The Husband Hour(87)

“I’m not talking to you today to help you make a movie,” Stephanie said. “I’m talking to you because you shouldn’t make this movie.”

“Why not?” Matt asked off camera.

“Because Rory Kincaid wasn’t a hero.”

“You’re the only person out of the dozens I’ve spoken with who has a negative opinion of Rory Kincaid.”

“Well, maybe that’s because I’m the only one who really knew him.”

“I doubt your sister would agree with that.”

“She would if she’d ever, for one minute, trusted me when I tried to tell her that he wasn’t worth her time. I tried to warn her.”

“She might have thought you were jealous. Maybe you still are,” Matt said.

Stephanie snorted. “So that’s how you want to play this? I’ll be the jealous-sister villain of your movie? Come on. You can do better than that.”

“I can’t—not if you don’t give me something better.”

“Nice try,” she said.

“Where were you in the summer of 2010?”

“I was here. At the shore.”

“Where was Rory in the summer of 2010?”

“He was also here.”

“Where was Lauren that summer?”

“She was taking classes at Georgetown.”

“Is there anything you want to tell me about that summer?” he asked.

“It was uneventful,” Stephanie said. But her face told a different story.

“Was Rory faithful to your sister?”

Stephanie glared at him indignantly. And said nothing.

Lauren, heart pounding, paused the video. What the hell was Matt getting at?

The summer, a low point in her relationship with Rory, was a time she’d avoided going into detail about with Matt. It had been confusing and painful, and in the end she liked to think of it as an insignificant rough patch.

It was the summer after Rory’s rookie season, the summer she should have just graduated from Georgetown. They had planned to spend July at the Green Gable, but she was two credits short of graduating, thanks to all the time she’d missed traveling to LA. She’d asked him to spend the summer in DC with her instead. Obviously, the steaming-hot city wasn’t the ideal place to spend July and August, but she hadn’t expected him to actually refuse. He gave her a litany of reasons he couldn’t change his plans and go to DC instead of the shore.

“So what if we already told our friends?” she’d said. “So what if Emerson is visiting you for the Fourth of July? This is about us.”

Rory was unmoved. Had he just been looking for an excuse to get away from her? Hurt, she’d said, “Fine. I can get more work done without you around.”

They didn’t speak for a few days.

When he finally called, the conversation felt perfunctory. Lauren was afraid to say what she was really thinking, which was Is this over? If it is, let’s just end it. She wasn’t ready for the answer.

Her one consolation was that a professor had helped her get an internship at the Washington Post—the newspaper once run by her idol Katharine Graham. Four days a week after her classes, she went downtown to K Street, where she experienced the energy of the real DC—not the academic bubble of Georgetown, but the bustle of the town. Every day, she would pick up her lunch at one of the cafés filled with people running to and from Capitol Hill, all of them wearing ID tags around their necks, signifying their importance and access.

She realized she had spent too much of her time in DC lamenting her distance from Rory. But that summer, she felt the magic she had experienced that first visit during junior year of high school. And if her love affair with Rory Kincaid was fading, the one she had with Washington, DC, was going strong.

Still, every morning between classes, she called Stephanie at the shore and asked if she’d seen Rory out the night before. The answer was always no, until late July.

“Yeah, I’ve been seeing him and his friends at Robert’s Place.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“Not really.”

Completely unsatisfying. But what did she expect? Answers about what was going on in Rory’s mind from a drunken bar conversation he’d had with Stephanie? She stopped asking.

Two more weeks passed without a word from Rory. She weakened enough to ask Stephanie, once again, if she’d seen him. Was he still at the shore?

“Forget about him already, will you?” Stephanie snapped.

“Why should I?” Lauren said. “We’ve been together six years!”

“Well, clearly it’s over.”

Lauren slammed down the phone. All sorts of clichés ran through her mind, like Don’t shoot the messenger and The truth hurts. But none of them made her any less furious at Stephanie. How could she be so callous?

And then, the most surprising phone call of the summer. It came on a Saturday afternoon.

“Where are you?” Rory asked.

“In DC. Obviously,” Lauren said. Where did he think she was?

“No. I mean where in DC?”

“Politics and Prose.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said.

What?

For fifteen, twenty minutes, she sat in the bookstore café, fighting the urge to look around the room. Instead, she stared at the same page she had been reading when he called, trying to figure out what was going on.