“June nineteenth. We thought it best to wait a while. Until things calm down.”
Caroline knew he was referring to the barrage of articles that were likely to start appearing over the next few weeks, stories marking the upcoming tenth anniversary of Samantha’s disappearance. What would have been their twentieth anniversary had they stayed married, Caroline thought. Reporters would be eager to pounce on any new tidbit, however unrelated it might be to the original event. When Hunter and Caroline had divorced, it made the Milestones column of every national magazine in the country. His remarriage to a younger woman would certainly add more fuel to what was already an unquenchable fire.
“I’m sorry,” he said again before Caroline hung up.
She didn’t realize she was crying until she felt the tears funneling between her lips. She brushed them away with the back of one hand and reached for the small pad of notepaper she kept by the kitchen phone with the other. Gone to Nicola’s, she scribbled, referring to the small grocery store several blocks away where she sometimes shopped despite its exorbitant prices. “If you want to know what grocery stores will be charging in the future,” Peggy had once quipped, “shop at Nicola’s today.” Back soon, she added.
Not that they needed anything, Caroline thought as she was walking down the street. More that she just needed to get out of the house. And she could use the exercise. She couldn’t help having noticed how good Hunter still looked, how he’d kept himself in such great shape, while she’d let herself go a little, first giving up her membership in the gym they used to frequent together, then abandoning the treadmill she once kept in her walk-in closet and used daily, and not bothering to replace it when it stopped working.
She entered Nicola’s, grabbed a small green plastic basket from beside the front door, and began walking up and down the aisles, stopping at the produce section and lifting an avocado, mentally measuring its ripeness.
“Is everything all right?” she heard someone ask.
Caroline spun around, finding herself face-to-face with a handsome man of about forty. Well, not exactly handsome, she decided, assessing the thinning dark blond hair that fell into his light brown eyes, and the deep creases surrounding his too wide mouth, everything just a little off. Still, there was something very appealing about him. “Excuse me?”
“You have a choke hold on that avocado,” he said. “Is there a problem?”
Caroline quickly dropped the avocado into her basket. “I guess I just drifted off for a few minutes. I’m sorry.” Why was she apologizing? She didn’t know this man. She didn’t owe him an explanation, let alone an apology.
“No need to apologize,” he said, as if reading her thoughts. “You seem to know your produce,” he continued with a smile. “Maybe you could help me out.” He extended a cantaloupe in her direction. “I never know when one’s ripe or not.”
Was he coming on to her? “Are you asking me to feel your melon?” she asked, amazed at the flirtatiousness in her voice. It had been so long since she’d engaged in this sort of banter with a man. Not since Hunter. And now he was getting married. To a woman at least a decade her junior. A woman with whom he’d been having great sex when their inebriated fifteen-year-old daughter showed up unexpectedly and threw up in his doorway. And Caroline hadn’t had sex in eight years. She hadn’t so much as looked at another man since Hunter left. How fair was that?
“Why don’t we start with a cup of coffee?” the man asked. “My name is Arthur Wainwright, by the way.”
“Caroline,” Caroline answered, deliberately omitting mention of her surname. She dropped her basket onto a stack of hothouse tomatoes and followed the man out of the grocery store to the Starbucks around the corner without another word.
“Son of a bitch!” Caroline was shouting as she sped north on Mission Boulevard toward the upscale neighborhood of La Jolla. “Son of a bitch!” She slapped the palm of her hand against the steering wheel, causing it to bark in protest, then used the back of her hand to wipe away the tears that had been falling down her cheeks ever since she’d left Jerrod Bolton standing openmouthed beside his table on the patio of Darby’s. “How could you do this, you miserable son of a bitch?”
She glanced to her right, saw the driver in the car beside her regarding her with a mixture of concern and fear. “Mind your own damn business,” she hollered at him through the closed window of her passenger door, and he quickly turned away.