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“I don’t know. I’ve heard about the jail time too, but no details. I know he disappeared, and his dad filed a missing-persons report but later retracted it because he had found Jon somewhere. I heard he was really bad with drugs and got into trouble over it somehow. He was gone for quite a while, until he turned up again about ten years ago. You know this part. Your grandmother took him in and helped him get on his feet. He’s come a long way. I’m not saying he’s using again, and I certainly hope he’s not. I’d hate to see him slip back into all of that, really. But I can’t believe this is news to you? That he never told you any of this?”
I just stared at her in disbelief. Imagine that, another secret that Jon Rayburn had kept from me all this time. I wanted to be mad, but my heart was breaking. That is why he left me when we were teenagers. Because he had a mistress I could never compete with, no matter how hard I tried. It had been drugs? The other woman was addiction? I considered why Grandma had never told me all this, but then remembered that I never let her talk to me about Jon. The moment she brought him up, I shut the conversation down.
Becky put the car into park and turned to look at me. Her mouth was thin, and her whole face was worried. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said any of that. I’m sorry. I’m really not trying to make anything worse.”
“No—I just—thanks for telling me.”
“Are you OK?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll talk to you later, OK? Thanks for dropping me off.”
I had to think that maybe some of this was all my fault – not the problem with drugs, as that had always been outside my control, but I’d been stubborn and not listened to Jon when I should have. Why was it so easy for me to jump to conclusions and storm out? Had Shaun really done such a number on me that I couldn’t even bring myself to sit down like a normal human being and have a civil discussion about it? We loved one another and maybe that just scared the hell out of me. The more I thought about it, the more I regretted my own shortcomings. I wanted to be with Jon. I knew that. I hoped it wasn’t too late to figure things out for both our sakes.
Thirty minutes later, I had the keys to my vet truck and was driving toward Jon’s house. I had no idea what I would say or what I should do about all this, but I knew that I needed to talk with him. I needed to know what was going on and if I could help or if I had to walk away from it. I noticed the Barracuda was gone when I pulled up but thought it might still be wherever he had left it the night before. I knocked on the door, but there was no answer. Something about this felt familiar, a fleeting memory from years ago of me at an unanswered door looking for Jon.
I knocked and knocked and still no response, so I opened the door and went on in, the very thing I had fussed at him for at my house. There was no sign of Jon in the house, and the cats were gone. That didn’t necessarily mean anything, as they wandered in and out their cat door as they saw fit. In this bedroom, clothes lay strewn across the bed and a suitcase had been pulled out but left behind. Where had he gone? I snooped around in hopes of finding some answers but came up empty-handed.
I sat down on the sofa, frustrated, and looked around for anything that might give me a clue. I spotted a small box on the table and picked it up and opened it, staring blankly at the diamond ring inside. I can’t say how long I sat gawking at it before just closing it and setting it back down on the table. He must have been planning to propose, but that wasn’t his mother’s ring. I recognized the main stone, but the rest had been completely redesigned. Jon had gone through the trouble of making sure it was something I would love rather than just his mother’s old ring he had let me wear during our fake engagement. I felt near tears but brushed them away, jumping up and heading back out of the house.
Jon’s childhood home looked the same as it had in high school. Chris Rayburn greeted me at the front door, two cats spilling out from around his feet.
“Hey, Rain. Surprised to see you,” he beamed, stepping off the porch to give me a big hug.
