I laughed. “No. There’s no one. Not since my divorce.” There was never anyone like you.
“I can’t say I’m sorry to hear you’re single.”
Thump, thump went my heart. “I still like to swim, too.”
He slapped his chest. “Thank God. I was prepared to sell the property if you didn’t still like to swim in the river.”
I laughed again. “No need for that.”
He cocked his head to the side and seemed to take me in all over again. “Every time I go into a bookstore, I look for your name on a cover.”
“Ah well, as you say, not all dreams come true. I’m a college professor. I teach about other people’s books.”
“It’s never too late,” he said. “Maybe Idaho will bring you new muses.”
“I don’t know about that. The years have a way of chipping away at a person’s self-confidence. What I was so sure of back then seems pretty far-fetched.”
“I hate to hear you say that.” He stepped out of the middle of the aisle to let a woman pass by us.
“What made you come back here?” I asked. “I’m surprised.”
“It’s what I always wanted. You know that. I felt like I belonged here.”
“But what about…everything? I didn’t think you or your family would ever come back here.” How lame. What a way to say it. Everything. As if that lone word could capture the pain and wreckage of our two families.
“That property was the only time in my life I felt at ease, like I was home. Nothing could change that. Not even mean-spirited gossip. I asked my mom to hang on to the property for me. She sold it to me for a steal. It took me some time to save enough to leave LA and go into semiretirement, but here I am.”
“I thought what happened might have made you bitter about Logan Bend.”
“No, not anymore. Anyway, no one remembers any of what happened. It’s been too long.”
“My mom says only the old-timers even remember,” I said. “But I remember. I remember everything. All the ways they took you away from me.”
“Carlie.” He reached for my hand, and I let him take it. We stared into each other’s eyes for a moment. No one but the two of us could understand the exact pain of what we’d endured. “I’m sorry we had to leave. I didn’t want to.”
“How come you never wrote?”
He shrugged and let go of my hand. “I didn’t think you’d want me to. Even if you’d wanted me to, I didn’t know what to say. What happened was so horrific. Everything was ruined.”
“I know what you mean.” He was right. What could we have said to each other after Beth’s murder? We couldn’t have exactly carried on as if things were still innocent and fine. Not to mention that he’d moved a thousand miles away. “I was completely blissed out one moment and devastated the next.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know if I ever said that.”
“You didn’t have to. I knew.” For a second I fell back in time and it was just the two of us under a starry night as we swayed at the very top of the Ferris wheel. Everything had been perfect, because the boy I loved felt the same way. If only we could have stayed in that moment.
I took his hand and turned it over to run my fingers over the calluses. They told me some of the story of his life. “You work with your hands, don’t you?”
“I’m a contractor. Flipped houses back in LA. Now I’m semiretired.”
He ran his thumb over the ring finger of my left hand. Would he feel the indentation left from wearing a wedding ring for twenty years? “All this time I figured you were married to a doctor or lawyer or someone rich and lived in a mansion. You were the classiest girl I ever knew.”
“My ex-husband was in high tech, so you have the rich part right.” It was my only consolation. He’d had to pay for his infidelities.
“Are you here for long?” Cole asked. “In town. Not the grocery store.”
I chuckled as I pushed back a strand of hair that had fallen over my eyes. “I’m not sure, actually. For now, I’m here for however long it takes to get my mom settled into her new place. I have to go through the house before I can put it up for sale. There’s a lot accumulated after living in a place for forty years. I’m deciding whether to sell my own house in Seattle. Or whether to go back to my job.”
“There’s a chance you might stay here?”
“My mom wants me to. Brooke’s in college in Boise. They’re all I care about now. So it’s a possibility.”
He nodded, then smiled. “I like the sound of you staying here more than I should say out loud.”
“I thought you’d be married too,” I said.
“You’ve thought about me?”
“How many days are in thirty years?”
“Over a hundred thousand. I think.”
“Then that’s how many times I’ve thought of you,” I said.
He grinned. “Well, shoot. If that’s the case, then it’s about half the number of times I thought of you. None of this once-a-day stuff. I’m at least a twice-a-day man. Do you want to go to lunch? The pizza place is as good as it ever was.”
“Now?”
“Why not? We have thirty years to catch up on,” he said.
My stomach fluttered. Don’t get carried away, I told myself. There was no reason to get all excited over my high school sweetheart just because he asked me for lunch. Our feelings were thirty years old, but they could have been a thousand as far as that goes. A million bad moments between now and then had changed us, and probably not for the better. He wouldn’t like me once he got to know me again. I
