My stomach drops. “What do you mean, in your heart? You either were or you weren’t.”
He doesn’t directly answer me; instead he starts telling me about how she used Vaseline to get the ring off, that she told him it had never fit quite right. “I told her we could get it resized. Or I could get her a different one. But she didn’t seem to hear me. She just told me she had to go.” He rubs his hands on his jeans, lost in thought for a moment.
“Nick, did she break up with you?” I ask again, my frustration mounting.
“She said that’s what she wanted, but she didn’t have a reason. I knew she just needed time to think. That she’d be back.”
“Did she come back? Change her mind?” I press, sitting up taller in my seat.
“I was working on that,” he says, then shakes his head.
“What do you mean?”
“I needed to know how she was spending her time without me. I figured it wouldn’t take long for her to figure out she was making a mistake. So I followed her.” He chews on his lower lip. “I never expected to see her cheating on me with him.”
“But was she cheating if—”
He cuts me off and launches into a story. He tells me how one night she headed north toward Los Angeles. She took a downtown exit he didn’t recognize. His heart was hammering so hard, and his hands were getting numb—he thought he might be having a panic attack. Then he pulled his bike to a stop and watched her pull up to a hotel.
“That’s when I saw him for the first time.” He grits his teeth. “Your husband. He leaned down and kissed her. And she held him there against her mouth for too long. They were in front of people—in front of me. I almost rushed James right then—I wanted to beat the shit out of him. But I couldn’t move.”
I try to push the image out of my mind that he’s created, but I can’t. I see James’s eyes light up, him scooping Dylan up in his arms, covering her mouth with his. Where had I been that night? At home folding his underwear?
“I couldn’t stop imagining them up in a hotel room doing God knows what!” He stops, balling his hands into fists at his sides. “I didn’t sleep at all. I went to the gas station and got coffee to stay awake, and finally, early the next morning, I saw your husband come out, and I followed him.”
I can’t bring myself to stop him. Because he’s filling in the blanks. Blanks that I haven’t realized have been there for far too long.
He tells me James led him to our house. A few Google searches later, he had answers: His name was James Morales. And he was married to a woman named Jacks.
Me.
“I followed you. I watched you at Trader Joe’s as you loaded up your cart with frozen orange chicken and spring rolls. As you debated between the low-fat and the two percent milk. That was cute.” He laughs. “As you tried to fit everything in that clown car of yours.”
Goose bumps prick my arms as the real Nick becomes clearer to me. He stalked Dylan, then James, then me.
Nick describes trailing me through the aisles of the grocery store, then out into the parking lot as I struggled to shove my bags into tiny trunk of my Mini Cooper that James always chided me for buying because it wasn’t practical. Then to my home. Is that why Nick had seemed familiar when I first met him? Because I subconsciously remembered seeing him?
Rage burns inside of me as the weight of what Nick is saying hits me. He took advantage of me.
“I followed you for weeks. I realized we were kindred spirits, you and me. Even though we never spoke, I felt a connection. Because of what we’d both been through—”
I pound the steering wheel with my fist and accidentally hit the horn. “You lied to me!” I burst out.
Nick doesn’t react. “I never lied to you.”
“Yes, you did! What about when you came to my house? You acted like that was the first time you had seen me.”
“I never said that. I never told you I’d never seen you before.”
He was right. He hadn’t. I realize I’m speeding and ease my foot off the gas pedal slightly.
“But you just said you’d followed me for weeks. Why didn’t you mention that?”
“Jacks, don’t you understand I came to your door to help you? And that’s what I told you I was doing.”
“To help me? Is that what you call it?” My voice is shaking.
“Yes. Absolutely. I had information, remember? Like when I figured out Dylan’s email password and printed out all her emails to James. And showed them to you. It was so you could see what was going on between them. So you could know what he’d done to you.”
I think back to how much it hurt to read them. Had he really been trying to help me by making me read their loving thoughts to one another?
“Nick, you misled me. You said she was your fiancée.”
“She was my fiancée!” He lets out an exasperated sigh. “I didn’t agree to the breakup.”
I pound the steering wheel again. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. “How could you do this, Nick? How could you misrepresent everything?” And how could I be so stupid?
“Calm down, Jacks. I never lied to you. I told you I loved her, and I did.”
My head is spinning. I try to calm my breathing, but it’s hopeless. I’m panting like a dog.
“Going to Maui together was to help us get over them. That wasn’t a lie either. And it did help—you even said so yourself.”
I think about the time we spent asking questions Nick already knew the answers to.
“But you weren’t honest. You’d already been there.”
“That’s true. But I never told you I hadn’t been.” He folds his arms across his chest. “I went because I needed to know.”
“Know what?” I whisper fearfully.
“Why she’d chosen James over me. Why he’d won.”
Won? My God. He’s delusional. I cover my hand with my mouth.
“I followed them to Maui, yes. And then I watched them on their excursions. They were so giddy. And I just kept getting more and more angry. Thinking about you, at home. So oblivious.”
That word is like a slap across the face. Because I was. Blind to it all. Pushing my stupid cart through Trader Joe’s, trying to pick the perfect fucking milk. Thinking my husband was where he said he was. Having no clue he was swimming with sea turtles with his lover, being trailed by some—
“And then they decided to drive the road to Hana. I saw them kissing by some store. Dylan was wearing this little dress—one I’d never seen before. That she’d clearly bought for him.”
“Stop it! Stop it right now!” I yell.
“No. You need to listen to me.” He holds up the purse. “I’m going to explain!”
But I don’t want to listen. I don’t want to know. I just need out of this car. I picture Dylan and James having their picnic, saying what would be some of their final words. Had James whispered that he loved her, told her how happy he was that he’d now have the family he’d always wanted? Or had my shadow been in the back of James’s mind, our tattered love still a placeholder in his chest?
“Once I was in Maui with you, it all made sense. Why they had the accident.”
Accident? I shake my head, tears rolling down my cheeks.
“The brakes giving out right when they did—at the cliff where there were no guardrails, where so many other accidents have happened—that was fate. When I pricked a tiny hole in the brake line, I had no way of knowing when or if James would lose control of that Jeep. That was between him and God. Everything happened the way it did because you were meant to be with me.”
I see James’s smile. His bed head. His lanky body. His sea-glass eyes.
I glance at Nick’s profile.
He really doesn’t think he’s responsible for killing them.
One man dead. Another responsible. I gave my heart to both of them.
A wave of nausea cascades through me, and I swallow the bile in my throat.
“What about the pregnancy test?” I whisper. “What did you think when you found that in her purse? Because you didn’t already know, did you?”