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“Ah, got it.”
“You’re my new reason.” Wiley came around the bar and sat in the stool next to me. “Start talking.”
I shook my head. “Nah, there’s?—”
“There’s clearly something, and my Spidey sense tells me it’s named Emily.”
Hearing her name stole the resistance from me, and I felt myself sag.
“So, is she gone?” he looked around.
“Yeah. But she kinda dropped a bomb before she left.” I sighed, glancing at the bottles lined up behind the bar. It was way too early for a drink, and I needed to get to work checking on the Thanksgiving dinner progress. It was only two days away.
“What bomb?”
I sighed and looked down at the patina of the old wooden bar top. Had my uncle sat right here? Rubbed his hands over thisvery spot? Something about the conclusion of the hunt had me feeling nostalgic for him, or maybe it had just been the message he left us with. Or maybe it was the loss of the person who made me understand what his message meant.
I watched my finger trace a decades-old ring on the bar top. “She told me her last name is Schaeffer. She’s Jake Schaeffer’s sister.”
Wiley knew the story, maybe not as intimately as my squadron mates who’d been there on the carrier that day. He might not have remembered the guy’s name, though. He was looking at me intently, a wrinkle between his brows.
“Jake Schaeffer was the guy who died that day. Back in the navy.”
Understanding softened Wiley’s tight features and his mouth loosened into a little “o.”
“She came up here knowing exactly who I was and wanting to...I don’t even know what. Meet me. Figure something out.” The anger blazed in me again, but it didn’t burn nearly as hot as it had when Emily had first confessed.
“Did she?”
“What?”
“Did she figure out whatever it was?”
I lifted my hands, turning them up and shrugging. “I have no idea. I do know she didn’t tell me any of this until we’d been together for a couple weeks. Until I trusted her. Until I thought I knew her pretty damned well.”
“Until you fell for her.”
When I didn’t answer, he gave me a half smile. “I saw you guys together at the hospital, rode back with you in the car.”
“I thought it was mutual,” I said, anger and misery making my voice flat. “I actually thought we might have a future.”
He nodded, saying nothing for a moment. And then he lifted a finger. “Let me ask you a question, and don’t punch me, okay?”
“Okay.”
“What difference does it make whose sister she is?”
“I just told you.” What was he not getting here?
“You told me who she was, not why it matters.”
“Because she lied!” I didn’t shout, but it was close. I was so frustrated and upset I wished I could just sink back into the protective shell I’d been wearing for years. But Emily had broken it. And now I felt like every bit of living was rubbing some new sensitive spot inside me.
“She didn’t lie, right? She just didn’t come clean right away. Did she say why?”
I sighed, the anger fading a bit. “She said she meant to, but then we got close so fast and she knew it would seem like she’d lied, and she didn’t know what to do.”
“Sounds pretty honest.”
