Her gaze didn’t linger on David or on anyone. She turned her elegant head to the bartender as he placed a martini before her.
Balanced on the horizon, the fat sun poured apocalyptic light through the huge tinted windows.
The restaurant and bar occupied one enormous space designed to allow patrons to see and be seen by the largest possible audience. Yet as the room filled with the fantastic light of the dying day, David felt as if everyone but he and this woman had been vaporized.
The sun sank, the night rose like a tide, and the restaurant dimmed to a romantic glow.
Although he considered approaching the woman at the bar, he didn’t dare. She surely couldn’t be true.
He ordered a second glass of cabernet and the filet mignon, and he watched her surreptitiously for the next hour. She did not glance at him again.
The other unescorted women at the horseshoe bar recognized impossible competition and despised this black-haired blue-eyed beauty.
A few men found the courage to approach her, but she gently turned them away with a minute of conversation and a lovely smile. To a one, they seemed to feel that a courteous rejection from her was a kind of triumph.
Gradually couples paired up and moved to dinner or departed together, and those who were unlucky either amped up their alcohol consumption or moved on to some other watering hole.
She ordered a second martini and then took her dinner at the bar with a glass of red wine. She ate with an appetite and a concentration on her plate that was familiar to David.
The expectation that had possessed him two nights in a row and that had been fulfilled with this woman’s arrival surely counted as something more than mere hope or intuition. There seemed to be some strange destiny unspooling.
He paid his check but carried his unfinished glass of wine to the bar, where he settled on the stool beside hers.
She didn’t so much as glance at him, but concentrated on the last of her steak.
David didn’t know what to say to her. His throat felt swollen, and he had difficulty swallowing. He was light with hope and heavy with a dread of disappointment.
When she finished and put her fork down and took a sip of her wine, he finally said, “Where have you been all these years?”
She licked her lips, her tongue taking extra care with the right corner of her mouth, as he had known it would.
When she turned her eyes to him, they were striated in two shades of blue, as radiant as jewels.
She said, “I would expect a much better pickup line from a writer.”
His heart had felt tight, laboring as though constrained by scar tissue from an old wound. Now it slipped free of those knots and raced like the whole and healthy heart of a boy.
“I was afraid . . . afraid you’d say you didn’t know me.”
“A lot of this crowd probably doesn’t read,” she said, “but I do. I’ve always thought you look so different from the kind of thing you write.”
The buoyancy that swelled in him now diminished. “That’s how you know me—from book-jacket photographs?”
She tilted her head to regard him quizzically, with a half smile. “Well, I didn’t see you on TV. I never watch TV.”
Her stare was achingly familiar, not just the color of it but the directness.
“You’re not playing some game?” he asked.
“Game? No. Are you?”
He bought a moment of silence by taking a sip of wine. “I don’t believe in staggering coincidences.”
“What coincidence has just staggered you?”
“Emily.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your name is Emily.”
“My name is Maddison.”
“Then you must have a sister named Emily.”
“I’m an only child.”
“I never knew of a sister,” he said.
“Because there isn’t one.”
“This is extraordinary.”
“What is?”
She was too young. He saw that now. A decade too young, but otherwise a dead ringer.
“You’re too young,” he said, though he didn’t mean to express that thought aloud.
She sipped her wine and propped an elbow on the bar and cupped her chin in her hand, exactly as Emily had done, and studied him for a long moment. “This has become a much better pickup pitch. It was so lame at the start. ‘Where have you been all my life?’”
“It was ‘Where have you been all these years?’”
“Whatever. But you’ve polished it up considerably in subsequent drafts, adding a nice note of mystery.”
He felt disoriented. As if he’d been folded into some universe parallel to the one in which he’d been born. “Ten years. She was twenty-five when I last saw her.”