“Yeah. That. I’m really sorry. It doesn’t seem like such a huge compromise to me, though, since you’re going to have to do it anyway—unless you plan on taking them out of the Mission Academy entirely and homeschooling them.”
She’d been gazing out toward the sea until I dropped the H-bomb. Then she whipped her head toward me. “Homeschool? No. No, I don’t think so. I’ll have to talk to Brad.” She fumbled in her tote for her cell phone. “But I think he’ll agree. Keeping them at the academy and then enrolling them in this gifted thing would probably be best. Oh, no, look at the time. I gotta motor. Kelly’s hired a personal chef, and he made salmon.” She lifted the skirt of her maxi dress and began to run up the steps. “Thanks, Suze, for all the help. By the way, I think I saw Jesse waiting for you, down at the beach.”
“Yes,” I said with a smile. “You did.”
treinta y cinco
I never in a million years thought I’d be so happy to see my nearly twenty-year-old Land Rover.
Of course, it was more the sight of the figure leaning against the utility vehicle that made my heart beat a little quicker. His fingers were tucked loosely into the front pockets of his formfitting jeans, his dark hair tossed a little by the strong wind from the beach. He was perfectly unconscious of my approach (the soles of my second-best butt-kicking boots were rubber). He seemed transfixed by the sight of the sea.
Or maybe he was napping behind the dark lenses of his sunglasses. He’d had a long night, after all.
“How on earth did you know I was here?” I asked after I’d pulled up beside him and was getting out of the BMW.
Jesse turned his head, then gave me one of those slow, drowsy smiles I’d come to love so much.
“An app,” he said. “Jake installed tracking systems in all his cars in case they were ever stolen.”
“Oh.” I was slightly disappointed. “I thought you were following me via our fiercely strong mind-body-spiritual connection.”
“Well, that, too.”
I joined him against the side of the car. The view was impressive. The sea was a deep, azure blue, the sky as cloudless as the forecasters had promised it would be. Seagulls wheeled in circles overhead, their cries lost in the pound of the surf. An occasional car went by, sightseers ogling both the surf and the expensive homes along 17-Mile Drive.
“So that was you a little while ago, and not Lucia, stopping in to say good-bye to Becca?” I asked.
“I may have helped Lucia give Becca a proper good-bye.” He hadn’t removed his fingers from his pockets, but we were standing close enough, our backs pressed against the car, that it felt as if we were touching.
“Bullshit,” I said. “That was all you. I’d recognize your romantic touch anywhere. Besides, the cigarette smoke gave you away.”
“I don’t smoke.”
“Not anymore, you don’t.”
His grin caused something to shift inside me. “You’re right, I don’t.”
For a long time I’d suspected there was an electric current passing between us. It had always been there, even when he’d been an NCDP, and hadn’t wanted to admit he loved me, a living girl whose job it was to rid the world of people like him.
In the years since his heart had begun to beat again, that current had only grown stronger. When we were apart, it stretched. I wondered if there was anything that could truly break it. Even death, it seemed, hadn’t been able to.
“So Paul wasn’t completely wrong,” I went on. “There is something left over from the grave inside you. But I don’t think it’s darkness. In fact, I think it’s light.”
Jesse swore in a very unangelic manner and strode away from the side of the car to lift a rock and hurl it at the waves. “Why, even on a beautiful day like this, do we still have to talk about him?”
“Because if we don’t talk about it I’ll never understand it, Jesse. And I want to. I really, really want to.”
“Why? Why is it important? Why can’t it simply be?”
“Well, for one thing because you nearly killed him last night.”
“I wish I had.”
“If you had, you wouldn’t be standing here on the beach with me right now, throwing rocks at the waves. You’d still be locked up somewhere.”
“But I’m not, querida.”
“Right. You’re not. Instead, you can give—and apparently receive—messages from the spirit world. Don’t get me wrong, I get them, too, but not the way you do. I talk to ghosts, but not all the ghosts, all the time. And I can’t do magic tricks like the one you performed back there. It’s a little spooky that my boyfriend—the mild-mannered physician—can do light shows with his mind. But then again, you used to be a spook, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“Well, if it doesn’t bother me, it shouldn’t bother you,” he said, coming back to lean beside me against the car. “It would be nice, however, if you’d trust me enough to let me in on your little secrets once in a while. And also check your cell phone.”