Both ideas sound utterly unappealing.
James opens a new browser window and finds himself staring at the satellite view of Los Gatos. He has two sons to support, needs to find a job, wants a new house, and definitely needs to exchange his car. He really should get back into painting. But he doesn’t have any motivation to do anything other than look at the house he once owned with Aimee. This isn’t the first time he’s checked out the house, a three-bedroom, two-bath bungalow in the heart of downtown. He doubts it’ll be the last.
He zooms into the photo until the roofline fills his screen. He doesn’t recognize the car in the driveway. The sycamores in the backyard are overgrown and the grass left to brown. His index finger erratically taps the edge of the laptop. He doesn’t like how the yard has deteriorated and he wonders if the same has happened inside their house.
He and Aimee were supposed to raise their children in that house. They had grand plans to expand—add on a second story and push out the back. And they were supposed to fall more deeply in love as they grew old there together. Instead, she married another man and now has a daughter.
What did she name her little girl?
He swears at himself and slams shut the laptop.
Thank God she doesn’t live there anymore. He’s not sure how he’d react with her there with another man. But damn, he feels like a stalker every time he Googles her, or the house. Or her café. He can’t help it. The same craving that drove him to paint now drives him to learn everything he can about Aimee.
He doesn’t deserve her and deep down he knows he must stop obsessing over her, but he can’t help that either. He wants her back, needs her back, as much as his body needs air to breathe.
After an early-morning walk with the boys through the reserve behind the house, James finds himself on the sidewalk outside Aimee’s Café. He didn’t intend to stop here, but the nearest parking spot was three doors down and the boys are hungry. Starving, rather, as Marc pointed out during their excursion. It’s well past breakfast time.
A sign squeaks overhead and James looks up. He recognizes the logo instantly. A coffee mug under a tornado-swirl of steam. He’d scribbled the logo, a crude drawing nowhere near what he could have designed. he had wanted to spark Aimee’s interest to open a restaurant like he planned to open an art gallery. They’d both been working for their parents at the time. He never intended for her to use that rough sketch, but it touches him profoundly. It’s as though she wove pieces of him into her dream.
Dressed in a wrinkled DC Comics Suicide Squad shirt, chino shorts, and Adidas slides, Julian cups a hand alongside his face and peers through the glass. “This looks good. Let’s eat here,” he says in Spanish, blatant defiance to James’s request they speak English. School starts in two months, so they’d better get used to speaking the language regularly.
“No,” James snaps. It’s late morning and he’s starving, too. But under no circumstance will he set foot inside the café.
Julian scowls and clamps his ever-present headphones over his ears.
“I’m hungry,” Marc whines in heavily accented English.
“Me too, bud.” James reaches for Marc’s hand and almost stumbles in amazement when his son’s smaller hand clutches his.
“I can’t see the menu from here.” Julian slips inside the café.
“Julian!”
Marc tugs his hand free and follows his brother.
James swears, glancing down the street toward the diner where he planned to take the boys. Now what? Does he wait here on the sidewalk like an idiot and hope the kids come back out when they realize he didn’t follow? Or does he suck it up and go inside?
Through the glass he sees Julian placing an order.
“Shit.” He sucks it up.
James yanks open the door. The bells overhead swing in a wide arc, hitting the wood-framed glass. Heads turn in his direction, exactly the attention he doesn’t want. He gives the diners a clipped nod and freezes. A montage of photographs, stencils, and paintings cover the far walls. His paintings.
She kept them, after all these years. He stares at them until his eyes dry out—scenes of rustic barns in the foothills and meadows covered with morning dew overlooking the ocean, forests with sunlight breaking through a canopy of trees or moonlight reflecting off the waterfalls of Yosemite. He pushes a long, steady stream of air through his lips and his hand slides into his front pocket, fisting the ever-present engagement ring like a lifeline.
“James?”
The tendons around his ears tighten at the sound of his name. He slowly turns around and faces a woman with a distended belly. She gazes up at him as though he returned from the dead, and in a twisted sort of way, he has. Her lips part on a gasp at the same time she falls back a step, eyes growing large. He’d recognize those cornflower blues anywhere.
“Kristen,” he rasps. She looks the same, yet different. Seven years has matured and enhanced his best friend’s beautiful wife.
“It’s you. It’s really you.” She launches herself into his chest and folds him in her arms, holding him as tightly as her pregnant stomach allows.
It’s the first hug he’s received in longer than he cares to remember. James’s face tightens as he fights a sudden well of emotion, and ends up holding himself back. He doesn’t return the hug, but awkwardly pats Kristen between the shoulder blades.
She leans back to look up at him. “Nick told me you were coming home and I didn’t believe it. Then I could hardly wait until you got here. And now you’re here.” Tears spill over her cheeks. A silly grin stretches her lips wide; then she excitedly jumps up and down. “Oh my God, you’re here!” she squeals.
James cringes. His gaze jumps to the swinging door that leads to the kitchen, then to the hallway in back before returning to Kristen. She’s still jumping and squealing. A smile fights its way onto James’s face. No, Kristen hasn’t changed much at all, except for her stomach. He stares stupidly at her belly. “You’re pregnant.”
She snorts. “Again. I know.”
Nick visited him once in Puerto Escondido. When he couldn’t reach Aimee, James had called Thomas. Nick’s number was the third one he dialed. He had to hear from Nick that everything Thomas told him was the truth. Unlike the lies Thomas had been telling him for years, the one he’d hoped was a lie, that he’d been abandoned in Mexico, was the absolute, horrifying truth. Nick confirmed this with one sobering statement. “Yes, it’s true, all of it.”
Within a few days, Nick was with him in Mexico, filling him in on the six and a half years missing from his life. James learned about Aimee, how she never gave up on him, eventually finding him, only to let him go so he could live his life as Carlos. Nick then sat him down, because he’d been pacing the length of his living room like a crazed man confined in a prison cell, and gave him the cold, hard facts about Aimee. She’s in love with another man. She’s married and has a daughter. Of all the news he heard, that was the most heartbreaking. It nearly destroyed him.
James had thrown his glass of scotch against the wall, where it shattered into slivered fragments, just like his heart.
Now, Nick’s own wife is pregnant with their third child.
Kristen rubs a circle around her stomach. She grimaces. “Four more months to go.”
“You look good,” he tells her honestly.
“So do you,” she says, her exuberance from a moment ago gone. “It’s good to see you. I never thought—”
Pots bang in the kitchen. Voices reach them, drawing his attention. His heartbeat accelerates. “Is she . . . ?” He looks anxiously at Kristen. “Is she here?”
Kristen shakes her head. “She didn’t come in this morning.”
He makes a noise in the back of his throat. She’s not here, which is for the best. When he does finally see her, he doesn’t want an audience.
James feels a tug on his shirt hem. He looks down at Marc. “May I have a doughnut, please?”
“We’re not eating here, Marc.”
“Anything else for you, sir?” the cashier calls over to James. His older son, standing at the head of the ORDER line, tosses James a challenging look.