Page 90 of The Night We Lost Him

“He talked about you,” he says. “He’d like that you were here.”

“I appreciate you sharing that.”

I look down, grateful, too grateful really. It means too much to me to hear that my father wanted me here. To hear that this part matters.

“There was one woman who came here with him.”

I look back up at him, wondering if I heard him correctly. “Sorry?”

He looks at me over his shoulder, shrugs. “Or at least there was only one woman that I met. That was it.”

I hold his gaze, my heart starting to race. He isn’t saying the rest because he doesn’t have to. He means one woman besides my father’s wives, one woman besides his families, one woman who he is guessing shouldn’t have been here.

I can see it in his eyes. He isn’t sure if it’s a betrayal that he’s told me or the right thing to do—or, somehow, both at the same time.

“I only met her a few times, and I wasn’t sure if she was a friend.”

“Did she seem like a friend?”

“Yes. And no.”

“Do you happen to know her name?”

He doesn’t hesitate. Now that he’s gotten this far, he doesn’t hesitate when he says it. “Cory,” he says. “He introduced her to me as Cory.”

Cory. Why does that sound familiar? That was the name etched into the closet. Cory & Liam. I’m sure of it. Could it possibly be the same Cory?

Clark knocks on the doorframe, as if he is steadying himself against what he revealed. And I reach out and touch his arm. “Thank you,” I say.

Then I am moving away from him—to the living room, to the bay window and that bird wallpaper, to all the photo albums and playbills and yearbooks that I spilled onto the floor already, that I have yet to put back.

Cory & Liam.

I call Cece back, but she doesn’t pick up. I leave a message.

Then I reach for his oldest photo albums—anything that looks to be from high school, anything that looks to be from before that.

And I start to move through.

Eleven Years Ago

It was ten degrees outside.

Liam was waiting for her on the street corner. The windchill was below zero, the snow flurries relentless, but he would wait until she appeared. He’d just left a drinks meeting at the St. Regis, and he was feverish from his scotch and from the hope he would get to see her soon. He knew which subway she took from Midtown to her apartment. He waited by the stop near her office.

Until there she was: barreling toward him in a long trench coat and a cashmere knit hat, her curls flying out beneath it, her cheeks red from the frost.

“What the hell are you doing?” she asked. “Trying to freeze to death?”

But she broke into a smile. She broke into a smile that seeped straight through his skin, the cold forgotten.

He smiled back at her. “Hello to you too.”

“You look giddy.”

“I missed you,” he said.

“I’ve seen you.”

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