He hugged Winnie and walked her down the hall to the front door. Then he returned to his office and stared at his desk.
It was time to start again.
44
Kate walked Popcorn along the city waterfront while Sam did homework upstairs in the loft. Dark water swirled with reflected orange light. The rusty bulkhead and rocky shore were littered with old tires, broken pilings, the fiberglass core of a foundered boat, all exposed by the outgoing tide. Waves from the wakes of passing ferries sloshed the shore. Amid the cacophony of trains and ships, Kate sought white noise, but nothing stilled her thoughts of Moonlight hidden in the beehive oven, hearts of blood scrawled more than twenty years apart.
On her way back from the walk, she saw someone sitting on the steps of the Maritime Museum across the street from her loft. When she got closer, the man stood. The streetlights illuminated him, and she recognized Jed. Popcorn hustled over, wriggling with pleasure as he reached down to pet him.
“Hey, boy; hey, boy,” he said. Then, looking up at Kate, “I was waiting for you.”
“How did you know where I lived?” she asked.
“Beth showed me,” he said. “We’d take walks after finishing up at the soup kitchen, and she’d always steer me down here. She loved you, Kate.”
Kate looked up at the sky at the mention of her sister.
“I know,” she said.
“She wanted to be closer to you,” Jed said. “She wanted you to know about us. Every time we walked by, she hoped you’d be coming out your door, leaving the building, and that you’d see us.”
“Why didn’t she just bring you upstairs?”
“She was afraid of how you would react. An accidental meeting would be okay, but she thought it would be too aggressive to throw it in your face.”
Kate glanced up at the tall windows of her apartment. The lights were all on; Sam was still up.
“What made you come here now?” Kate asked.
“You’re the only other person in the world,” he said, “who loved her as much as I did. Sam, of course, but I can’t talk to her. I can’t stand how much I miss her, Kate. I just want to talk about her.”
“Yes, I want that too,” Kate said.
“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 about us,” 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.”
“Really? But you were so sure. You gave each other rings. You promised each other.”
“I know that. I hate myself for doubting her. But I live in a fucking tent. She’s Beth Woodward. She comes from all that. Maybe she decided she didn’t want to give it up.”
Kate thought, The money is Beth’s, not Pete’s. He’d be the one giving it up.
“To Beth a promise is a promise,” Kate said instead. But was that true? Even after the ceremony, the vows marked with blood, she and Beth hadn’t stayed close. “Are you the baby’s father?”
“What do you think?”
“Were you?”
“You went through my tent. I know you took the sonogram.”
“A ring, a baby,” Kate said. “But you didn’t even go to see her when you couldn’t get in touch. To find out what was wrong. What if it was a problem with the pregnancy? Especially if the baby was yours.”
“Look, she wouldn’t tell me, okay?”
“Whether you were Matthew’s father?”
“Yeah,” he said. “At first, when she found out she was pregnant, she said I was. But about a month before she died, she backed off from that. She told me it was possible Pete was.”
“Did she even know?” Kate asked.
“She must have,” Jed said. “Because when she and I got together, there was nothing between her and Pete. She said it had been over a year. That’s why I was so sure.”