I pulled my jacket around me and stubbed out my cigarette before saying my good-byes. I thumbed through the apps, opening the one for text messages. I keyed in a few sentences and hit “send.” When I was finished, I left my phone with Mary Alice.
“You ready for this?” she asked.
“Nope.”
She grinned. “Neither are we. Now, get going.”
I went to the driveway to find Taverner waiting, swinging his keys in his hand.
“I thought Minka was taking me to the station.”
“She’s busy working on her fastball with Akiko,” he said. “I’m driving you.”
I got into the passenger side without waiting for him to open the door.
“So we’re spending some quality time together?” I asked.
“It looks like it.” His voice was casual, but he was tapping his finger on the steering wheel and I knew exactly why.
Those last few hours before a job goes down, the adrenaline is pumping and there are limited ways of releasing it. Sex and exercise are effective, but they’re a bad idea before a job. They can leave you tired and rubber-legged. Alcohol can also take the edge off, but it can also dull the sharpness you need for the work. There’s only one solution and that’s to sit with it, that simmering feeling of wanting to jump out of your skin. It’s the reason I took up meditation, and most of the time it worked, but not with Taverner sitting next to me, eighteen inches and thirty years of history between us. We’d been good together in a way that I could never have explained to anybody. The sense of recognition, of the world slotting into place when I met him, was something I’d never felt before or since.
We’d lasted three years, stealing time between jobs to meet up in out-of-the-way places since romantic entanglements between field agents were strictly prohibited. Our last rendezvous—in a dive lodge in Mozambique—ended with him proposing for the fourth time and me packing my bag two days early. He’d driven me to the station then too, kissing me on the cheek and telling me he understood. It wasn’t complicated. We wanted different things. He was six years older and ready to settle down, build a life, and make some babies. And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t figure out how to make myself small enough to fit into that picture.
Two years later, he’d left a message for me when I was on a job in Venice. When I called him back, he’d told me it was his wedding day, and I wished him luck. I very nearly meant it. He didn’t say the words, but I was fluent in Taverner and I could hear the subtext. I loved you first and I will love you last.
I’d hung up the phone and gone on to kill my mark in Venice with my bare hands, probably around the time he was cutting his wedding cake.
I turned to face him, studying the profile that had somehow gotten better with age. “Do you ever regret it?” I asked him. “Breaking up, I mean.”
He paid me the compliment of at least thinking about it before he said no. “If we hadn’t broken up, I wouldn’t have my girls. I would have missed thirty good years with Beth—and they were good, most of them.”
“Was it everything you wanted? The picket fence? The PTA?”
“What’s the PTA? Some sort of cult?”
“Pretty much.” I waited as he navigated a roundabout.
“Yes,” he said finally. “I got my rose-covered cottage and my happily-almost-after.” He flicked me a sideways look. “You?”
My mind skimmed like a bird over the past thirty—almost forty—years. Jesus, where had the time gone? The scenes passed in front of my eyes like a movie reel, some in faded black-and-white, some in a riot of Technicolor, the places I’d seen, the people I’d known.
“I have had exactly the life I wanted for myself,” I told him.
He was quiet a long moment. “I’m glad.”
“You know,” I said lightly, “I always wondered if you were really that upset when I turned you down. I half expected you to chase after me and drag me to the altar against my will, but you never did.”
“Oh, I thought about it,” he admitted with a smile. “But I knew if I pushed, you would wind up hating me for it, and I wasn’t about to take that chance. Besides, I always figured we’d find our way back to each other in the end.”
I couldn’t form an answer to that so it was just as well that we’d arrived. He eased to a stop in the drop-off lane at the station and I opened my door. I cleared my throat and managed to sound passably normal. “It was good of you to come.”