He studied my face, making the creases between his eyes more prominent, then wiped his mouth with the napkin. “Maybe I need a change of scenery. I'd do anything to climb inside your head and see the world the way you see it.”
“I don't know what to tell you. I can't really explain it. The world looks the way it looks to me. It's no more beautiful or ugly to me than it is to you.”
“Somehow I doubt that's true.”
“I could say the same thing about you. Writing music is mind-boggling to me. I could never do that. You put sounds into a pleasant arrangement and tell stories over the top of it. It's magic. I could never make beautiful things with words.”
He took a sip of his coffee and shot me that disarming Eamon look, leaving me ready to surrender. “You make beautiful things with words every time you speak to me.”
The heat rose in my cheeks the way an electric burner glows red. Forget temptation or desire, I needed him. He was pulling my very being straight out of the center of my chest. “I worry you think too much of me.”
He shook his head. “Not possible. You've always had my number. You knew that from the moment we laid eyes on each other.”
Once again, the air around us stood perfectly still. It still seemed impossible that I had his number the way he had mine. “It was a special time, wasn't it?” My voice was only slightly more than a whisper. The new direction of our conversation was peeling back the layers of my shroud.
“It wasn't the time. It was us. I knew that as soon as I saw you last night. I had wondered a million times if I'd built it all up in my head, but I knew last night that I hadn’t.” He pressed his lips together and choked back a quiet laugh. “Well, I didn't know it fully last night. We only got to talk. We'd need to do some other things before I could say with certainty that the magic is still there.”
It was like a sprinkle of fairy dust fell on me. Magic wasn't quite the right word, but it was close. Add in some kismet and fate and alchemy. “We'll always have a connection. You can't undo what happened between us.” That was exactly what I'd been feeling last night. There was an invisible tether between us, now pulling on me again. Maybe even pulling on him.
“Which is why I asked you to breakfast. I couldn't just see you last night and let you go.” He nodded as if he needed to confirm this to himself. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes over the years and I'm not getting any younger.”
“Don't be silly. You turned forty this year, didn't you? Don't tell me you subscribe to that bullshit about getting old. Forty is not old.”
“It's not about the number. It's about the minutes I spent walking this earth without the one person I always felt understood me. Plus, there's no escaping the fact that you and I knew each other before I was anything to anyone. That means a lot. I know that what we had was real.”
My brain was reeling so hard it was like I'd been kicked in the head. Looking into his eyes didn't help me decipher any of it. It only left me that much more vulnerable. “What are you saying?”
“I want us to know each other again, Katherine. For real. Like last time.”
I must've blinked one hundred times in the span of ten seconds. “Really?” I knew how horrible it sounded as soon as it left my lips. “I’m sorry. I mean, really? Then why didn't you look for me? Ever.” It wasn't like I'd been hard to find over the last eleven years. And he had means that I didn't. Didn't people hire private investigators? He could've at least spent twenty minutes with Google.
“Because I'm guilty of being a hopeless romantic. I always wanted fate to bring us together.”
From any other man, this could have sounded sappy, but he was sincere. I could hear it in his voice. “Well, here I am. And there you are.”
“I know.”
I had a detail perched on my lips, but I wasn't sure I should share it with him. Call it embarrassment. Or maybe it was something else. “I wrote you a letter, you know.”
His eyebrows drew together, forming a crease between his eyes. “You did? When?”
“A year after I left Ireland. I just…” Words were whizzing through my head. Some felt they were the most important and others were scrambling to hide. Loneliness and desperation were the strongest, drowning out everything else. “I missed you.”
“I missed you, too. But I never got it. The letter.” He cleared his throat and dropped his elbows down onto his knees, combing his fingers through his hair. “Damn. I never got it. That was right around when things started to get crazy for me.”
“Your first big hit.”
“Yeah. I wasn't even home that much. I, uh, I had someone dealing with my mail at that point. There was a lot of it. Bags and bags some days.”
So that was what happened to it. My profound longing for him had landed in a pile of what were probably similarly worded sentiments—I love you, Eamon. You’re so amazing.“I’m sure it was overwhelming. It must've got stuck in with the rest of your fan mail. Or maybe it got lost.” I was feeling more pathetic about this with every word. Whoever had read that letter had probably seen it and thought I was some lovesick teenage girl.
“It's really hard to know what happened. But damn, I wish I’d gotten that. What did it say?”
I scrunched up my lips, wondering exactly how truthful I should be right now. So much time had passed. It didn't matter now, did it? However much it had hurt me at the time to write that letter and get zero response. Here he was, saying to me that he wanted to try to recapture what we'd had, but what did that even mean? Fate had always seemed more hell-bent on keeping us apart. “Just that I missed you and hoped you were doing well and were happy. That's all I really wanted for you. For you to be happy.” Tears stung my eyes, emotion jamming up my throat.
He shook his head in disbelief. “That could've changed a lot of things. It could've changed my whole life, really. I got married eighteen months after you left.”
“Yeah. I know. It was all over the newsstands here.”
