Coming Home to You (25 page)

How could he have been so underhanded? So
thoughtless
?

Did he think this was funny?

“Does Kate know about all this?” I almost didn’t want to know the answer, because if she did, then that would mean she had been in on this betrayal.

Ray dipped his head, an acknowledgement of Kate’s collusion in the scheming, but he kept silent. I wasn’t sure if he was afraid to speak, or if he really just wasn’t sure of what to say. My eyes were still wide as I stood facing him, my hands balled into tight fists at my side. This was absolutely ludicrous. If I hadn’t been so angry, I might have laughed.

“How did you think that doing something like this would be
okay
? And
why
? Why did you feel the need to play around with my life like that?” I shook my head. “Were you really that bored? You saw me and thought messing with my head like that might be
fun
?” I felt like the man I’d come to trust as one of my best friends was a total stranger, that I couldn’t really believe anything he said or did anymore.

Then there was Kate. How was I supposed to feel about Kate’s involvement in all of this? She should have been someone that I could rely on to watch out for my best interests, but I felt suddenly that I had lost that reassurance.

“And
Neil
!” I sneered. “What do you think Neil will say about this? Do you think that he’s ever going to trust you again? You lost him before, Ray. I can’t believe you would be so stupid as to risk losing him
again
! That’s what’s going to happen, you know. When he finds out that you did all of this—” I waved my arms wildly. “He’s not going to want to have anything to do with you!” My stomach felt as though I had been on the tilt-a-whirl after one too many nachos, and I closed my eyes. “I just don’t understand,” I said quietly, finally having gained a little control on my voice.

“Please sit, Zoë. You look like you’re about to fall down.” There was concern in Ray’s voice, but at that point I didn’t care. I didn’t need him to take a genuine interest in my well-being all of a sudden. If, indeed, it really
was
genuine.

Still, sitting down seemed like a good idea. I was suddenly tired, and I didn’t want to stand anymore. I wanted to send him away and crawl into bed and sleep and then wakeup to find out all of this had just been a very strange dream.

Unrealistic, I knew, but none of this seemed to be real.

“I need you to listen to me, and I need you to listen until I’m finished. I know you don’t feel like you owe me any favors right now; but please do this for me, anyway,” Ray said calmly.

He was sitting up straight now, his hands folded loosely in his lap. When I didn’t argue, he continued.

“I knew after all of those months of you coming into the coffee shop that there was something going on with you, something that really wasn’t getting any better. You were like a zombie, Zoë. You’d come in, and you were there, but you weren’t. There was this…this…
lost
look in your eyes that never quite went away, even on the few occasions that I got you to smile at me. And I always wondered what you must have been like when you were happy. What you were like when you were
living
.”

He scrubbed a hand up his face along his beard, picked up the throw pillow from the floor where it had fallen. He stared down at the pillow in his hands intently.

“One day when you left, somebody said something about who you were and what had happened. So I knew. Even before you finally told me, I knew.” Ray glanced up, trying to get a bead on me.

“When you brought Kate in that one day, the opportunity just presented itself. And I wanted to help you. You were both standing there, and she said something to you about moving, and you said something back, and I could tell what was going on.

“The same thing happened when Olivia died. Everyone had advice for me about what I should do and where I should live and how I should feel. It all made me want to scream.” He shook his head at the memory, looking weary and sad. “Neil was the only one who seemed to understand that I had to figure it out for myself, that there was no pre-packaged way to deal with it all. But every time I walked into that house, I could hear her voice or her laughter. I couldn’t go into our bedroom without seeing her there, curled up on the bed the way she was when I found her.” There were tears streaming down Ray’s cheeks into his beard; and I felt tears of my own as I sat, silently watching and listening.

“I spent as long as I could in that house, but when I realized that I would never be able to rebuild my life without really moving on, I also realized that I would never be able to move on while I was still there.” He smiled mirthlessly. “So many people didn’t understand what I was doing. So many people thought I was running away and avoiding having to really deal with the pain. But the house—it was like someone had broken into my home and violated it. All the happy memories I had there were tainted by the image of her body and the paramedics and the police.

“I packed up and I moved out. And I started to not dread going home anymore, started to recognize all the ways that I hadn’t been allowing myself to move on with my life. It’s hard to do, you know, when you walk around every day blaming yourself for the fact that your wife is dead. That somehow, you weren’t enough to make her want to live.” He shrugged. “I couldn’t do it alone, though. You can’t just talk yourself out of that kind of guilt. Neil was stationed in Texas and deploying a lot at that point, but we kept in touch by e-mail. Hundreds of e-mails, maybe thousands of them, I don’t know. He was there for me through the whole thing, which made what happened later with Sara harder.” Ray said her name with a bitter edge to his voice, as though she poisoned everything and everyone she came into contact with.

“You and Kate have that kind of relationship, that bond that makes you closer than blood. And I knew she was right, that you needed to leave that apartment.” He put the pillow in his lap and rested his hands lightly on top, palms flat and fingers splayed. “I knew it was a long shot, but I thought you might be more receptive to something you thought was temporary, like house-sitting, since you were so adamant about not letting go and getting out. Neil’s house seemed like the perfect solution.”

He paused, and I took the opportunity to ask him a question.

“So how did you get Kate on board so quickly with your little scheme?”

Ray smiled, but shook his head. “I may be good, but I’m not that good. Kate didn’t know that this whole thing was on the sly until I told her, about a week before I went up to Atlanta. She was the one that suggested sending you the letter and setting up the e-mail account so that you could send e-mails.”

I nodded, marveling at my own blindness. “She knew I was going nuts not being able to contact Neil. I’d told her that I felt strange being in his house, not having ever met him, and I really didn’t understand why you hadn’t told me how to get in touch with him. So it definitely makes sense that she would come up with such a neat solution.” It was deviously brilliant, in any regard. But there was something that still needed answering.

“The postmark on that letter,” I said. “How did you arrange that?” I paused, another question flashing through my brain. “And the keys to the house?”

By this point, I was more fascinated than furious. It was all so involved and intricate, the planning that had gone into all the arrangements. I supposed I might have been able to come up with something like this if I’d had enough preparation time, but I wasn’t sure I could have carried it off for so long.

Ray’s mouth twitched with the beginning of another smile.

“I know a guy,” he said simply, as though that explained everything. “He was able to get them postmarked for me, so that was easy enough. And Neil gave me his keys when he left.” The broad grin on his face was unapologetic. “He was trusting me to watch after his house, so naturally I needed to have a set of keys for that.”

“Naturally,” I echoed, narrowing my eyes at him. “Tell me this, though. Why did the e-mails stop?”

“I think the simplest answer to that question would be that it was getting harder and harder to keep up the charade. It was just easier to let your e-mails go unanswered and hope that you would just…lose interest? Or that you would assume Neil was just too busy to answer.”

I stared at Ray in amazement. “So what now?” I asked cautiously.

Ray regarded me thoughtfully. “Now we stop with the games and really get serious about a home for you.” He took my hands in his and locked his eyes with mine. “I’m sorry, Zoë,” he said earnestly. “Really sorry.”

I looked back at him, the corner of my mouth curling into a half smile.

“I’m not, Ray,” I replied, shaking my head very slightly. “I’m not.”

And I wasn’t.

As bizarre as it might have sounded, in giving me those keys and playing those games, Ray had given me a gift. And for that, I would always be grateful.

“Zoë Trent,” Sara barked, her fingers tented in front of her face as she sat across from me at her desk. “I’m sure this isn’t something you haven’t heard before, but you have quite the enviable credit rating. What I can’t figure out,” she continued, arching an eyebrow at me in condescension, “is why you came in here pretending to be looking for an apartment to share with Ray McPherson.”

She let out a throaty, derisive laugh, shaking her head.

“This is the twenty-first century, Zoë. Don’t humiliate yourself into thinking that you need a man to help you get an apartment.”

Her tone dripped with disdain. In her eyes, I was the antithesis of the modern, independent woman. I felt like I was in the principal’s office being scolded for chewing gum in class. Relying on a man wasn’t humiliating, I wanted to tell her.
This
was.

But I didn’t. I sat silently in the visitor’s chair, wondering how she had figured it out.

I didn’t have to wonder long.

“I have my sources,” she said, answering my unasked question. “I know that you were engaged and that your fiancé died shortly before you were going to be married. I know that Ray is engaged to a woman in Atlanta who is your best friend, so the two of you couldn’t possibly be looking for an apartment together. Could you?” She pressed her lips together in a tight smile.

“I’m sure Ray has told you that we know each other through a mutual acquaintance,” she continued. “No doubt his account of things didn’t paint me in the most flattering light, either.”

Again the tight-lipped smile, though it resembled more of a smirk. Maybe she enjoyed having a reputation as a cold-hearted sadist. Maybe she thought it gave her an edge.

I wasn’t sure how much I should let on that I knew, so I decided the best approach would be the noncommittal one.

“Ray didn’t really tell me very much,” I said, looking at a spot on the wall just to the right of her head. I didn’t know if I could trust myself to meet her gaze while I was telling her such a bald-faced lie. “He just said that the two of you used to know each other.” I clamped my mouth shut, willing her to move on to a more benign subject.

Sara cocked her head.

“Yes, well. Some things are best forgotten.” She straightened in her chair and shifted her steely focus to the computer screen. The interrogation seemed to be over.

“I spoke with the owners of the warehouse apartment on Belmont,” she said. “They’ve agreed to come down in price to accommodate the changes and repairs that still needed to be made to the place, so all that’s left is for you to sign the papers,” Sara said, sounding quite pleased with herself.

Not that I could blame her. The original price for the apartment, though reasonable by some people’s standards, had been too lofty for me to manage. But Ray and I had noticed some things in the floor plan and in the construction that had the potential of driving the price down to something well within my range. We’d pointed them out to Sara, and she had worked her magic—or witchcraft, depending on your perspective—to make the negotiations successful. I knew I couldn’t have done it on my own, but I still had a strange feeling that I’d somehow sold my soul to the devil. I wondered if I’d have to promise her my firstborn when I signed the papers, or if she’d just be satisfied with me signing in blood. It was a morbid thought, I knew, but something about her was just so very manipulative.

She rearranged a thick sheaf of papers on her desk, licking her index finger to separate the top sheet from the rest. She extended it to me, her mouth curved into a smug arc. It almost made me want to get up from my chair and walk out, leaving her there with all the unsigned papers still on her desk, but I fought the urge and took the proffered page from her. It was blurry with paragraph after paragraph of legalese and signature lines, and I looked down at them hoping that I wasn’t blindly signing my life away.

But here it was again. Another decision I was going to have to make alone. Another step into self-sufficiency that, while making me feel very grown up, also made me feel very lonely.

I skimmed the page in my lap, making a desultory attempt to understand some of what I was signing, and leaned forward to take a pen from the holder on her desk. Sara explained the papers I was holding, but it didn’t seem to translate to my brain. I felt a little like I was listening to the teacher in a Charlie Brown special.

“Should I sign my full name?” I asked, stalling for time.

“Just your first name, middle initial, and last name will be fine,” she replied with practiced patience.

She watched from her chair as though she would pounce if I changed my mind. I supposed this was the way all realtors behaved at this stage of the game, but I wasn’t used to the strange little dance and found it to be somewhat unnerving. I looked up at her to find her still watching, silent and intent.

Make that
very
unnerving, I thought.

I found the first signature line highlighted and flagged, signing my name with a scribble that sounded loud in the otherwise silent room. As nervous as Sara made me, I was beginning to wish she’d start talking about something. Anything.

There seemed to be a million flagged lines to sign and date, and I wondered how long it would take me to actually get through them all. Maybe it was a good thing that I’d come alone after all, I thought as I signed. Ray had wanted to come with me; but I’d been insistent that this was something I needed to do on my own, without him. Realistically speaking, I knew that I couldn’t expect that I would always have someone like Ray to rely on. Besides, weren’t all those magazine articles and talk-show hosts and psychologists always saying that women needed to become more self-reliant and learn not to expect a man to help them?