After that I try not to think about JD too much. I still cry over him. It’s hard not to. He owned one third of my heart. I don’t think it will ever be possible to replace the missing piece he still holds.
I think about Ark instead. It took me weeks to get any answers, and the FBI was very reluctant. But they finally admitted Ark was undercover. Had been undercover for four years. And that the job was over and he’d moved on.
That broke my heart again. It made me think that it was all a lie.
That’s how I started to write my book. Because I needed to remind myself some of it was real, even if those parts only belonged to JD. I needed to remember Janine too, whom they never found, but her baby was in the records the FBI confiscated from Gabriel’s compound up in the mountains. They said that’s where I was kept too. But I have no clue. I don’t think about that time. Instead I think about Janine’s baby, who was reunited with her true family once they got through all the fake adoption records.
“Can I ask you a question?”
I look up at the young woman, holding out her book for me to sign. “Sure,” I say back with a smile.
“Why do you call it Three, Two, One? I know you have a lot of references in there to the numbers. But is it like a countdown?”
“Yeah. That’s all it is. Just a countdown.”
Three soulmates.
Two broken hearts.
One last chance to set it right.
“Oh,” the woman says, slightly disappointed. “Well, thank you so much.” She takes her book and smiles at me. “I love this story. I love the fact that they all end up together. I think JD loved her more, but I’m glad she got both. They filled her up, like she said. They both completed her because they were so different.”
I nod. I can feel the sting of tears. “They did,” I say. “You’re right.”
My book is fiction. And I can end it any way I want. So JD never died. Ark never lied. And everyone lived happily ever after.
After that I keep my attention where it belongs. On the people in front of me. I still scan for Ark’s face in the crowd, but by four o’clock when the last person steps up to have their book signed, I can’t avoid the obvious.
He never came.
I sign the book, smile, take a picture, and then hand it back. I thank the fan for coming to see me on such a cold and wintry day, and wish her happy holidays.
And then I stand and stare out the window where the snow is falling in large round flakes. The same way it did that night everything fell apart.
I walk away from the table and grab my bag from my publicist. “Do you need a ride to the airport?” she asks me, clearly concerned with my somber mood.
“No, thanks. I can manage.”
I turn and make my way towards the back of the bookstore where my coat is hanging in the employee break room. I’m just turning the corner of the hallway when a voice rings out.
“Miss Marshall?”
I turn. “Yes?”
The last girl in line is jogging down the book aisle towards me. “Sorry,” she says, out of breath. “I forgot! A man was in line with me a while ago, but he said he had to leave and would I pass this along.”
She holds out a sealed envelope.
I stop breathing for a moment. “A man?”
“Yes,” she says. “Sorry, I forgot.” And then I take it from her and she waves goodbye. “Happy holidays!”
I lose my manners and ignore her. I just stare at the envelope. And then I look around nervously. Is he still here?
I open the envelope and pull out a thick card. Not a greeting card, a two-sided card, like a glossy business card, except larger.
A Private Affair
You’re Invited
When: Right now.
Where: Get in the car in the front of the store.
My alarms should be going off. I’ve been a prisoner twice. Once by force, once self-imposed. So I should be wary. But I don’t even think twice. I grab my coat and walk out the front door, searching for Ark.
The world is blanketed in white. But the car in front, with a driver standing next to it, is long and black. The driver smiles at me, then opens the door to the backseat and I get in. He walks around the front of the car and gets in the driver’s side.
“It’s not far,” he says. Like he knows that my mind is whirling with thoughts. He looks for traffic and pulls out onto the street.
I glance down at the card in my hand. There’s no artist’s name or gallery listed, but my heart knows. My heart knows because Ark’s got a piece of it. And the closer we get to my final destination, the more whole I become.
I got a photograph in the mail last Christmas. It wasn’t of a person, but of a view through an open door of a cage. The view was from the loft terrace in Denver, looking out over California Street.
I looked at that picture every night for months and I wondered, Why won’t he come for me?
And then I decided he was waiting for me to come to him. He was waiting for me to leave the cage and let myself be free.
When we pull up to an old building that looks like it’s been rehabbed recently, my heart beats a little faster. Two Dragons Art Gallery is an urban legend in New York. People admit to having been there, but no one can tell you where it is.
When I first heard this I immediately thought they were drugged and taken somewhere in secret. But then I was told the reason no one knows where it is because the location isn’t permanent. One time it’s here, the next it’s there. Always on the edge of things, never on the beaten path.
And somehow, that fits Ark.
The gallery changes from exhibit to exhibit. It’s fleeting. Just a moment in a night. Sometimes it’s in a building. A subway station. A basement room in an underused public library. Once I heard it was in a bar bathroom.
It’s always in Brooklyn, though. Ark’s real home town. And that’s why I agreed to do the reading today. I hoped against hope he would find me and let me back into his secret world.
The driver gets out and walks around to open my door. I take his hand as he helps me out. I pull away, but he holds on tighter.