The Keeper of Happy Endings(118)

I remember my bare hands suddenly and shove them into my pockets, painfully aware of my robe and bare feet. The seconds tick by as we stand looking at each other, and I find myself wondering what he sees. Forty years is a long time, but it’s an especially long time for a woman. Does he still see the girl he met in the halls of the American Hospital, or have the years made me a stranger? It shouldn’t matter, but it does.

“I’ll get you a towel,” I say thickly.

When I return, I’m wearing white cotton gloves. He’s hovering at the edge of the foyer, just off the carpet. I hold out the towel and back away.

He blots futilely at his shirt, then scrubs it over his hair before giving up. When he tries to hand it back, I keep my hands in my pockets. “Just leave it on the chair.”

“You’ve lost some of your accent,” he says without expression.

“I’ve lost a lot of things.” It hurts to see the blankness in his eyes, but I force myself to meet his gaze. Has he come to apologize? To explain? No. I can see that it’s neither of those. Whatever he’s come to say, I need him to say it and leave. “What is it you want?”

“To end this.”

“I don’t understand. What is there to end?”

“Don’t play a scene with me. You’re not twenty anymore. Whatever this farce is that you’ve been playing—it ends now.”

His voice is just as I remember, the same husky timbre that set my nerves jangling the first time we met, but it’s tinged with contempt now. For me. “Whatever there was between us ended forty years ago, Anson. In Paris.”

“Did it?”

I can’t answer. I can’t even breathe. I focus on the small scar above his right eye. It wasn’t there before. There’s another just below his jaw, on the left side. Also new. And still one more near his hairline. I’m memorizing his face, I realize. Making a new memory to superimpose over the one I’ve been carrying around—for when he’s gone again. Only I don’t want to remember this Anson.

“Rory said she flew to San Francisco to see you, and that she told you . . . everything.”

“She did. I must say, it was quite a surprise. It isn’t every day a man becomes a father and a grandfather all at once.”

“You didn’t just become a father, Anson. You’ve been a father for forty years. And I had nothing to do with her visit. I didn’t even know—” I stop abruptly, angry that I’m explaining myself to him. I feel the beginnings of a sob and swallow it down. I will not cry in front of him. “I left your father’s house thinking you were dead, that the boche killed you and buried your body in the woods. And then last night, I see you standing at the foot of the stairs. Can you imagine what that felt like? And you just stood there, glaring up at me. At me! Like I did something wrong. Did it never occur to you that I’d want to know you were alive? That even if you didn’t want me, you owed me at least that?”

“It never occurred to me that you’d be interested.”

His reply stuns me. “We were going to be married.”

He flicks cold eyes over me and shrugs. “And what would you have done? Dropped everything, I suppose, and run back to Newport to play nurse to a man facing the possibility of life in a wheelchair?”

Yes! I want to scream at him. Yes, that’s exactly what I would have done. I would have done anything to have you back. But it’s too late for such melodrama. I turn away, moving to the small bar in the corner to pour myself a cognac. Liquid bravado, Maddy used to call it. I’m in need of some bravado just now.

My back is still to him as I fumble with the decanter. I feel his eyes between my shoulders as I empty the glass in two quick gulps. The heat tongues its way down my throat and into my belly. I reach for the decanter and pour another.

“I used to think I could hear you calling me,” I say, with my back still to him. “Your voice on the breeze. In the rain. In my sleep. Just my name, over and over again, as if you were reaching out to me from wherever you were. Silly, isn’t it?” I wait a beat, until the silence grows awkward. “Can I offer you something? A cognac? Something stronger, perhaps?”

“I don’t drink anymore.”

The hesitation before the word anymore is almost imperceptible, but it’s enough to make me abandon my drink and turn to face him. Once again, I’m struck by the change in him. Not in his looks—he’s still a handsome man—but in his manner and the way he carries himself. Time mellows most of us, wearing down our sharp edges. But it’s done the opposite to Anson. It’s made him callous and eerily emotionless, reminding me again that this is not the man I loved.

I think about the time he got tipsy at dinner on a single glass of wine. It was one of the few times I ever saw him drink. “I don’t recall you ever being much of a drinker,” I say to fill the silence, then immediately wish I hadn’t. I don’t want to talk about how he used to be.

“I got better at it,” he replies flatly. “A lot better, in fact. Medicinal purposes. Or so I told myself. Good for the pain. And remarkably effective if you start early enough in the day. Until you start losing whole days at a time. Then it gets tricky.”

“The pain . . . It was from your wounds?”

He looks at me for a long time. So long, I think he won’t answer at all. “Sure,” he says finally. “Let’s go with that.”