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“By the way,” Emily continued, knocking him back to the present, “I didn’t tell the cops this, but Greg knew Cecelia Callister.”
That made Myron pull up. “Wait, what?”
“Not well. He probably met Cecelia two, maybe three times. Back in the day, we used to hang out. Cecelia and I, I mean. We were friends when we summered out in the Hamptons right after we both got married. I know we went out once as couples—me and Greg, Cecelia and her first husband, a nice guy named Ben Staples. Or maybe Ben was her second. I can’t remember. Anyway, it was a million years ago.”
Myron tried to take this in and see what it meant. “Could they have been more?”
“You mean like lovers?”
“Like anything.”
“Greg and Cecelia,” Emily mused. “Who knows?”
Myron tried another avenue. “When was the last time you heard from Greg?”
“When he ran off for Cambodia or wherever.”
“Laos. That was five years ago.”
“Something like that.”
“And not a word after that?”
“No,” she said softly. “Not a word.”
He couldn’t tell whether that bothered her or not.
“Look, Myron, Greg and I… it was a strange relationship. We got divorced years ago after, well”—she gestured with her hand in Myron’s direction—“you know.”
He did.
“But Jeremy was still a sick kid, even after the transplant, and whatever issues Greg had… has?… damn, which is it? Whichever, he loved that boy, even after…”
And there it was.
After Myron’s clumsy senior-year proposal, Emily dumped Myron for, you guessed it, Greg Downing. To raise the heartache to the tenth power, she and Greg fell so hard for one another that they got engaged four months later.
That was where it got messy.
Put simply, the night before the wedding, Emily asked Myron to come over. He went. They had sex. The result—though Myron wouldn’t know this until some fourteen years later—was a son, Jeremy, who Greg unwittingly raised as his own.
Yep, a mess.
Myron had always blamed Emily. Just as he had started to move on from the pain of losing her, she had been the one to call him that night. She had provided and encouraged the alcohol and made the first move. She had a plan of sorts, destructive as all get-out, and he was just a pawn in it. That was what he’d spent years telling himself. But now, with more distance and objective hindsight, Myron realized that his thinking was old-fashioned. He’d wanted to paint himself the good guy and ultimately the victim. Classic self-rationalization.
Man can justify anything if he puts his mind to it.
“Myron?”
It was Emily. Present-Day Emily. Boy, Win had warned him about letting old trauma back into his life, hadn’t he?
“So you two divorced,” Myron said, pushing away the past. “But then years later, you got back together, right? You even got remarried.”
Emily didn’t reply.
“And then, what, Greg just up and ran overseas without explanation?”
“There’s more to it.”
