A stiff wind had kicked up off the water, which lay a good fifty yards down a set of wooden stairs and across the width of sandy beach. The lot was almost full, but she and Jeremiah were the only people around. She took a breath, keeping tension and frustration at bay. “We can talk here.”
He looked out at the sparkling water, the beach that was only lightly dotted with bright umbrellas, sunbathers, kids running with plastic buckets. “I don’t get up here that often. Let’s go down by the water.”
“Jeremiah—”
“I’ve got something I need to say, Mollie. I don’t want to say it in a parking lot.”
“If it’s about this jewel thief, it can be said right here.”
“It’s not.”
He walked out ahead of her, leaving her little choice but to follow. They headed down the sand-covered steps to the beach. The wind must have pushed the crowds off the water, but Jeremiah seemed undaunted as he walked across the sand to the ocean’s edge. The air was cooler, the wind stiffer, penetrating the lightweight khakis and black henley Mollie had pulled on in haste. She wished she’d brought her windbreaker. She reminded herself she was with a man who’d always lived in this ecologically complex maze of water, land, wildlife, and people. She remembered walking on the beach on a late afternoon such as this, with gulls wheeling in a clear sky as he’d told her about growing up in the Everglades, an only child with a widowed father, his soul as tangled up with exotic birds and tall grasses and mysterious waters as hers was with music.
If he was to be believed. For all she really knew, he’d grown up in Buffalo.
The tide was going out, wide stretches of sand dampened and packed down from the recent influx of water. That was where they walked, leaving footprints. The wind whipped Mollie’s hair into tangles, but she had to admit it felt cathartic, as if it were trying to whip some of the anger and confusion out of her.
“Here’s the deal, Mollie.” He walked steadily beside her, his mind clearly made up to say whatever he’d come to say. “I lied to you ten years ago.”
“Yes. We’ve been over that ground. You wanted your story, and you used me to get it. It happened a long time ago. And I forgave you a long time ago.” She smiled. “Sort of.”
He didn’t smile back. There was a seriousness about him, a weightiness, that hadn’t been there this morning. In the harsh late afternoon light, she saw lines at the corners of his eyes she hadn’t noticed, either. “I wanted the story,” he said, “but I didn’t lie to you or use you to get it.”
Mollie kept walking, ignoring the catch in her knees. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I thought it would be easier for you if you hated me. So I made up the story about using you.”
“Whoa, back up. You’re saying you didn’t use me for your drug-dealing story?”
“Correct.”
“And you thought painting yourself as a morally corrupt journalist who’d bed a twenty-year-old flute player—i.e., me—to get a front-page story would be easier on me?”
He nodded, expressionless.
Mollie sputtered, nearly speechless. “Easier than what?”
“The truth,” he said.
“You mean it gets worse?”
He squinted against the wind and sun, regarding her with infuriating calm. “I guess that depends on your point of view. The truth is I did fall in love with you that week.”
“Well, hell,” Mollie breathed.
A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. “But I knew it never could have worked, and so I tried to spare you—spare myself is more like it—by making sure you went back to Boston in high dudgeon over having been used by your first—what was it you called me?”
“A son of a bitch, I believe.”
“Your first ‘dark and dangerous’ man. That was it.”
She scowled. “I was young.”
“So you were.”
“And you were dumb, Jeremiah. Good God, what were you thinking? Here you were, caught in this inconvenient, impossible relationship with a Boston flute player, trying to end it as gently as possible—and so you make sure I hate your guts. Boy. That makes sense.”
Now that he’d said what he’d had to say, he seemed more at ease. The wind gusted, kicking up the surf. Down the beach, a middle-aged couple packed it in for the day. Jeremiah just kept walking, the water lapping almost at his toes. “I was trying to be honorable.”
“The truth, Tabak, is honorable. A lie is a lie.”
“What can I say? I was twenty-six, I wanted to do the right thing, and now, here we are.”
“Yes. Well, no wonder you wanted witnesses.”
He smiled, and she thought she saw a flicker of amusement in his eyes, half-closed as they were.
“Did you pine for me?” she asked.
“For weeks.”
“Good. Would you have lied to me if I hadn’t been a virgin?”
“Mollie, you weren’t a virgin when I made the decision to lie—”
“That was at the end of the week. At the beginning of the week, I was a virgin. Did it matter?”
“Of course it mattered, just not in my decision.”