When she finished, Stacy said, “Wow.”
Kat sipped her coffee.
“And now, almost twenty years later, you see your old fiancé on a dating website?”
“Yes.”
“Single?”
Kat frowned. “There are very few married people on it.”
“Right, of course. So what’s his deal? Is he divorced? Has he been sitting at home, still pining like you?”
“I’m not still pining,” Kat said. Then: “He’s a widower.”
“Wow.”
“Stop saying that. ‘Wow.’ What are you, seven years old?”
Stacy ignored the mini outburst. “His name is Jeff, right?
“Right.”
“So when Jeff broke it off, did you love him?”
Kat swallowed. “Yes, of course.”
“Do you think he still loved you?”
“Apparently not.”
“Stop that. Think about the question. Forget for a second that he dumped you.”
“Yeah, that’s kinda hard to do. I’m more of an ‘actions speak louder than words’ girl.”
Stacy leaned closer. “There are few people who’ve seen the flip side of love and marriage more clearly than yours truly. We both know that, right?”
“Yes.”
“You learn a lot about relationships when your job, in some ways, is to break them up. But the truth is, almost every relationship has breaking points. Every relationship has fissures and cracks. That doesn’t mean it’s meaningless or bad or even wrong. We know that everything in our lives is complex and gray. Yet we somehow expect our relationships to never be anything but simple and pure.”
“All true,” Kat said, “but I don’t see what you’re driving at.”
Stacy leaned closer. “When you and Jeff broke up, did he still love you? Don’t give me the ‘actions speak louder than words’ stuff. Did he still love you?”
And then, without really thinking about it, Kat said, “Yes.”
Stacy just sat there, staring at her friend. “Kat?”
“What?”
“You know a hundred ways over I’m not religious,” Stacy said, “but this feels a little like, I don’t know, fate or kismet or something.”
Kat took another sip of her coffee.
“You and Jeff are both single. You’re both free. You’ve both been through the ringer.”
“Damaged,” Kat said.
Stacy considered that. “No, that’s not what I . . . Well, yes, that’s part of it, sure. But not so much damaged as . . . realistic.” Stacy smiled and looked away. “Oh man.”
“What?”
Stacy met her gaze, the smile still there. “This could be the fairy tale. You know?”
Kat said nothing.
“But even better. You and Jeff were good before, right?”
Kat still said nothing.
“Don’t you see? This time, you can both go into it with eyes open. It can be the fairy tale—but real. You see the fissures and cracks. You go into it with baggage and experience and honest expectations. An appreciation for what you both messed up a long time ago. Kat, listen to me.” Stacy reached her hand across the table and grasped Kat’s. There were tears in her eyes. “This could be really, really good.”
Kat still didn’t reply. She didn’t trust her voice. She wouldn’t even let herself think about it. But she knew. She knew exactly what Stacy meant.
“Kat?”
“When I get back to my apartment, I’ll send him a message.”
Chapter 4
As Kat showered, she thought about what exactly to put in her message to Jeff. She ran through a dozen possibilities, each lamer than the one before. She hated this feeling. She hated worrying about what to write to a guy, as if she were in high school and leaving a note in his locker. Ugh. Didn’t we ever outgrow that?
The fairy tale, Stacy had said. But real.
She threw on her plainclothes cop uniform—a pair of jeans and a blazer—and slipped on a pair of TOMS. She pulled her hair back in a ponytail. Kat had never had the courage to cut her hair short, but she’d always liked it pulled back, off her face. Jeff had liked it that way too. Most men liked her hair cascading down. Jeff didn’t. “I love your face. I love those cheekbones and those eyes. . . .”
She made herself stop.
Time to get to work. She’d worry about what to write later.
The computer monitor seemed to be mocking her as she walked past, daring her to leave. She paused. The screen saver did its little line dance. She checked the time.
Get it over with now, she told herself.
Kat sat down and once again brought up YouAreJustMyType .com. When she signed in, she saw that she had “exciting new matches.” She didn’t bother. She found Jeff’s profile, clicked the picture, read his personal statement yet again:
Let’s see what happens.
How long, she wondered, had it taken Jeff to come up with something so simple, so enticing, so relaxed, so noncommittal, so engaging? It was no pressure. An invitation, nothing more. Kat clicked the icon to write him a direct message. The box came up. The cursor blinked impatiently.
Kat typed: Yes, let’s see what happens.
Ugh.
She immediately deleted that.
She tried a few others. Guess who; Been a long time; How are you, Jeff?; It’s nice to see your face again. Delete, delete, delete. Every utterance was lame to the nth degree. Maybe, she thought, that was the nature of these things. It was hard to be smooth or confident or relaxed when you’re on a site trying to meet the love of your life.
A memory brought a wistful smile to her face. Jeff had a thing for cheesy eighties music videos. This was before YouTube made it easy to watch any and all at a moment’s notice. You’d have to find when VH1 was running a special or something like that. Suddenly, she pictured what Jeff would be doing now, probably sitting at his computer and looking up old videos by Tears for Fears or Spandau Ballet or Paul Young or John Waite.
John Waite.
Waite had an early MTV classic, a quasi new-wave pop song that never failed to move her, even now, if she was flipping radio stations or in a bar that played eighties hits. Kat would hear John Waite singing “Missing You,” and it would bring her back to that truly cornball video, John walking alone in the streets, repeatedly exclaiming, “I ain’t missing you at all,” in a voice so pained it made the next line (“I can lie to myself”) superfluous and overly explanatory. John Waite would be in a bar, drowning his obvious sorrows, flashing back to happy memories of the woman he will forever love, all the while still chorusing that he wasn’t missing her at all. Oh, but we hear the lie. We see the lie in every step, every movement. Then, at the end of the video, lonely John goes home and puts his headphones on, now drowning his sorrow in music rather than drink, and so, in a tragedy reminiscent of something Shakespearean by way of a bad sitcom, he can’t hear when—gasp—his love returns to his door and knocks on it. In the end, the great love he was meant to be with forever knocks again, puts her ear against the door, and then walks away, leaving John Waite forever brokenhearted, still insisting that he doesn’t miss her, lying eternally to himself.