I stood up and turned away from him because it was all so maddening. “But you cursed me with another kind of pain. The loss of you was horrible, especially without closure, without ever knowing what really happened to you. And later, finding out that you had kept secrets from me. I just wish, when it first happened, you had let me choose whether to stay with you or not. If you had called the police that night, maybe we could have worked through it. Survived it.”
“Or maybe you would have never wanted to see me again.”
“It ended up that way anyway,” I reminded him. “You lost me. You destroyed what we had.”
“At least I had you for a while.”
I scoffed, and my anger resurfaced. “But you were in hell the entire time. So was it worth it? Those brief years we had together?”
“Selfishly, I want to say yes,” he replied, “because you were my safe haven. But I hate what I did to you.”
We sat in silence for a while. Dean sipped his water. “If I had called the police that night and you found out what I did, you would have cut me loose, and you would have gotten over me, I’m sure. We barely knew each other.”
“Don’t be so sure,” I replied. “I thought what we had was special, even in those early days. Looking back on it, if you had told me everything, I probably would have stood by you. Are you forgetting that I let my father cut me off? I said goodbye to my entire family for you. That’s how crazy in love with you I was.”
He bowed his head. “Maybe I just didn’t believe I was worthy of that kind of love. My father always told me I was worthless. My greatest fear was ending up like him. Alone. Disgraced. In jail.”
“So that was your greatest fear?” I asked with disappointment. “Mine was losing you. Thank you for that—for letting me know where I stood in the hierarchy of what mattered to you.”
His eyes lifted, and I had to fight a sudden wild impulse to let myself fall headfirst into the tortured depths of his soul and tell him that everything was going to be all right.
“Not a day goes by,” he said, “that I don’t think about you. But I had to let you go, especially after you remarried. I wanted you to move on and be happy. So I decided that my shame and loneliness would be my penance.”
I faced him. “It wasn’t your fault that she died, you know. If she pushed you . . .”
“It was my fault for becoming involved with her in the first place,” he replied, “when I knew it was wrong. Sometimes I think about that, and it feels like it was someone else in my body. Not me.” He gazed forlornly at me. “For a while, you were my escape from what I did. When we moved to Miami, it was easier to block it out, to pretend it never happened.”
“Until I wanted to have a child,” I said. “Is that why you chose to leave me that night?”
“No,” he replied. “I had been thinking about it for quite some time. I was just waiting for the right set of circumstances.”
“What circumstances?”
“I had to be alone in the plane. Usually there was a flight attendant. Often a copilot.”
“How did you do it?” I asked. “How did you make your plane disappear? The detectives said that Melanie Brown was working on a project about how planes go missing over the Bermuda Triangle. Was there some technique you used out of that?”
He bowed his head. “No. It had nothing to do with whatever she was trying to prove. All I did was descend rapidly to a very low altitude until I was flying too low to be detected by radar.”
I couldn’t believe it. It was so simple. And yet it had created a monster in my mind, an obsession with mad theories and explanations.
“That’s it?” I asked. “Then where did you go? You couldn’t have flown all the way to Australia like that. Could you? You’d at least have to stop for fuel somewhere.”
He seemed to have an easier time talking about this than about Melanie. “I flew to Colombia, ditched the plane there, got a fake passport from some people I’d met at one of Mike Mitchell’s parties. Then I booked a flight to Sydney.”
“What do you mean, you ditched the plane? Did you just abandon it?”
He shook his head, as if he didn’t want to answer the question.
“Did you sell it? To who?” I was beginning to figure this out on my own. “Let me guess. Someone you met at one of Mike’s parties.”
He nodded solemnly. “They paid me cash. It was enough to get me here and buy a sailboat and start a business.”
I turned away from him. “Oh God, Dean.”
I stood at the counter in the galley, looking up at the sky through the small window over the cooktop. I found myself thinking of that day long ago in my father’s study when he’d tried to convince me that Dean wasn’t good enough for me. I had defended Dean and walked out on my father, who had insisted he was only trying to protect me.
I imagined my father looking down at me now and saying, I told you so.
I was a mother now. Maybe it was time for me to forgive my dad, because I finally understood his need to protect. And yet, if only he could have trusted me enough to figure it out on my own. Maybe I would have.
But Dean had been trying to protect me, too, in his own way.
A seabird soared over the boat. I watched it coast on the wind. When it disappeared from view, I let out a sigh.
I was so tired of people assuming I was too fragile or innocent to protect myself. What was it about me that made them think I couldn’t handle hardship?
Except for Gabriel. He had let me come here on my own.
As I continued to stand on Dean’s boat, the floor beneath my feet bobbed gently on the waves. Outside the tiny rectangular window, the sky was a spectacular shade of blue. I had never seen color like that before, and I wished Gabriel were there with me to admire it.
Then I looked back at Dean, who stared out the opposite window, his posture ravaged with emptiness and defeat. I thought of how angry I’d been after I’d learned about Melanie Brown. I had banished the cedar box to the basement, as if it were something toxic.
But today, on this boat, my anger was dissipating. In its place, I felt the first blessed whispers of relief in knowing the truth, though it was marked by sadness for Melanie Brown and pity for Dean, for the mistakes he had made and had to live with. Mistakes he could never undo, unless he could find a way to turn back time, which was not possible.
If only he had been able to trust me enough to know that I would have stood by him if he had done the right thing. We would be past all that by now. Instead, he had chosen another path. He had withdrawn into his shell, to live with a nightmare that would never end.
I wondered if he felt any relief today, as I did. Confessing the truth to me, after all these years—perhaps it was like the pulling of an abscessed tooth. It had always been his worst fear for me to learn of his crime, but now the secret was out. At least between us. He no longer had to fear my censure. It was done. That part of it was over.
“What happens now?” he asked as I returned to the table and sat down across from him.
The thought of Detective Johnson and the card I still carried in my wallet coasted into my mind. For all these years, there had never been any breakthroughs regarding Melanie Brown’s death or Dean’s disappearance. But now there was this.