She reached up to hold him.
“Kate, wait,” he said.
But she shook her head, and then she kissed him. It was the kind of kiss that changed both everything and nothing. He felt it in his skin. Kate was his life, the way his bones and blood were his life. This kiss brought him back to the beginning yet told him that nothing was the same. They’d never be the way they were. He wanted to take her to bed. He wanted to pick her up and carry her over the threshold, the way he should have after their wedding.
The wedding that never happened.
He couldn’t do that to her, but he couldn’t help himself from wanting to walk her into the bedroom. He stopped himself and took a deep breath.
“You said you have stuff to tell me,” Conor said. “But I have to go first.”
“I’m not sure I’m ready for it,” she said.
“Please, Kate. It’s eating me up,” he said.
She gazed at him for a long time, and then she nodded. “I get that,” she said. “It’s the same for me.”
He took her hand and led her to the sofa in front of the fireplace. He sat down, about an arm’s length away from her. He didn’t want to be too close—he needed a little distance because he wanted to look right into her eyes, see her reaction.
“You kissed me just now,” he said. “I wasn’t sure you’d want to, after what I told you on the island.”
“I would block it out if I could,” she said. “I keep telling myself it doesn’t matter, whatever you did before you met me. But then I find myself wondering when it happened ... you sleeping with Belinda ... was it after you and I?”
“Kate, you and I weren’t together yet,” he said. “Not really.”
“But sort of?” she asked.
“Well, you and I had met, but we hadn’t started seeing each other,” he said. “It was between the two cases.” He meant the cases where he had helped solve Kate’s mother’s murder, and, later, her sister’s.
“You were dating Belinda then?” Kate asked.
“No, not at all. You know we knew each other when we were kids, when she lived next door. But I had forgotten all about her.” He gathered his thoughts, trying to remember the sequence. “I began getting calls from an unknown number. I’d answer, hear someone breathing, and then they’d hang up. There were emails from an unfamiliar address, sent to my work email. They were unsigned. At first, they contained what I thought were poems—at least, that’s how they sounded. It turned out that they were lines from a book. Can you guess which one?”
He watched Kate; after a moment, he saw the sharp look in her eyes.
“Beauty and the Beast?” she asked.
“Yes. Throughout this whole time, I had no idea who was sending the messages. I wrote back and asked who it was. That’s actually against the advice of our cyber investigators. The instruction is to delete and not reply. But I was so curious.”
“And she answered?”
“No. Instead, the calls and emails stopped. But a few weeks later, I got a call at my office from Belinda. Totally out of the blue. She said that she had read about me in the paper—ironically, in an article about how I’d worked on your mother’s case. She said that she’d moved away and had come back to the area, and would I like to meet for lunch.”
“So you did.”
“Yes,” he said. “And at first, it was good to see her. We had a lot to talk about—old times in New London. She remembered things I had totally forgotten, like how our first-grade teacher said that we were the two best readers in the class. Like when I fell out of a tree and broke my arm, and she signed my cast. She made theBin Belinda into a heart.”
Kate didn’t say anything.
“I gave her that stupid wire ring right after that,” Conor said.
Conor noticed Kate glancing over toward the dining table. He wondered what she was looking at, but she didn’t say anything.
“Anyway, after that lunch, we went on a few dates. I liked her—she was funny and smart, and she told me all about this interesting life she was leading—studying historic houses, traveling around New England to document them.” Conor stopped. “I don’t like telling you this,” he said.
“I want you to. I need to know.”
“We began as friends, but it turned into something else. Or it started to. One weekend, she asked me to go with her to Salem, Massachusetts, to visit a Colonial house connected to the witch trials. So we went. We stayed in a bed-and-breakfast. And that’s when we slept together. It was the only time.”
