with the very real authorities. If she were caught failing to report Finn’s whereabouts, not to mention giving him access to George’s family’s cabin in Kentucky …
The potential consequences were terrifying.
There had been no picnic in the park for Caitlin and the boys this afternoon. After Finn left, she paced her kitchen in a panic, running through every imaginable scenario that would reveal her crime. What if George suggested they take the kids to the lake this weekend, as he so often did after they’d been apart? It was only a couple hours’ drive, but their family time together was different there. Simpler. Uninterrupted. It was the perfect place to recharge when your home life was as driven by one parent’s hyperactive career as theirs was.
This time, of course, it was Caitlin who had been away, a switch that none of them was used to. If George had suggested a drive to Kentucky this morning, she would have jumped at the idea—as George would have known she would. So if he happened to suggest it now, how would she manage to decline in a convincing way?
She needed to be prepared with reasons she could not or did not want to go, just in case. The problem was, she couldn’t think of any. Except, of course, the one she couldn’t say.
There was also the possibility that George’s parents could happen upon Finn there—it was, after all, their cabin, though they rarely used it anymore. Now that they were retired, they felt less and less need to get away—unlike Caitlin’s own parents, who were currently on yet another transatlantic cruise, an expense only just within reach thanks to her mother’s teaching pension, her father’s retired firefighter benefits, and their modest mortgage finally being paid off. The sprawling Bryce-Daniels estate was much more comfortable than the simple house on the lake. When you lived in a resort and no longer went to work, who needed a vacation?
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