I stared at it, and even though it had no window, the gate was closed so I knew who was behind it.
I wanted to ignore it and as I turned my head to look out my kitchen windows at the blustery, gray day, I tried to talk myself into ignoring it.
Then a louder knock came and on its heels the dulcet chimes of the doorbell that Walt had installed, which rang on the bottom and second floors just in case I wouldn’t hear it farther up in the house from the main floor. I had this as well as an intercom system that was tucked discretely on the stone column by the gate should I get an unexpected visitor or a delivery or something.
It was just that the person outside my door didn’t feel the need to use my intercom system.
I got off my stool leaving my laptop behind and moved to the door.
I opened it and looked up at Coert.
He was frowning.
So was I.
“You need a peephole.”
“What I need is a local sheriff who’s unconcerned about his citizens’ safety.”
“I hope to God that such a thing doesn’t exist.”
I ignored that and went on, “I also need a dog trained to bite all strangers, even ones with badges.”
He ignored that and declared, “Cady, we need to talk.”
“No, Coert, we need to go back to our strategy of avoiding each other. You were right. That was a good call. Let’s head back there.”
“You said some things last night—”
“I introduced myself to drinking tequila on the rocks last night. It was an experiment that failed so I won’t be repeating it.”
His jaw clenched before he asked, “Why are you here?”
“Why are you here?” I parried.
“I asked first,” he bit out.
“It’s my house you’re inexplicably standing at the door of, so I get dibs.”
“We aren’t at recess, Cady.”
“Good, because school was awful, my grades were terrible, it drove my mother insane and gave my brother something else to bully me about.”
Coert fell silent.
I did too.
He broke it by repeating, “We need to talk.”
“Has evidence been uncovered that a short, red-haired woman careening uncontrollably through middle age was sneaking around the jetty last night with her bottle of wildly expensive but completely worth it tequila, dousing buildings and setting them on fire?”
“That isn’t a joke.”
I stared up at him and asked in shock, “Was it arson?”
“The report isn’t in but that isn’t funny, Cady.”
“I’m not trying to be funny, Coert. I’m trying to communicate to you how ridiculous, and I’ll add offensive your inferences are of me having something to do with said fire.”
“You were in Denver. Now you’re here,” he declared.
“Yeeeeeees,” I said slowly and unwisely carried on, “It’s clear you haven’t lost any of your keen observational skills.”
His jaw clenched again.
I was losing patience and frankly I was losing a lot of other things.
Like the battle to beat back a fresh broken heart.
“You were in Denver,” he said quietly. “Now you’re here.”
“Coert—”
“Why?”
I looked over his shoulder.
“Cady, look at me,” he demanded.
I looked at him.
“Why?”
I said nothing.
He changed tactics.
“Why the investigator?”
Okay, I could stop swearing tomorrow.
Because . . .
Damn.
“Why, Cady?” he pushed. “Why the investigator?”
“Please leave,” I whispered.
“You’ve been intruding in my life for years. Years. I ignored it because it was a nuisance and you were there, I was here. Now you’re here so I think I deserve to know why you’ve been intruding in my life, don’t you?”
“He wasn’t my investigator,” I told him.
“God, please,” he shook his head, “please do not stand there and lie to me. Not about something like this.”
“He was Patrick’s.”
His entire body went still except his brows went up. “So . . . what? He was worried I’d come back to you or something?”
“No.”
“He was worried you’d come back to me and he wanted to know how to find you if you did,” Coert guessed.
“No.”
“Cady, for fuck’s sake, your dead husband had a man reporting to him about me since I left Denver. You can’t be so far gone in whatever it is you got going here not to think I don’t have the right to know why.”
“He knew you meant the world to me, and I meant the world to him, so if I ever worried about you, wondered about you, he wanted to have the answers available for me the instant I did.”
Yes.
That was what I said.
Right there.
To Coert.
In the door of my fabulous lighthouse.
The truth.
Or most of it.
And Coert heard it, and after my words visibly pummeled his tall, strong, motionless body, only his lips moved for him to say, “I meant the world to you.”
“You meant the world to me,” I whispered.
“I meant the world to you,” he repeated.
It was now me clenching my teeth.
“I meant the world to you so after it all went down, you couldn’t wait two weeks for me to come to you and explain why I did what I did. Instead, I found you making plans to marry a man old enough to be your grandfather.”
“Coert—”
“I was in love with you.”
I took a step back.
He took a step into my house.
“Oh no,” he growled. “You don’t get to do that shit. You don’t get to look used and abused and beat down, Cady. I don’t give a fuck it was the name Tony you whispered when I was inside you, you knew me. You knew how I felt about you. You made a promise to me that you broke the instant the going got tough, you cut loose and you let go and you found another way to make the path easy for you.”
“Don’t,” I begged.
“Don’t?” he spat. “Don’t? You said it yourself, you earned this. So you know you earned exactly this.”
“You wouldn’t listen to me explain.”
He leaned toward me and bellowed, “You had another man’s ring on your finger! Two weeks, Cady! Two weeks after the last I saw of you was when I left our bed with you in it smiling at me and you were with another man!”
“Okay, let me explain now,” I said hurriedly.
“Explain what I want you to explain,” he demanded, throwing both arms wide. “Explain this. Explain why you’re back. Explain why you just couldn’t leave well enough alone. I got a kid I love, a job I like doing in a town I like bein’ in with friends I like being with. What the fuck would motivate you to shake any of that goodness that I,” he thumped his chest, “earned. That I worked for. That I carved out of the rubble you left of me.”
My heart was thumping in a chest that was moving rapidly as I tried again desperately.
“To explain that, I need to go back and explain the rest.”
“I don’t give a shit about that.”
“If you want an explanation, Coert, it has to start there.”
“You shared the bed of a man nearly three times your age for seventeen years, Cady,” he sneered with his lip curled. “Do you think I wanna understand any of that? Do you think that doesn’t turn my goddamned stomach to think that body,” he tossed a hand my way, “my body, the one you gave me, you shared with that guy? It might have been okay with you considering the mansion and the Jaguars and whatever the fuck. But it was a kick in the balls for me.”
“Coert, please, if you’d just listen—”
“No,” he bit off. “You don’t get to come here and be wounded, bleeding Cady making me feel like a dick because the woman I loved jumped ship faster than I could blink, has finally got a healthy bank account and a dead husband and is free to do whatever the hell she thinks she’s free to do and lands on my doorstep. Fuck that.”