The One In My Heart

“You already Googled me up and down before I even knew your last name. What else is there to know?”


He only looked at me. I swallowed, completely rattled. “Look, you’re a man who holds his cards close. You have a fake girlfriend, for God’s sake. And you can’t even tell your parents you want to be their son again. I mean—”

“I know what you mean. You’re saying that I, the pot, am asking you, the kettle, why you are such a profoundly sooty shade.”

I made no reply: That was exactly what I’d been going for.

“It’s a valid point,” he said. “You’ve made other excellent points before on my choices. And I’ve been thinking about what you said. Today I called my dad and asked him to meet me for a drink Saturday, just the two of us. We already agreed on the time and the place.”

This took me aback. “What are you going to say to him?”

“What I should have said long ago.”

I was shaken anew. “Why now? Why out of the blue?”

“Is it out of the blue? Maybe it looks that way from the outside, but I’ve been weighing it for a while. You were right about our reconciliation going nowhere. To go on doing the same thing and hope for different results—that’s the definition of insanity, isn’t it?”

“I guess. I mean, it’s good that you’re moving forward with your dad. It’s…really good.”

“I hope so.”

He glanced outside. The weather had been demented lately, swinging from single digits to the forties and back again in forty-eight hours, accompanied by every kind of precipitation imaginable. Now it poured, wind-whipped raindrops pelting the floor-to-ceiling windows like pebbles, the sheets of water cascading down the huge glass panes distorting the buildings across the street into blobs of light and shadow.

Bennett looked back at me—I realized I’d been holding my breath. “When I bowed to the conclusion that continuing along the same path with my dad would be fruitless,” he said, “I saw that the same could be said of the two of us.”

I stared at him.

He gave his wineglass another quarter turn. “Don’t tell me you have no idea. By now somebody must have said something to you about the ring.”

“You insisted that it wasn’t an engagement ring.”

“I didn’t ask you to marry me. All the same, it was an unambiguous gesture.”

My fingers dug into the seat of my chair. “Tell me, then. What exactly did it signify?”

I couldn’t quite believe it, that we were—or he was—going to blow the beautiful, perfect lid off our beautiful, almost perfect relationship.

He was silent for nearly a minute. I was once again reminded of the night we met, his hesitation in the rain.

“Do you remember what I said about the first time I saw you?” he spoke at last.

No more hesitation on his part—and I couldn’t hold his gaze. “Central Park. June. My friend’s wedding,” I answered, looking at the remnants of our dinner. The remnants of my hopes for a wonderful evening.

A wonderful life.

“You forgot the crucial part,” he said.

“What crucial part?”

“That I fell in love with you at first sight.”

I trembled, even though I did my best to hold still. “I never believed that. It was too outlandish.”

“I fell in love with Moira at first sight,” he said softly. “I was watching soccer on TV, a match between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona, when I heard a car pull up. I opened the window for a better look. Moira was just coming out of the car, her hair in a ponytail, a bottle of wine in her hand. She saw me, smiled, and said to her boyfriend, ‘Mira, el muchacho americano.’ And I knew that instant my life would never be the same.

“After we broke up, I went around and met as many women as I could. I wanted to fall in love again—it seemed that being into someone else would be the best way to forget Moira. Never happened. After a while I realized it was a blessing. Given how our breakup had torn me apart, why would I ever want to fall in love again?

“By the time I moved back east, I was pretty confident that Moira had been a fluke. Which made things easy: I just needed to find a nice woman who’d get me back into my parents’ circle and settle down with her.

“I met Julianne my third week in the city. Her mother has served on several boards with my dad. She herself is pretty, outgoing, and personable. Her company does PR for the hospital, she liked me, and she was absolutely perfect for what I had in mind—not as a fake girlfriend, by the way, but a real one.”