You look nothing like yourself. She wouldn’t know you if she saw you.
Casey dared to get close enough to Rowan in public to test that theory a -couple of times. It was at once vexing and exhilarating to have her brush on past in the supermarket aisle with an oblivious “Excuse me.” Casey was tempted to grab hold of her and confront her, but managed to keep cool and move on as if they were total strangers; as if their lives—-all their lives—-had never intersected; as if they hadn’t been forever impacted on that fateful day fourteen years ago.
It would be nice to imagine that the memory has tormented her all this time. But chances are—-Rowan being Rowan—-that she hasn’t even thought about it in years.
It doesn’t matter.
Casey is certain she’s thinking about it tonight.
The house is still, other than the ticking mantel clock and an occasional creaking floorboard overhead that lets Rowan know Mick is still awake in his room. He’s probably not doing his homework, as he claimed when he got home from the restaurant. More likely he’s goofing off on the Internet while shooting wads of crumpled notebook paper into the hoop on the back of his door, having long ago misplaced the Nerf basketball that came with it.
Ordinarily, she’d have caught him in the act and told him to get to work or get to bed.
Ordinarily, she’d be in bed herself by now.
But when Jake turned in after the football game ended, she told him to go on upstairs without her.
“It’s late. What are you doing?” he asked around a yawn.
She couldn’t claim to be grading papers; he’d caught her on the computer.
“Christmas shopping,” she told him.
“Can’t it wait?”
“Cyber Monday deals end at midnight. I’m saving us a ton of money.”
That was enough to send him upstairs with a simple “Great, good night.”
Now it’s after midnight, and Rowan has yet to buy anything, but she’s fairly certain she’s finally zeroed in on the right man.
She sits staring at the Facebook profile of a Rick Walker who appears to be the right age and works for an unnamed firm in Manhattan as an administrative ser-vices manager. At least, that’s what it says here.
It might be a lie.
Everything can be a lie when it comes to social networking.
She can’t access his private photos, but the headshot on his profile page bears some resemblance to the man she used to know. Yes, he’s wearing sunglasses in the picture, and has a receding hairline, and is clean--shaven, while her Rick usually had five o’clock shadow.
Your Rick? Don’t think of him as your Rick. Nothing happened.
Be that as it may . . .
This Facebook profile could very well belong to the Rick—-Vanessa’s Rick—-with whom nothing happened fourteen years ago tonight.
She studies his friends list looking for mutual connections or familiar names, but doesn’t find any, including his wife’s. That’s not surprising. The Vanessa she remembers doesn’t strike Rowan as the type of person who’d waste time on social networking.
There are a few Facebook profiles that share her name, but none could possibly belong to her.
Rick Walker’s younger two kids, whom she remembers with varying degrees of fondness, would be around the same age as her own. Their names don’t appear on his friends list either, although that doesn’t mean anything. Of her own three offspring, only Katie was willing to connect to her via social networking, and Rowan is fairly sure that she screens her Facebook page to keep her mother from seeing all but the most innocuous posts. Either that, or her daughter is leading an unusually dull social life for a college freshman.
After investigating Rick Walker’s public Facebook profile as thoroughly as possible, Rowan looks for him on other social media and is quickly overwhelmed. It’s just too hard to tell whether any of the Rick Walkers out there are the same man she used to know.