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I had arrived in L.A. three weeks before, unannounced and ahead of schedule. The drive was a blur. I had stopped only to eat and sleep, and then only when I had to. In over three thousand miles, the only landmark I remembered was the strip mall where I’d stopped to buy a new phone. I’d made it to Pennsylvania before I remembered that I didn’t have mine anymore.
It was also when I realized that his duffel bag was still in the trunk of my car.
Richard had come back from a meeting to find me parked in his driveway, still in the driver’s seat, staring into space. I had prepared myself for this moment—I would tell anyone who asked that Adamhad dumped me with no explanation, leaving me to make the trip to California alone—but in the end, I didn’t need to. Richard had looked at me and at the empty passenger seat and said, “You look like you could use a drink.” His nose wrinkled. “And, more urgently, a shower.”
That night, I slept for eighteen hours. If I had dreams, I don’t remember them.
Richard called the investigator that night, but hadn’t told me until this moment, after the report arrived. When he did hand me the envelope, he apologized. Not just for being nosy—of course he’d already read it—but because he thought I would be disappointed. For all the information it contained about who Adam had been before I met him, the places he’d been and the things he’d done, the detective had come up short on one crucial front: he couldn’t tell us with any certainty where Adam was now. The trail went cold in Bar Harbor, as if he’d fallen off the face of the earth.
This wasn’t the first time that Adam had disappeared without a trace, or the first time he had left a trail of lies and betrayal behind him. In the years before we met, he had made his way up the coast under a series of aliases, working at the type of posh assisted living facilities where wealthy middle-aged women tended to install their parents. He had a sixth sense for the damaged ones, so desperate to feel loved, wanted. So susceptible to his charms. He had fleeced two of them for a sum in the high five figures, and had blackmailed another with photographs that he threatened to send to her children. The investigator’s report noted that these were just the women who would talk to him, that there were almost certainly more. All of them were racked with shame, blaming themselves for being taken in. Nobody had gone to the police.
I was the only one he’d ever asked to marry him.
I wondered if that meant anything—or if I even wanted it to.
And I wondered if Adam was right: that he was drawn to Bar Harbor for a reason. That it was meant to be. Maybe the man who killed my grandfather was an instrument of something bigger, the hand of fate reaching out to balance the scales and make Mimi pay for the terrible wrong she set in motion all those years ago. Or maybe it was something less poetic, more banal: a criminal at the end of his life who recognized a little piece of himself, a kindred spirit, in the eyes of the young man at his bedside.
Maybe it didn’t matter. Either way, the ending would have been the same.
Richard’s voice broke the silence. “The most important thing,” he said, “is that you dodged a bullet. I know it probably doesn’t feel that way now, but man, you really did. One of these days, you’ll stop feeling shitty and start feeling lucky. And then one day, further down the road, you’ll realize it’s been ages since you thought of him at all.”
I nodded, and he smiled.
“Wait,” he said. “I know, how about I float some Prosecco in your drink? That’ll cut the bitterness.”
“Okay.”
“Just take a few sips, make some room for it. I’ll be right back.”
I watched him as he strode back to the house. I thought that he was half-right: I did feel lucky. Lucky to be here, facing west, with the sun on my face and family beside me. Lucky to have a life ahead of me, full of possibility. Lucky that I never had to return again to the Whispers, the frozen reach, that cold, dark water.
There had been a clothing donation box next to the strip mall where I bought a new phone. Nobody had looked my way as I stuffed the duffel bag inside. Letting go of the last thing that might have tied me back to him.
That was lucky, too.
But letting go was not forgetting.
The door slammed: Richard was back, holding a sweating bottle in one hand. A breeze, warm and arid, blew across the yard, ruffling thesurface of the swimming pool and lifting my hair away from my face. I raised my drink in his direction, the cubes clinking, and took a long sip before setting the glass down, half-full. But the flavors of juniper, cherry, and bitter orange lingered on my tongue, and I shuddered as I swallowed.
Not because of the bitterness.
Because of the ice.
