Cassidy took a bite of the fajita and her taste buds nearly popped off her tongue. They chewed in silence for a while. Cassidy took another bite.
“When did you realize Reeve was an addict?” Bruce asked.
Cassidy drew a deep breath at the sudden recollection. “When he was thirteen.” Their family had vacationed at a ski resort and had stayed in a condo belonging to a friend of Pamela’s. Reeve had broken into the locked liquor cabinet and was drunk every night. His mom and her dad never found out. Rebecca knew, though. She had known all along. Reeve had experimented with many different types of drugs, from pot to pills.
“What was his drug of choice?”
“It started with alcohol, then it was pot for the longest time. All through high school. Then in college he started dealing. You know what’s funny? He seemed to function okay for a while. I mean, he was no star student, and he was always a little unpredictable, but it was like those drugs became a part of his coping mechanism, and they worked. Then I’m pretty sure he tried heroin. He dropped out. And everything sort of snowballed from there. The last time I saw him he threatened me. Pete wasn’t there. I had to call the police.”
“Who’s Pete?” Bruce asked.
Cassidy’s mouth was half open. Her sluggish brain tried to scamper back in time. “Uh,” she managed. Bruce was looking at her funny. She closed her eyes and bit back the flood of pain. “Pete was my fiancé,” she managed. “He . . . passed away last year,” Cassidy added. They’re only words, Cassidy told herself. She had practiced saying them with her grief counselor in an effort to make them come out easier. It hadn’t worked. She could count on one hand the number of times she had actually spoken the words aloud. Either someone else shared the information, or she avoided having to say it. Evasion was a special skill that she was perfecting to an art.
“Oh shit,” Bruce said, hanging his head. “I’m sorry.” The sound of the water lapping the boat’s sides and the muted music from the rafted boat party filled the silence between them.
“How?” he asked. “If you don’t mind telling me,” he added, the wrinkles around his eyes crinkling with empathy. “I mean, you . . . he . . . you’re so young,” he said.
The words tumbled out. “He was in an accident . . . ” She gathered a breath and held it.
“Shit,” Bruce said again. He grimaced. “I’m so sorry.”
Cassidy had nothing to say. She put the made-up image of his accident out of her mind with a series of pictures that her grief counselor had helped her create: Pete at the bottom of the ski lift, wearing his puffy blue ski coat and shiny blue ski boots, leaning forward against his skis that were planted in the snow. Pete, hard at work building her a set of raised beds for her lettuce and peas, the late-afternoon sunshine casting long shadows. Pete, sitting across the table from her in their home late at night, rapt with concentration as she shared her latest geologic breakthrough with him. It might be the thing she missed most: being able to share what was in her crowded brain and have him understand, engage, and discuss it with her, even challenge her, and then, him taking her to bed.
What most people never understood was how hard it was not to talk about Pete. It was especially awkward in the geology department. She was new enough that she had no deep friendships, and she feared that everyone knew her as the “girl whose fiancé crashed his motorcycle.” Every now and then some detail about Pete would slip out, and her colleagues would freeze and look at her with a kind of mild shock, as if she had just mooned them or told a racist joke.
Cassidy spun the ring on her finger, the gems dull in the darkness. She realized how pathetic she must look: sitting there in her dead lover’s sweatshirt, wearing the ring he had designed for her but would never slide onto her finger as he said “I do.” She drained her beer, her fingers shaking.
Bruce went to the small bar and poured two glasses of something from a squatty amber bottle, added ice, and returned, placing the glass in front of her.
“I’m sorry, Cassidy,” Bruce said, catching her eye. He had stopped eating, and Cassidy had too. It had tasted good, but her appetite was gone.
Cassidy managed a slight nod. She sipped her drink gratefully—some kind of whiskey.
“So I take it nobody showed up at the gas station?” he asked. She was thankful for the shift in subject, purposeful or not.
“No,” she said, remembering the hidden spot where she had stood in silence, dripping wet, watching. “But I may have figured out something else,” she added.
Bruce sipped his drink, watching her curiously.
“Benita found out that Reeve paid Tikva International the day you guys left Costa Rica.”
“What’s Tikva International?”
Cassidy paused, sipped her drink, enjoying the satisfying way it warmed her insides. “Remember that synagogue we passed, Chabad House?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I went in.”
Bruce frowned. “Why?”
She told Bruce about the arguing men and how she had been spooked. “I’d seen tourists go in while I was watching the Uno,” she continued, pushing a pepper around on her plate to make patterns in the last of the sauce. “Inside, tourists were having this banquette-style meal. And they were like, ‘Come on in! Have some latkes!’ ”
Bruce gave her a look. “And did you?”
“No,” she said. “But there was a poster on the wall. It was one of those you see in bus stations or pubic bathrooms.” Cassidy shuddered, remembering the little boy’s haunting eyes. “It was a campaign against sex trafficking. The logo on
