The lone lightbulb above them flickered once, twice, three times with a static, electric sort of sound, and the women turned their eyes upward, holding their breaths, waiting to be plunged into darkness. But the noise quieted, the light steadied, and they found themselves staring again at each other.
“It would help if he had some discernible reason,” Gram said finally. “But maybe there isn’t one. Or maybe there isn’t just one. Ultimately, does it really matter?”
“Of course it matters!” Violet felt instant shame at the outburst. “It matters to me,” she said more softly.
“Fair enough. That’s your right,” Gram said, matching her tone. “But to me? It only matters that he brings Bear back.”
* * *
Once Gram had gone—reluctantly, and only after Violet’s repeated reassurances that she would be fine, that she was, above all, exhausted and in need of rest—Violet got the vodka and the cranberry back out and filled her glass at the table. As drained as she was, sleep wasn’t an option. And as much as she hated this kitchen, she couldn’t go back into the living room without hearing the echoes of Delilah Branson’s voice over the phone, couldn’t go into her bedroom without being surrounded by reminders of the stranger who was Finn, and couldn’t bring herself to stoop to the low of drinking in a child’s room, even if that was the only place in the house that felt like home. So she sat at the table alone and drained and refilled her glass. She did it again, and again, and she rethought everything she had ever believed to be true about her life with Finn.
“My name is Violet,” she had replied to Finn’s ad. “And I am free any night this week.”
It had taken him a full forty-eight hours to respond. She’d wondered if her message had been caught in his spam filter—there was no direct contact info listed in his ad, no way to reach him other than the automated Craigslist system, and she knew those return addresses were displayed as odd scrambles of letters and numbers. If she had posted an ad looking for someone, she would have been checking her in-box incessantly, at all hours of the day and night. But maybe Finn wasn’t like that. After all, he’d waited two years to post it in the first place.
But finally, there was his response, pinging into her smartphone and bolded at the top of her in-box. It was a short note inviting her to dinner and drinks after work the next day—that was all.
They met at Arthur’s, just off Hyde Park Square, where even the casual spots were overpriced but the location was too perfect to argue. Tuesday was “Burger Madness” at the little brick café—you could get as many gourmet toppings as you wanted for no extra fee. She found Finn waiting at a table in the walled courtyard out back. He was seated in a corner beneath the pergola, a ceiling fan whirling above his head, an almost-empty pint glass sweating on the table in front of him. Violet glanced at her watch. She was right on time. He must have arrived really early. A good sign.
He smiled when he saw her and stood for an awkward hug. As she settled into her seat across from him, her heart racing with anticipation, he leaned in as if to confide some great secret. “I almost didn’t recognize you—you’re not wearing your grandma’s clothes.”
Violet laughed, looking self-consciously down at her blousy sleeveless shirt and khaki pencil skirt. The truth was, the peep-toe heels she’d chosen were the only part of her outfit that Gram herself probably wouldn’t wear. She’d been going for one of those looks the magazines said could transition from office to evening, but she wasn’t sure she’d exactly hit the mark. Finn was far more casual, in jeans and a faded T-shirt.
They made small talk. He ordered another round of drinks—white wine for Violet—and they rattled off their choices of toppings, which, on a list half a menu page long, were the same: Boursin, red onion, lettuce, tomato, bacon. Another good sign. They smiled shyly at each other. Finn seemed nervous in an almost reluctant way. His demeanor reminded her of someone who’d been dragged along on a double blind date against his will, which made no sense, of course. She would have to learn to read him better.
When she told him where she worked, she waited for a flash of recognition on his face, an, “Oh, I almost interviewed there once! Funny story—at the time, I was…” But none came. He merely asked if she was a graphic designer there and she explained that she was not, but that she worked with a team of them in her role overseeing communications. He only nodded.
“That’s what I do for a living,” he explained flatly. “Well, sort of. My current job doesn’t involve a lot of graphics. Or a lot of design.” They laughed together then, as if this were some great coup he had pulled off.
Their burgers arrived. They bumped elbows over the condiments and politely apologized; their obligatory small talk continued. It might as well have been any ordinary, semi-awkward first date. Violet kept waiting for him to bring up their meeting on the beach—and what came next, and why he’d chosen this moment to look for her. Had Katie been right that maybe he’d reached out through the universe before, and Violet had missed it? But he didn’t bring it up, and so Violet followed his lead. She was here because of his ad. He was the initiator. And so she would try to stick to his script of how this should go. She would be patient—she would not rush the conversation and risk ruining things. Because if there was one skill she’d had ample opportunity to hone these past two years, it was the art of waiting. And if there was one thing she’d already known how to do even before she first met Finn, it was improvise. For that, she could thank Gram.
After dinner, they walked around the corner to Graeter’s and got small paper cups of ice cream—Violet ordered raspberry chocolate chip, and when he said only, “I’ll have the same,” she couldn’t hide her smile. As they stepped into the crosswalk, headed toward the small rectangular park in the middle of the busy square, a sports car sped toward them, and he took her hand, looking almost comically alarmed. When it had passed, he didn’t let go. They found an empty bench and sat in silence for a moment, eating their ice cream thoughtfully as they watched the traffic go by.
Violet turned sideways on the bench and stretched her legs out across his lap. She did it without thinking, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and only after she saw the stunned look pass briefly across his face did she realize what an intimate gesture it was. No—a presumptive gesture. I know you already, it said. You belong on this bench next to me.
She was about to apologize, to retract her legs and face forward again, when his face changed. She’d meticulously flat-ironed her freshly cut and layered hair that morning, and he reached out and gathered the section to the right of her chin into his fingertips. He wound it through and around his fingers as he looked into her eyes, really looked into them, as if seeing her only then for the first time.
“Now I remember,” he said softly. The veil of awkwardness lifted. The smile that came next was more genuine—the smile of someone who was a little surprised to find himself sitting next to her this way, but happily so.
Here it was, finally, that current between them—that intensity of connection that had been missing from every other masculine encounter she’d had since that long-ago day on the beach. It was there. It was real. She hadn’t dreamt it. And now that this spark had again flickered, she was desperate not to be plunged back into that uncertain darkness. Now that she knew she hadn’t imagined the flame, she needed to know what it was that had brought them here—and what it was that had kept them apart. She wanted to know how he’d spent every moment of every day since they’d seen each other last.
“It’s been a long time, you know,” she said softly. “Why now?” Something like fear flashed in Finn’s eyes, and, worrying that she sounded more suspicious than she’d intended, she smiled coyly and tried for humor instead. “I mean, where have you been?”
She half expected some glib comeback, a battle of wits, but none came. He seemed to be considering her question seriously. She knew then that something about this man was different from the Finn she’d met on the beach. His almost automatic flirt
ation was gone, and in its place was something more measured. But still, he didn’t drop the lock of her hair he was holding. He didn’t let go. Some sort of explanation had to be given, after all, or at the very least gotten out of the way. He knew it, and she knew it.
“Did you ever think,” he said slowly, “that maybe when we were split up that day … did you ever think we should take that as a sign not to find each other? That anything beyond that conversation just wasn’t meant to be?”
She paused for only a second before answering honestly. “No, I didn’t. Is that what you thought?”
“No,” he admitted. He dropped her hair and gave her a sheepish smile. “But my dad always used to say that nothing worth having comes easily. Sometimes I think I take that advice to the extreme and can’t take a hint.”
His words were light, but there was real sadness in his expression. How he must miss his father. Violet felt a surge of tenderness for this man she hardly knew. She thought then that she’d been wrong—it didn’t really matter where he’d been all this time, what he’d been doing. The only thing that mattered was that he was here now.
She leaned toward him. “Well,” she said, “if you ever miss any of my hints in the future, I’ll be sure to let you know.” She inched closer still, until their noses were just inches apart. She looked at him with exaggerated eagerness, and he finally broke down and laughed—a genuine, warm sound that dissolved the moment of uncertainty. Here they were again, a woman and a man holding dishes of melting ice cream, her legs draped nonchalantly but purposefully across his lap, his arm wrapped now almost involuntarily around her knees, looking at each other so intimately that anyone walking by would surely look away.
“Would this be some sort of kissing-related hint?” he asked, touching the tip of his nose to hers.
“I knew you weren’t as bad at this as you thought.”
The familiarity between them took over then—maybe too quickly, she acknowledged now. After all, it had been false familiarity. Without cause. But it had seemed like such a natural fit, and such a miracle to have found each other again. Looking back later, Violet would remember feeling, above all, relieved. Perhaps not the most romantic notion on which to build a relationship—no one ever gushed about being relieved when they met their spouse, though wasn’t everyone relieved to stop looking for a match, relieved to stop being alone?—but it had felt good. It wasn’t run-of-the-mill relief. It was a feeling that things had been restored to their natural order. To the way they were supposed to be but very nearly hadn’t been. What was wrong with breathing a sigh at that?
A few months later, when she discovered she was pregnant, she wasn’t even all that nervous about telling him. Sure, it was sooner than she’d imagined, and everything was out of order—but didn’t that fit with the way things had gone between them? Wasn’t that just one more charming bump in the story of their love?
When he heard the news, though, he got quiet. And when he went home from her little duplex that night, rather than staying over as he usually did on Fridays, she cried herself to sleep, hoping Gram couldn’t hear her from her side of the walls.
But he was back in the morning, with her favorite cinnamon-sugar-crusted bagels and seasonal pumpkin spice lattes, decaf for her. “I guess we should get married,” he said, smiling apologetically, and it wasn’t really a proposal, but that was okay. It was them. They weren’t fancy. They just … they just were.
They arranged things hastily. Neither of them wanted to make a big deal. Violet once tried to suggest more, but Finn looked so troubled that she thought it had been insensitive of her. Of course he’d be bothered that he had no family to invite. Surely there must be aunts or uncles or cousins somewhere, but when she asked, he just said, “Not really.” She let it go. She didn’t want to cause Finn any pain. He was fond of Gram, and his closest friends were already becoming Violet’s own, and of course that was enough for Violet. It seemed to be more than enough for Finn.
And so that’s how it was: George and Caitlin were there, and Gram. The last weeks of November could swing between Indian summers and snowstorms in Cincinnati, and the day they’d chosen fell somewhere in between. They spent a chilly morning at the courthouse, but later, as they celebrated with a spread at George and Caitlin’s house, the sun made a brilliant appearance, and the day turned warm enough to sit in the courtyard out back, even to remove their jackets.
For their honeymoon, they drove east, deep into Amish Country, to the Murphin Ridge Inn, a spot recommended by Caitlin. It was billed as a place to unplug, but with a luxury take on rustic—the inn served dishes by award-winning chefs who sourced their ingredients from adjacent farms, and the private accommodations were designed so that you wouldn’t miss the TV. In their chalet fringed by woods, the centerpiece was a deep Jacuzzi and a 360-degree fireplace. The room came well stocked with books, cards, and board games. They took breakfast and dinner at the inn, and snacked in between from a basket delivered daily to their door. With the excuse of being pregnant, Violet ate heartily. At night, the innkeepers built bonfires on a large stone patio and she and Finn settled into Adirondack chairs under the stars, she with hot cocoa and he with something stronger. It was a communal atmosphere, with other couples also drawn to the circle, but most of them kept to themselves, paired up in their own little worlds, lost in the roaring blaze.
That first night, as they admired how wide the sky stretched above and beyond them, how bright the stars were here, how they could actually see the haze of the Milky Way cut its swath across the sky, Finn lowered his eyes to hers, and she saw something there that she only then realized she hadn’t seen from him before: hope. “Maybe nothing has to be as complicated as we make it,” he said. “Maybe life really is this simple.” Violet didn’t know what to say, so she just squeezed his arm in reply and looked back to the sky, and a moment later she felt his gaze leave her face and follow.
She hadn’t known that he found things complicated, but it wasn’t such an odd thing to say given their circumstances—planning so suddenly for a baby, and her move out of her duplex and into his more spacious apartment next to George and Caitlin’s house. She was sad to leave Gram, and sorry not to have her next door to help when the baby came, but Finn’s rental had more bedrooms, a better yard, and a bargain price. It made the most sense. Gram would be only a short drive away and could stay over anytime—there was a guest room she could use as often as they wanted. And Caitlin was pregnant also, with twins. It would be fun, Violet thought. A new start.
Complicated? Maybe. But as Finn said, it was really pretty simple. It was just what you do when you fall in love with someone—you go with the flow, as the cliché says. It seemed to Violet that she and Finn were pretty good at riding those tides as they came.
But if she’d known that it would lead her here, to this miserable little table where she’d come to sit alone, drinking well into the night, her husband and her son vanished, her world turned upside down by an FBI agent and a stranger on the phone, she would have navigated those waters differently.
22
BEYOND AUGUST 2012
Caitlin loved Violet from the start. She’d always loved Finn, but had rarely seen him in love. Until she’d met George, her boyfriends always felt threatened by the fact that her best friend was another guy, always suspected there was something more to their relationship. There never had been, at least not outwardly, but it also was true that Finn had spent the majority of those years single. He wasn’t one of those guys people were always looking to fix up. Not because he wasn’t a great catch—he was—but because he just seemed uncommonly content to be alone. It wasn’t until he lost his parents that Caitlin saw a change in him, a hint that he might be longing for someone or something after all. Still, she’d once teased Finn that it would take a sign from the universe to pin him down, and though they both had laughed it off, it turned out she hadn’t been far from the truth.
The year Finn fell for Maribel, he almost disappeared entirely from Cait
lin’s view, understandably preoccupied with new love in spite of her attempts to keep him close. She missed him, missed seeing what that version of Finn was like. She still wondered about it sometimes, still wished she had more memories of him and Maribel with her and George—double dates, weekends away, all those things they’d said they should do together but hadn’t followed through with before it suddenly had been too late. It seemed ridiculous to Caitlin that she’d met Maribel only a handful of times when her loss had had such a profound effect on one of her oldest and closest friends. She mourned Maribel, of course, but she mourned her on Finn’s behalf. And she mourned Finn, too. Because Finn was changed. Her efforts had done nothing to shorten the shelf life of his grief. Caitlin felt sure, though, that if anyone could bring him back, it was Violet.
“I was drunk when I placed the ad,” he confessed the day Violet’s response landed in his in-box. Caitlin could still picture him, hands over his face, his bottle of beer from her fridge already sweating in the August heat, as he sat awkwardly forward in one of the whitewashed Adirondacks on her massive front porch. “I almost forgot I even did it. How did she see it? What are the odds that she actually would have seen it?”
“Slim,” Caitlin agreed. “Still, that is usually the idea behind those ads. You know, the hope that the person it’s written for might actually see it. If it didn’t ever happen, I suppose they wouldn’t exist.”
He looked at her skeptically. “Fad diets exist. Penis enhancers exist. Plenty of things that never work exist.”
She rolled her eyes. “Fortunately, what we’re dealing with here are real people going about their lives in the natural world, and not something that was manufactured to make a dirty buck.”
“What if I don’t reply? This might just … go away.”
“Why on earth would you want that?”
Almost Missed You Page 18