No, there it was again—and a soft thud this time. She’d heard that the majority of home break-ins happened in broad daylight. Had she walked in on one? She certainly hadn’t been quiet coming in, grunting as she’d dropped the twenty-four-packs of bottled water on the floor and noisily piling the plastic bags onto the counters and the island.
She grabbed her cell phone, just in case, and crept in the direction of the stairs. She didn’t want to be the dumb woman in the horror movie who doesn’t leave while she has the chance. But she also didn’t want to overreact. It could have been nothing. Or maybe not nothing, but just a little something. A squirrel, in through the chimney? A work crew outside causing a racket that sounded closer than it was?
Then, as she reached the bottom of the stairs, she was certain she heard it: a giggle. A child’s giggle, followed by some very agitated scolding that sounded to be coming from an adult male. A child came into view above, and Caitlin stopped short, stunned.
“Auntie Caitlin!” he yelled, and charged down the stairs and threw his arms around her neck.
“Bear!” Tears filled her eyes as she gripped him as if he were her own. But how … She lifted her gaze and there, leaning against the upstairs hallway and looking defeated, was Finn.
“Finn! Oh, thank God.” Relief cascaded over her. “What are you doing here?”
He held up a house key, one she recognized having given him years ago. “We needed a shower,” he said in an unapologetic tone that was decidedly un-Finn. He was challenging her with his eyes, and her relief began to be displaced by an unsettled feeling that was not unlike real fear. “You might have gathered that this is not a social call.”
Caitlin’s smile faded.
4
AUGUST 2010
Being dateless for George and Caitlin’s wedding wasn’t a surprise to Finn. He’d never planned on taking a date, and hadn’t much cared—right up until there was a specific woman he found himself wanting to have by his side, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. The fact that he caught himself standing on the edge of the dance floor trying to picture what the woman from the beach might have worn to this white-light-strung evening under the stars, imagining what she might have felt like in his arms as the swing band played, that was the part that surprised him. What an idiot he’d been not to at least have gotten her name. All that talk about Camp Pickiwicki and not once had he bothered to ask—it was his own fault, really. He should have known better, that anything could happen at any time to derail things. If losing his parents one after the other so soon after college had taught him anything, that was it.
Caitlin had been the one to step forward and help pick up the pieces then—his male friends were relatively useless in emotional scenarios, which he understood but still couldn’t help privately resenting just a little—and he knew he owed her wedding his full attention now. But he’d never had much control over his daydreaming, and she was used to it. Gorgeous in a fitted lace designer gown that George’s family had to have footed the bill for, breathless from dancing, giddy with happiness, she pulled Finn aside to chide him playfully. “You’re creative,” she told him. “If anyone can devise a way to locate a mystery woman, it’s you. Just devise it tomorrow, would you? You’ve been standing here spaced-out for the entire set.”
He was hopeless. For two weeks now, he’d been unable to stop thinking about that encounter on the beach, to stop looking for her everywhere he went. By the time he’d managed to locate the sick woman’s husband and return with him to the lifeguard, the ambulance was gone, and his fellow good Samaritan with it. The poor husband ran off in such a panic that Finn wasn’t able to ask if he might ride along. It was a long jog back to the penthouse George had rented—Finn must have wandered well over a mile down the beach earlier that afternoon before being pulled to a halt by that familiar yellow T-shirt—and by the time he retraced his steps, begged the keys to the group’s shared rental car, and made his way to the hospital, the woman he’d felt so instantly drawn to was gone.
“She asked about you, though,” the husband told him. When Finn finally came across him in the waiting room, he was less distraught, apologetic for having left the beach without so much as a thank-you, and Finn looked at the little boy asleep in the man’s lap and brushed his apologies away.
She had asked about him. Well, that was something. But it didn’t help.
He knew she lived somewhere in the Cincinnati area, but what had always struck him as a relatively small city suddenly seemed impossibly vast. Whenever he had a moment to himself—sitting in traffic, waiting for a takeout order, riding his road bike, flipping through the channels on his couch alone at night—he ran over and over their conversation, looking for some clue he might have missed to help him find her. But there wasn’t even a hint of what she did for a living, what kind of neighborhood she lived in, how she spent her time, anything. Just as bad, he could not think of anything he’d told her that might have allowed her to find him, if she were so inclined. How was it possible that they’d managed to have such a real connection and yet found out so little about each other?
Finn was used to returning home from vacations dreaming about going back to wherever he’d been. But this time, all he could think of was trying to find that piece of the beach that was somewhere here in Ohio with him.
The wedding ended in a blur of tossed flower petals and downed champagne, Caitlin and George left for their honeymoon, and normal life resumed, as it always seemed to. Finn’s college friends had been systematically relocating to other cities since graduation—it never took much to lure bright-eyed young adults away from Cincinnati, so long as they were romantically unattached—and aside from Caitlin he mostly hung out with coworkers these days. Or with himself. There was a fine line, it turned out, between being a dreamer and being a loner. He minded it only sometimes. The week dragged by, and when a group at the graphic design firm where he worked took their summer interns out for a good-bye happy hour, Finn went along. Anything beat another solo Friday night at home. He wasn’t entirely sure the students were all twenty-one, but the bartenders knew Finn and his coworkers brainstormed projects here after hours, and they weren’t about to start carding people at a work function. Two pints in, Finn confessed his trouble.
“Dude,” said one of the interns prophetically. He was a frat guy type who spent his lunch breaks smoking in the parking lot and talking self-importantly on his Bluetooth. Finn had been unimpressed. “Craigslist, dude.”
“I’m not looking for a cheap couch,” Finn said, trying to refrain from rolling his eyes. “Or a cheap date.”