Missing You(84)

If these two men had been after him, would he still be so afraid to see Kat?

Didn’t matter. Jeff had his life. He had a daughter and lived with a grumpy old man. Kat had no idea who the old man was. Jeff’s own father had died years ago. Jeff had chosen to go on a dating website. Kat had reached out to him, and he had slapped her hand away. So why was she still pursuing it?

Why, despite all the evidence to the contrary, was she still not buying it?

Kat got back on Montauk Highway and headed west. But she didn’t travel far. A few miles down the road, she turned left onto Napeague Lane. Funny what you remember after nearly twenty years. She made the turn onto Marine Boulevard and parked near Gilbert Path. She took the wooden boardwalk toward the ocean. The waves crashed. The sky darkened, hinting of an upcoming storm. Kat made her way around a pathetic fence with shattered rails. She slipped off her shoes and started on the sand toward the water.

The house hadn’t changed. It had been newly built in that sleek modern style that some people found too boxy but Kat had grown to love. The place would have been way out of their price range, even for a weekend rental, but Jeff had been the owner’s TA at Columbia, and loaning him the house had been her way of thanking him.

It had been nearly twenty years, and Kat could still tell you every single moment of that weekend. She could tell you about the visit to the farmers’ market, the quiet walks in town, eating three times at the expanded shack restaurant nicknamed Lunch—because they both got addicted to their lobster roll—the way Jeff sneaked up behind her on this very beach and gave her the most tender kiss imaginable.

It had been during that tender kiss that Kat knew she had to spend the rest of her life with him.

Tender kisses don’t lie, do they?

She frowned, again hating herself for the sentimentality, but maybe she should cut herself some slack. She tried to find the very spot where she had been standing that day, checking her bearings by using the house, moving a few feet left, then right, until she was certain, yes, this was the spot where that tender kiss took place.

She heard a car engine and turned to see a silver Mercedes idling on the road. She half expected that it would be Jeff. Yes, that would be perfect, wouldn’t it? He would follow her here and come up behind her, the same way he had all those years ago. He would take her in his arms and yeah, it was dumb and corny and hurtful, but that didn’t mean the longing wasn’t there. You have very few perfect moments in your life, moments you want to put in a box and stick on the top shelf so that when you’re alone, you can take the box down and open it up again.

That kiss had been one of the moments.

The silver Mercedes drove away.

Kat turned back to the churning ocean. The clouds were gathering now. It was going to start pouring soon. She was about to head back to the Ferrari, when her phone rang again. It was Brandon.

“Bastard,” he said. “That lying, cheating bastard.”

“What?”

“Jeff or Ron or Jack or whatever the hell his name is.”

Kat stood very still. “What happened?”

“He’s still hitting on other women. I couldn’t see the communication, but he was in touch with both of them yesterday.”

“How many other women?”

“Two.”

“Maybe he was saying good-bye. Maybe he’s telling them about your mother.”

“Yeah, I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because that would be one, maybe two, direct messages. These were more like twenty or thirty. That bastard.”

“Okay, listen to me, Brandon. Did you get the names of the two women?”

“Yes.”

“Could you give them to me?”

“One is named Julie Weitz. She lives in Washington, DC. The other lives in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Her name is Martha Paquet.”

? ? ?

The first thing Kat did was call Chaz.

He would contact both women and make sure they hadn’t gone away with their online paramour. But as Kat made her way toward her car—she was going back to that house in Montauk and she’d kick the old man in the balls if he didn’t talk to her—something started bothering her again. It had started to nag her early on, from the beginning of all this, really, but she still couldn’t see what it was.

Something was making her hang on to Jeff.

Most would have said that it was the blinding potency of a foolish heart. Kat would have agreed. But now Kat was maybe getting a little clarity on the situation. The thing that had been bothering Kat involved her own messages with Jeff on YouAreJust MyType.com.

She kept going over his words, replaying the ending so many times in her head—all that crap about protecting himself and being cautious and going back to the past would be a mistake and him needing a fresh start—that she hadn’t really gone over their earliest communications.

It had all started when she sent him that old music video of John Waite singing “Missing You.”

And how had he responded?

He hadn’t remembered it.

How could that be? Okay, maybe she had stronger feelings than he did, but he had, after all, proposed. How could he forget something that was so crucial to their relationship?

More than that, Jeff had written that the video was “cute” and that he liked a girl with “a sense of humor” and that he was “drawn” to her photograph. Drawn. Gag. She had been so hurt and surprised, and so she had messaged him and said . . .