Missing You(116)

Kat smiled too. “Good point.”

Bo sprinted toward the ball with all he had. He picked it up in his mouth and jogged toward Brandon. Leaning on one crutch, Brandon lowered himself and patted Bo’s head. Bo dropped the ball, wagged his tail, and barked for him to throw it again.

Dana shaded her eyes. “I’m glad you could come out, Kat.”

“Me too.”

The two women watched Brandon with the dogs.

“He’ll always have a limp,” Dana said. “That’s what the doctors told me.”

“I’m sorry.”

Dana shrugged. “He seems okay with it. Proud even.”

“He’s a hero,” Kat said. “If he hadn’t broken into that website, if he hadn’t somehow known you were in trouble . . .”

She didn’t finish the thought. She didn’t have to.

“Kat?”

“Yes?”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

Dana turned to her. “I want to hear everything. The whole story.”

“Okay,” Kat said, “but I’m not sure it’s over yet.”

? ? ?

When Kat arrived back home on 67th Street the day after they brought down the farm, Jeff was sitting on the stoop.

“How long have you been waiting here?” she asked him.

“Eighteen years,” he said.

Then Jeff begged her for forgiveness.

“Don’t,” she said.

“What?”

But how could she explain? As Sugar had said, she would have given or forgiven anything. She had him back. That was all that mattered.

“Just don’t, okay?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

It was as though some invisible giant had grabbed ahold of eighteen years ago in one hand, grabbed ahold of today in the other, pulled them together and then sutured them up. Sure, Kat still had questions. She wanted to know more, but at the same time, it no longer seemed to matter. Jeff began to fill her in bit by bit. Eighteen years ago, there was an issue at home, he explained, forcing him to go back to Cincinnati. He foolishly believed that Kat wouldn’t wait for him or it wouldn’t be fair to ask her to wait, some chivalrous nonsense. Still, he had hoped to come back to her and, yep, beg her forgiveness, but then he got into that fight at the bar. The drunk boyfriend whose nose he had broken was mobbed up. They wanted revenge, so he ran and got a new ID. Then he got Melinda’s mother pregnant and . . .

“Life got away from me, I guess.”

Kat could see that he wasn’t telling all, that he was shading the story for reasons still unknown. But she didn’t rush it. Oddly enough, the reality was better than she could have imagined. They had both learned much over the painful years, but perhaps the greatest lesson was also the simplest: Cherish and take care of what you value. Happiness is fragile. Appreciate every moment and do everything you can to protect it.

The rest of life, in a sense, is background noise.

They had both been hurt and heartbroken, but now it felt as though it had been meant to be, that you can’t reach this high without at one point being that low, that she and Jeff had to go their separate ways so that, surreal as it sounded, they could end up together in this better place.

“And here we are,” she said, kissing him tenderly.

Every kiss was like that now. Every kiss was like that tender one on the beach.

The rest of the world could wait. Kat would get her revenge on Cozone. She didn’t know how or when. But one day, she would knock on Cozone’s door and finish this for her father.

Just not right now.

Kat asked for a leave from the force. Stagger gave it to her. She needed to get out of the city. She rented a place in Montauk, near Jeff’s house. Jeff insisted that Kat stay with them, but that felt like too much too soon. Still, they spent every second together.

Jeff’s daughter, Melinda, had been wary at first, but once she saw Kat and Jeff together, all doubts fled. “You make him happy,” Melinda told Kat with tears in her eyes. “He deserves that.”

Even the old man, Jeff’s former father-in-law, welcomed her into the fold.

It felt right. It felt wonderful.

Stacy visited for a weekend. One night, when Jeff was barbecuing for them in the yard, both women holding wineglasses and watching the sun set, Stacy smiled and said, “I was right.”

“About?”

“The fairy tale.”

Kat nodded, remembering what her friend had said so long ago. “But even better.”

? ? ?

A month later, Kat was lying on his bed, her body still humming from the pleasure, when the fairy tale came to an end.

She hugged the pillow postcoital and smiled. She could hear Jeff singing in the shower. The song had become the ultimate delight and the ultimate dreaded earworm, never leaving them: “I ain’t missing you at all.”

Jeff couldn’t carry a tune if you tattooed it on him. God, Kat thought with a shake of her head. Such a beautiful man with such a horrible voice.

She was still feeling deliciously lazy when she heard her cell phone ring. She reached over and hit the green answer button and said, “Hello?”

“Kat, it’s Bobby Suggs.”

Suggs. The old family friend. The detective who had worked her father’s homicide.