Twenty-Seven
THE DAY BEFORE Thanksgiving, my phone rang, and when I checked it, it read: POSSIBLE SPAM.
I answered anyway, if that gives you a sense of how lonely I was.
But it wasn’t a telemarketer.
It was Jack Stapleton.
“Hey,” he said when I picked up, and I knew him from one syllable.
I could also hear he was grinning.
Then suddenly he was FaceTiming me—me, still in my nightgown with hair pointing in ten different directions—and I could see he was grinning.
“Did you miss me?” he asked, looking pleased with himself.
I was distracted by the reflection of myself in the phone. “No,” I said, pawing at my hair.
“So nice to see my favorite nightgown again.”
“Why are you calling me?”
“Important business.”
“How do you even have my number?”
“I sweet-talked it out of Kelly.”
“I’ll bet.”
“The point is,” Jack said, “I’m calling to tell you about the plan we came up with to catch the stalker.”
“You came up with a plan to catch the stalker?”
Jack nodded. “A sting operation. To catch her in the act. And then haul her down to the clink. And then scare, pressure, and cajole her into, you know, not murdering you.”
“That’s the plan you came up with?”
“Yes,” Jack said, looking pleased with himself.
“You got Glenn on board with that?”
“Yes,” Jack said. “Glenn, Bobby, and a bunch of police.”
It was so strange to see his face again, even through the phone. Since leaving, I had tried to avoid anything that might force me to see it—watching television, scanning magazines in the checkout aisle, or even, since that whiskey endorsement, glancing at buses as they drove by.
I hadn’t anticipated getting a FaceTime call.
“Look,” I said, “I hate to disappoint you, but it’s almost impossible to do anything about stalkers.”
“Thanks for the negativity.”
“I’m not sure if what you just described is even legal.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve got a whole team of advisors.”
“Why would you even care about the stalker? You’re leaving after Thanksgiving, anyway. Two more days, and you’re out.”
“That’s the thing, though. I might not be.”
I didn’t mean to, but I held my breath.
“My mom had this idea that I should maybe stay for a while. Do some fishing. Hang out. Do a little personal healing.”
“That’s a great plan,” I said.
“You still don’t like my stalker plan, though, huh?”
“I don’t even know the details. But I can tell you already that it’ll never work.”
Jack smiled. “But guess what?”
“What?”
“It already did.”
I leaned closer to the phone. “You did it already?”
“We did it already.”
How did I not know about this? “And it worked?”
“It worked. I’m a genius. I’m also very lucky.”
“Nobody tells me anything.”
“I put some posts on social media as a lure saying I couldn’t wait to spend a lazy weekend at my house in Houston.”
“That was enough to lure her to your house?”
“The Kennedy Monroe video didn’t hurt, either.”
“I need to talk to you about that.”
But Jack was celebrating his triumph. “And then, when the Corgi Lady showed up, we arrested her for trespassing.”
“That’s not going to stick.”
“No. We were going try to scare her with lawyers and threats and doomsday scenarios, but then something better happened.”
“What?”
“She used her one phone call when they booked her to call her sister—who wasted no time hopping on a plane to Texas, packing up her conversion van, and moving her, corgis and all, home to Florida.”
The sister had apologized profusely to Jack and promised to keep her on her meds. “She’s always been mostly harmless,” she’d said. “She was fine until the divorce last year. We should have made her come home sooner. We’re on it now.”
“That was easy,” I said to Jack. Then I frowned. “Was it too easy?”
“There’s no such thing as too easy.”
“But I mean, how reliable is this sister?”
“I don’t know, but a stalker with her sister in Florida has got to be better than a stalker all alone right here in town.”
“Agreed,” I said.
“Anyway,” Jack said. “That’s why I’m calling.”
“To say I’m less likely to get murdered now?”
“To invite you to Thanksgiving.”
I paused. Then I said, “I can’t come to Thanksgiving, Jack.”
“Why not? Your would-be assassin is halfway to Orlando by now.”
“It’s not a good idea.”
“That’s not a real reason.”
An image of Kennedy Monroe spreading herself over Jack like he was a cake and she was his icing appeared in my head. “I think it’s best,” I said, “to make a clean break.”
“Just one day. One meal. To say a proper goodbye.”
“We already said goodbye.” I didn’t want to do it again.
“I have something to give you, though.”
And then he lowered his phone down past his famous mouth and his legendary Adam’s apple, angling the camera down and down until he stopped on his necklace. And there, just leaning against his collarbone, in remarkably sharp focus, was my safety pin.
“You found it,” I said, touching my finger to the phone screen. I’d known it, of course—but I hadn’t entirely believed it.
“I did.”
“Where was it?”
“On the beach by the river.”
“How could you find it there? That’s impossible.”
“I’m pretty good at impossible things.”
“But—how?”
“A lot of looking. And some delusional optimism.”
I’d have to revise my opinion of delusional optimism.
Jack went on. “Remember all those mornings I told you I was hitting golf balls?”
“Yeah.”
“I wasn’t hitting golf balls.”
“You were looking for the safety pin?”
Jack nodded. “With my dad’s metal detector. The one my mom told him was a total waste of money.”
“That’s what was in the golf bag?”
“It sure as heck wasn’t nine irons. I can’t hit a golf ball to save my life.”
“You went down there every morning?”
“I did.”
“That’s what you were doing?”
Jack looked into my eyes and nodded.
“I just thought you were being a pain in the ass.”
“That was a side benefit.”
“You should have told me.”
His expression shifted one step more serious. “I didn’t want you to get your hopes up.”
“But, Jack…” I studied his face. I was so bewildered. “Why?”
He frowned like he wasn’t quite sure how to explain it. Then he said, “Because of the look on your face when you realized it was lost.”
I felt tears in my eyes. “I don’t know how to even start to thank you.”
Now he was smiling. “In other news, I’ve started a bottle cap collection.”
I laughed a little, but when I did, the tears spilled over. It seemed like I’d cried more in four weeks of knowing Jack Stapleton than in my entire life before that. This guy just kept cracking me open. But maybe that wasn’t entirely a bad thing.
When he spoke again, his voice was softer. “I’m guessing you’d like it back.”
“Yes, please.”
“Easy,” he said then. “No problem. We can make that happen. All you have to do”—and here he paused to look straight through the phone like he really meant business—“is come to Thanksgiving.”
Well played, Jack Stapleton. Well played.
I sighed. “Fine, dammit. I’ll be there.”