Page 108 of Key West Homecoming

“Not now. There was someone, but it didn't last.”

Jake nodded.

Emma appreciated that he didn't immediately ask who the man had been or what had happened. She wasn't ready to explain that relationship, mostly because she wasn't sure she understood it herself anymore. At the time, she'd blamed the end of it on two people who wanted different things. Looking back, she wondered how much of it had been because work had always come first and she'd expected whoever loved her to understand.

She didn't want to think about that tonight.

The sky beyond the porch had deepened to darker blue, and the sounds from the neighborhood seemed quieter than they had a few minutes earlier.

Jake turned his water bottle between his hands and looked serious.

“Emma. I want to tell you something.”

“All right.”

“You didn't ask, but I want to tell you anyway. You're going to know eventually, and I'd rather you hear it from me.”

“Jake, you don't have to tell me anything you don't want to.”

“I know.”

He looked out at the garden, and it was a minute before he began.

“Her name was Nora. She was twenty-nine and taught kindergarten at a public school in Little Havana. We were engaged. We'd been engaged eighteen months and were supposed to get married that October.”

He paused.

“We'd put down a deposit on a little house in Coral Gables. It had a lemon tree in the backyard and a porch her mother would have loved. Nora had gone to see it twice before we signed anything because she wanted to make sure the afternoon light came through the kitchen windows. She was thoughtful that way.”

Emma could picture a woman she'd never seen standing in an empty kitchen and watching the light.

“She loved it,” Jake said.

Emma waited.

“Nora was driving to school one Wednesday morning. It was seven-forty. A truck crossed the median on the Palmetto Expressway.”

His voice remained steady, but Emma could see what it cost him to keep it that way.

“I was at work. I hadn't been on an ambulance in years. I'd gone into medical device development and was working for a small company in Miami. That morning I was in a meeting about a battery casing when my phone rang. It was Jackson Memorial.”

Jake looked down at the bottle in his hands.

“A woman said, ‘Mr. Kelleher, we have your fiancé here. You should come now. Nora must have been able to tell them to call me. I was her emergency contact.”

Emma's chest tightened.

“I drove carefully. I remember that more clearly than almost anything else. I didn't speed. I stopped at every light. I called two of her cousins from the car and left messages. I called her mother in Seattle, but I hung up when her voicemail answered because I couldn't think of anything I could say that wouldn't scare her.”

He took a breath.

“When I got to the hospital, a woman at the intake desk took me into a small room and told me Nora was gone. She said it kindly. She said it the way I'd said it to families when I was a paramedic.”

Jake looked toward the yard.

“I remember sitting there thinking she was very good at her job.”

Emma reached across the space between them and put her hand on his knee.