The Forgotten Hours(63)

“I don’t know yet,” she said, which was the truth but not the whole truth. With every half admission, there was a sense of taking a curve too fast in a car, of getting a little winded.

“I think I should tell you. I’m, uh—Lulu got in touch with me a couple of years ago. I wanted to tell you at the lake, but it somehow, well. Didn’t feel right, or I was nervous or something.”

Her head was wooly, and she wasn’t entirely sure she’d understood. “Lulu,” she said, like a moron. The hunk of bread she was chewing was like putty in her mouth.

“Yeah. I got a message from her. It was maybe two years ago? This friend request on Facebook, and I had absolutely no idea who it was. I mean, she looks nothing like how I remember her.” He considered his words. “It was like this glam shot, one of those things they take at the mall. She had on tons of makeup. Her hair was different. She was heavier. She had this look on her face, like, I don’t know. Twinkly.” He raised his brows as though he knew how absurd this sounded. “I definitely don’t remember her as twinkly. And her name was different, too, not Lulu. Loretta, I think.”

“And you friended her.”

“Sure. Look, I was trying to get into real estate. I have loads of so-called friends I don’t know. I didn’t think twice about it, and then she sent me this private message, and we started having a conversation. Nothing too important. Just catching up.” Jack motioned to the waitress to bring them each another drink. “We switched to email, and then she started really telling me a lot. You know how email can be. It was wild—she just really opened up. She told me about her life when she was a kid, her relationship with her mom—her real mother, before she was adopted. Did you know that—that she was adopted?”

The waitress came over with another martini for Katie and a beer for him. He took a long pull from his glass and then sighed. “Guess I’m really off the wagon now, huh?”

“I read her testimony,” Katie said, “and I can’t get it out of my head. Did you—did she talk about that? What did she tell you?”

“Well, I mean, she told me tons of stuff. Not much about the trial, though. It was sort of like—I guess she wanted to let me know more about herself. Like, who she was, not so much what had happened. But it was kind of strange ’cause we’d never been like that, talking and sharing things. But the way she—you know how people behave when they’ve been alone for a long time? Isolated, or away somewhere foreign? Like they just can’t stop talking. That’s what it was like.”

“Is she with anyone?” It was hard to tell if the pit Katie felt growing in her stomach was a bitter coil of pleasure at thinking her old friend might have had to pay in some way for lying or if it was a prickle of empathy. “What’d she end up doing?”

“She was moving. There was some guy—I can’t really remember. She’d tried singing for a while, but I guess that didn’t work out. I kind of just stopped responding. To be honest, she sort of freaked me out.” He tipped his head back to finish his beer. “I felt like she wanted something from me that I couldn’t give her. She asked a lot about you.”

Jack’s eyes were resting on Katie as though appraising every inch of her face for some secret sign, something that would tell him what to say next. “She was disappointed I didn’t have anything to tell her. She seemed to think we kept in touch, like, actually dated.”

Katie took a small sip of her second drink, and the salty bitterness of the olive juice tasted like food to her on her empty stomach. “And all summer long I thought you liked her. Christ, it took us a long time to get anywhere, didn’t it? And then it all went nowhere.”

He smiled. “I liked you from the minute I saw you the first day, running by the tennis court, and then, oops . . . go figure, your shoelaces come untied . . .”

“Oh shit. That’s so embarrassing.”

“Yeah. You guys weren’t exactly subtle.” He held her gaze. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but do you think about the summer—I mean, not about your father or about Lulu, but about the two of us?”

Heat rose up her neck and seeped into her face. “We were just kids. It was—”

“Your dad, that business eclipsed everything, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t other things that happened, things that meant something. It’s just, sometimes I think back to what was sort of the simple life, right?” he said. “And there’s a moment—we keep coming back to it, again and again, for whatever reason. It’s not even necessarily a big thing. It’s just this sort of hinge or something, on which everything seems to turn.”

“Not sure I understand,” she said, buying herself some time. But she did know what he meant; that summer had been full of seemingly innocuous moments that turned out to be indelible, that came back to her in all their strangeness and meant something while also meaning nothing.

“For me—when you said goodbye at the clubhouse, I remember you were soaking wet. I couldn’t really hear what you were saying. You looked so pretty, so incredibly serious. If I’d just stopped for a minute and asked you what was going on . . .”

She looked down. “You remember when we stood at the window at the Dolans’, looking out? We’d just gotten there, and it was pitch dark. We couldn’t see a thing. It was like I was blind, but then, slowly . . . slowly things sort of began to take shape. You know, like a picture developing?” Her heart began beating madly. “We hadn’t even done anything yet. We were just sort of hugging.”