“But—”
“I haven’t been able to get anything on Maddison Sutton, where she works, family, education, anything at all. Such deep anonymity doesn’t make sense in Googleworld. We’ll dig further. I’ll have some follow-up for you tomorrow. And when I have more time, I’ve got to know what’s going on there. ‘It’s not about romance,’ huh? If it’s really not, then you’re either blind or stupid, and I know you’re neither. Now I’m off to Le Coucou.”
David hung up. He switched off the computer.
The quiet in the cottage was so deep that the place might have been drifting outside of time, displaced by some quirk of physics. The planet rotated, and on the wall, the ladder of sunshine and shadow skewed somewhat, and the bright bands dimmed. As the light seemed almost to simmer slowly away, steeping the room in mystery, David Thorne wondered what he ought to say to Maddison Sutton at dinner, how he might draw her out yet avoid seeming suspicious—and what he would feel in mind and heart when he touched her.
| 11 |
Upon the waters came a multideck party boat, a mere shell of spaces that could be used for banquet rooms and buffet lines and rental casinos and dance floors, bedecked with strings of tiny white lights, with guests of some well-catered event posed at the railings or glimpsed beyond the enormous windows in chambers festooned with cream-white bunting and enormous floral displays of white and yellow blooms. This massive confection of contrived elegance cruised past the windows of the restaurant, moving smoothly through harbor waters glimmering with the first golden light of sunset. It seemed to glide not by the power of its engines but to hydroplane on the music of its big band playing Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.”
Maddison had arrived before David. She already sat at the window table where he had dined alone the previous evening. Her martini had been so recently served that it had hardly been touched.
Perhaps she saw his reflection in the glass. She turned her head to smile just as he approached.
The passing spectacle paled by comparison with this woman. To David, the expensive and lustrous decor of the restaurant became ordinary. The festive clinking of glasses, the ringing of flatware, the laughter of the singles on the hunt at the bar, the animated conversation of the other diners—all of it faded so that even though she spoke softly, her voice was clear and intimate as he settled in the chair across the table from her.
“I’ve been thinking about Emily,” she said.
“Thinking what?”
“How I’m not her.”
“We agreed on that.”
“Yet that’s why we’re here.”
“Not really, no.”
“A girl likes to think she’s unique.”
“I approached you because you look like her, but that’s not why I asked you out.”
“Why did you?”
“I liked the way you talk.”
“Oops. Last night, you said I talk like her.”
“I say a lot of stupid things.”
“Few men would admit as much.”
The waiter came to take a drink order.
When David and Maddison were alone again, he said, “Maybe I should go home and send my brother.”
“Then I would have to dine alone. Anyway, even if he existed, I doubt he’d be cuter than you. Or more entertaining.”
He didn’t know what to say. He wished he already had a drink.
After taking a sip of her martini, she said, “Which woman in your novels is Emily?”
“I’ve never written her.”
Maddison raised one eyebrow. “You loved her more than life itself, but never wrote about her?”
Although he hadn’t spoken to Maddison of his love for Emily, he supposed that she could deduce it from his actions or read his heart as revealed in his eyes.
He said, “Sometimes it takes a lot of distance to be able to fold a piece of your life into a work of fiction.”
“Ten years is a lot of distance. Did you leave her?”
“Why would I have left her if I loved her more than life itself?”
“We all do reckless, foolish things. So she left you, just walked out?”
“Yes,” he said, and left it there.
“You’re afraid of writing about her and getting her wrong. Are you still too angry to be fair to her?”
“I’ve never been angry with her.”
“Then it’s pain.”
“Is it?”
“Her leaving hurt you so badly that you don’t believe you could be fair to her, and you still love her too much to write about her in an unfair way.”