“Can I buy you a tea?” Jed asked.
They walked two blocks to Witchfire Teahouse, open till midnight. Thessaly sat at a back table, reading tarot cards, not looking up when they brushed through strings of bells hanging in the entrance. They took a table, and Popcorn lay beneath it on the painted wood floor. A young waitress with a blue streak in her blonde hair and a ring in her nose took their order: a large pot of Earl Grey.
“When you said she wanted me to know aboutus,” Kate said, “what does that mean?”
“We were together,” he said. “She was my person; I was hers.”
She stared at him. He wasn’t much older than thirty, seven or eight years younger than Beth.
“What about the fact she was married?” she asked.
“Pete didn’t deserve her. He was a bastard, and she’d had enough. She stopped being able to pretend and put up with it, even for Sam’s sake. She was going to leave him.”
“And be with you?”
“She was already with me.”
“But she was living with him.”
“Presence is only part of it. Intent and feelings are what count.”
He held out his left hand, showed her a ring. White gold or platinum, etched with fine markings. “She gave it to me, and I gave one to her. We designed them together. They were going to be our wedding bands, but we figured, why wait to wear them? They were our promise to each other.”
Promise to each other.The same phrase had run through Kate’s mind just hours ago, remembering the blood sister ceremony. She leaned over the table to examine the ring’s delicate engraving more closely, but the dim light made it impossible.
“Earl Grey,” the waitress said, setting down the blue-and-white bone china pot and two mismatched chipped porcelain cups and saucers. She poured the tea, then took a pewter sugar bowl off another table and left it with a pitcher of milk.
“Beth wasn’t wearing hers,” Kate said as soon as the waitress walked away.
“She only wore it when we were together.”
“Did Pete know about you?”
He frowned and looked troubled, didn’t speak as he stirred sugar into his tea.
“Did he know, Jed?” she repeated.
“I’m not sure. She was going to tell him.”
“Tell him what?”
“That we were in love. That she was divorcing him.”
Kate sat up straighter. She thought of what Conor had said, about Pete’s anger building as he realized everything he was losing.
“When?”
“Well, she planned to when we saw each other a few days before he left on the boat trip.” He paused. “But I don’t know if she followed through.”
“Why wouldn’t she let you know?”
“I never spoke to her again. We were together that day—at my tent, don’t think it’s weird, Beth was the most, I don’t know, refined, elegant, whatever you want to call it, person I’ve ever known, but we were happy there. She could let all the bullshit go, all her unhappiness, and just be. Just be Beth. She left my tent that day, and I headed out to Fishers Island. She was supposed to talk to him, and she never called to let me know if she did.”
“Why didn’t you go looking for her?”
He stirred his tea, the milk swirling in the amber liquid, and was quiet for a long time. She had the feeling he was figuring out something to say. Inventing it as he went along? She waited.
“I wanted to. I felt like getting a ferry back from Fishers, going to see her. But I thought maybe he’d talked her out of it. That she’d changed her mind,” he said finally. “It was up to her to tell me, and she didn’t.”
