truth, it didn’t matter anymore.
Jack was through blaming himself.
He waited at a wrought-iron table beneath a broad Cinzano umbrella. It was a humid, sticky afternoon on South Beach, typical of late summer in the tropics. This particular cafe was one they’d never visited together, and he suspected that was precisely the reason Cindy had chosen it. No memories, no history, no ghosts.
“Hello, Jack,” she said as she approached the table.
“Hi.” Jack rose and instinctively helped with her chair. She got it herself and sat across from him, no kiss, no handshake.
“Thanks for coming,” she said.
“No problem. How have you been?”
“Fine. You?”
“As good as can be expected.”
The waiter came. Cindy ordered a sparkling water. Jack ordered another bourbon.
“Pretty early in the day for you, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Not necessarily. I haven’t slept since I got your message last night, so I’m not really sure what time of day it is.”
“Sorry.”
“Me, too. About a lot of things.”
She looked away, seeming to focus on nothing in particular. A pack of sweaty joggers plodded by on the sidewalk. A loud Latin beat boomed from the back of a passing SUV on Ocean Drive.
“Have you found your son yet?”
Jack coughed into his drink. He’d suspected that might come up, but not right out of the starting blocks. “Uh, no.”
“Are you looking?”
“No. No reason to look.”
“What about the money? Jessie left the entire million and a half dollars to her son, if you can find him.”
“To be honest, I’m not much interested in trying to funnel stolen money to a child who’s probably perfectly happy not knowing me or his biological mother.”
“But what’s the alternative? Give it back to the Russian mob?”
“If I have any say, it’ll go to the relatives of people like Jody Falder, and anyone else Yuri and his pack of viatical investors eliminated in order to cash in on their investments.”
“That’s probably as it should be.”
“In due time. But at the moment, Dr. Marsh’s widow is trying to prove that half of that loot is hers. She’s suing Clara Pierce for fraud and mismanagement of Jessie’s estate. I’m content to let those two tear each other to shreds before I take a stand.”
“Good for you.”
“Yeah. I guess it is.”
Cindy squeezed the lemon wedge into her water. A breeze blew in from the Atlantic and sent their napkins sailing. They reached across the table to grab the same one. Their hands touched, their eyes met and held.
“Jack, there’s something I want to say.”
He released the napkin, broke the contact. “Tell me.”
“That day in the house, when I had the gun. I said some things to you.”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“Yes, I do. I said some very harsh things. And I want you to know that part of me will always love you. But those things I said. Some of them…”
“Cindy, please.”
“It really is the way I feel.”
He felt as though he should have been devastated, but he wasn’t. “I know that.”
“You know?”
“Yes. For years, your mother held such obvious hatred for me. I always wondered, why can’t Evelyn put this all behind her, especially since her own daughter has forgiven me for what happened with Esteban? But now I know: You never really did forgive me, either.”
“I tried. I wanted to. I’ve thought about this so much.”
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, too. And as much as I loved you at one time…”
“You stopped loving me.”
“No. It’s not that. It’s just that it wasn’t love that was keeping us together. When you get right down to it, I think you stayed in this marriage because you were too afraid to be alone. Or worse, afraid of spending the rest of your life living with your mother.”
“And why did you stay?”
Jack struggled, wondering if some things were better left unsaid.
She answered for him. “You stayed because you felt guilty about what happened with Esteban.”
Jack lowered his eyes, but he didn’t argue. “Somehow I thought that if we worked long and hard enough, things would get back to where they were. Before Esteban.”
“That’s fairy tales, Jack. It doesn’t usually work that way in real life.”
“So where does that leave us?”
“You know, I used to think that people who bailed out on a marriage were just quitters. But that’s not true. Sometimes, the so-called quitters are really idealists. They know there’s something better out there for them, and they have the courage to go out and look for it.”
“You’re ready for that?”
“After all these years together, I think the one thing we owe each other is honesty. Since we’ve been apart, I haven’t had a single nightmare.”
“What does that tell you?”
“The nightmares will never go away. Not unless…”
“Unless I go away,” he said.
“I’m not trying to say it’s anyone’s fault. It’s just the way it is. Can you understand that?”
“I more than understand. I agree.”
She gave a weak smile, as if relieved to see that he wasn’t going to put up a fight. “That’s all I wanted to say,” she said.
“So, this is it?”
She nodded. “I should go.”
She rose, but he didn’t.
“Cindy?”
She stopped and looked at him. “Yes?”
“There’s one thing I need to know.”
“What is it?”
“Did you think something was going on between me and Jessie even before she called and told you there was?”
“What makes you ask that?”
“For months now, I’ve been trying to put a timeline together in my head. As best I can figure, Jessie came to me and said that the viatical investors found out that she’d scammed them and were out to kill her. Then, after I didn’t help her, she called you and said we were having an affair.”
“That’s right.”
“So, I just wonder: How did the viatical investors find out Jessie had scammed them?”
“Someone obviously told them.”
“Yeah, but who?”
“Could have been anyone.”
“Not really. There aren’t that many possibilities. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t Jessie. It wasn’t Dr. Marsh. Just makes me stop and think: Maybe it was someone I confided in.”
She showed almost no reaction, just a subtle rise of the left eyebrow. “That’s something you may never know,”
