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One of the strangest things about flying, Eric thought as he sipped his complimentary orange juice and stared out the tiny window, was that the sky seemed just as far away as when you were standing on the ground. Clouds were closer, but the blue sky itself still too far away to touch.
Like Cassidy.
He wasn’t used to thinking poetically about anything, really. He’d been like that once. He’d been a young man with his head in the sky, dreaming of his certain romantic future with an auburn-haired woman who’d been destined to be with him as long as he could remember. But when that woman disappeared, that young man then faded away into this older man, an economics expert who thought concretely, who dealt with numbers and facts.
Only a man who’d lost his heart could understand the true concept of risk.
Eric leaned his head back in the uncomfortable coach seat and sighed for the millionth time since takeoff an hour ago. He should have had something stronger than orange juice. Anything to keep him from his own thoughts for the seven hours between Boston and London.
“Are you going to London on business?” he heard a woman ask, and in the split second before he turned his head to the left, he thought, I can’t have a casual chat with someone now. I just can’t. But the person next to him was a snoozing elderly man.
Eric heard a muffled male response and realized the question came from a woman in the seat behind him. “It’s quite a long flight, and I hoped you wouldn’t mind talking awhile,” she said.
The man said yes in a tone that told Eric the woman was attractive and the man was surprised she’d chosen him to converse with. Eric sighed again. The last thing he felt like doing was listening to a cheery get-to-know-you chat.
On the other hand, he’d already seen the in-flight movie a few months ago, and it hadn’t been that great. Maybe eavesdropping would pass the time, help him get away from the musty history museum of his own mind and the full-color portrait of Cassidy Maxwell that was on permanent exhibit there.
“So, are you headed to London on business?” the woman repeated.
Her voice carried over the plane’s engines better than the man’s did, and when Eric didn’t hear his response, he filled in the blank with his own mental answer. Yes, I am, he said silently. I’m going to London on business. Unfinished business.
“A woman, eh?” Eric heard, and gave a start, wondering if she was a mind reader.
“I’m a psychologist,” the woman said to her seat-mate. “I can tell when a man’s crossing an ocean for a woman. Is she your wife or your girlfriend?”
Neither, Eric answered in his head. He sipped his juice.
“Was she your wife or your girlfriend?”
Neither, Eric repeated silently. Cassidy had never been his girlfriend. She was supposed to be, because they’d planned it that way. For years at Saunders University, they’d whispered their plans. Cassidy’s face had shone with anticipation and, every time, he’d felt his own face heating up to match. It was all figured out. Right after her graduation. It was the moment he lived for, drew breath for, waited for…for four long years.
The moment that never came.
“Tell me her name,” the psychologist urged. “Just her first name.”
“Cassidy,” Eric said and, realizing he’d said it out loud, glanced at his neighbor. The man rasped out a snore.
“How long have you known her?”
I met her when she was six and I was eleven.
“And now you’re…?”
Thirty-five. But, he said, and the words were hard to say, even just mentally, I don’t know her anymore.
Cassidy never showed up to her graduation ceremony. Eric never again saw the only girl he’d ever loved. Something had happened. Something to make her run from him and the future they’d planned. Whatever that something was, it was something she never bothered to tell him.
She disappeared ten years ago, he said in his head to the doctor, but I stopped knowing her before that. I just didn’t realize I’d stopped knowing her until she was gone, and then there was nothing I could do.
The doctor nodded in understanding. At least, in Eric’s mind she did. Surprising himself with his candor, he continued his story. She was like my little sister, tagging around after me all the time. When I went off to college in Massachusetts, to Saunders University, I left all my friends in New Jersey. She was just in junior high, just another friend I was leaving behind. She started writing me these letters. The letters were…see, Cassidy never talked much. We hardly ever even talked on the phone the whole time I knew her. She was quiet. Her face did all her talking.
The doctor nodded again, scratching on a pad in Eric’s imagination.
But these letters— Cassidy was smarter than her age, funny, insightful. I read these letters over and over and saw how she was growing up into someone who… I dated plenty of women in college. But what they had to say could never compare to anything Cassidy wrote me.
The plane shuddered, the kind of shake that would rattle a nervous flyer but caused a veteran traveler like Eric to pick up a napkin in case he spilled his drink.
“Did that scare you?” Eric heard the doctor ask.
Sure, it scared me. She was a kid. I was an adult. Finally, I made an effort to distance myself from her. I answered her letters less frequently. I’m sure she noticed, but when I was a senior, she invited me home anyway for her Sweet Sixteen party.
“I see,” the doctor said. She was quite good at her job, Eric thought. She must be expensive. Good thing she wouldn’t be charging him.
I was going to blow off the party, stay at school, but her mother called me and asked me to please come, because it would mean so much to Cassidy. I had a feeling Cassidy had told her mother I was giving her the cold shoulder, and I felt very guilty about it because our parents were close, so I said okay. And I went. And…
“Yes?” the doctor asked behind him. Eric closed his eyes.
Cassidy had opened the door for him that evening. The room behind her was colorful and noisy, filled with friends and fun. She was wearing a tight black shirt and fitted black pants. Eric had glanced over her shoulder, searching for her, before he realized he was looking right at her. Her hair shone around her head and shoulders. He’d never seen her wear black before. He’d never seen her wear makeup before, either, not properly. He’d never seen the delicate skin at her collarbone, sprinkled with freckles, and wondered if the skin below it had the same freckles. She’d stared into his eyes then, and he knew that she knew what she’d become, and what she could do to him.
And later, a few hours later, she’d pulled him into the hall, away from her high school friends, and leaned in, and…
I’m sorry, Doctor, Eric said silently, opening his eyes. There are exactly three moments in my past that I never allow myself to remember. I remember they happened, but I can’t put myself back there again because I can’t live with that intense pain. This is the first of those three moments.
“It’s all right,” the doctor said.
Eric had fled that night, before the party had even ended. Fled straight to the train station, headed back to Saunders, and tried for the rest of that year to forget Cassidy Maxwell.
“Could you?” the doctor asked.
No, I couldn’t.
The next year, Cassidy arrived with her suitcases at Saunders, having just graduated as valedictorian, and signed up as a political science major. Just like Eric. He was now a Saunders grad, but he had an impossible time tearing himself away from the campus now that it had suddenly become more beautiful. He was making political contacts and headway, but found himself visiting Saunders often, dropping in on Professor Gilbert Harrison many times to talk. He didn’t recall what he’d said to tip the professor off, but one day Gilbert tipped him off about an assistant teaching position in the polisci department, and a couple of days later, Eric was standing in front of a lecture hall with Cassidy in the front row.
“That must have been hard,” the doctor said with sympathy.
It was hard, all right. He had been hard, watching Cassidy every day. Cassidy, who’d never verbally strung two sentences together in all the years Eric had known her, would raise her hand and wax brilliantly about any political topic, would debate any controversy with moxie. Young men and women alike were taken with her, and wanted to study with her, have dinner with her, be her friend or more.
But Cassidy’s biggest smiles were reserved for the person she’d been giving them to since she was a child. Eric could read those smiles as well as he always could. She wanted him. She knew he wanted her.
“Then what?” the doctor asked.
Cassidy respected the distance her old friend put between them. Even when that semester ended, he was still a faculty member, and both understood—without speaking to each other about it—that the teacher-student relationship had to be kept that way. But Eric had to be near her, had to be with her. They met off campus many times, and during those times, Cassidy reverted to her wordless ways. They brushed hands in a jazz club. He breathed in the scent of her neck as he pulled out her chair at a coffeehouse. Finally he found himself at four in the morning, sitting with Cassidy under the huge oak on the quad, the entire campus asleep around them.
I’m sorry, Doctor, Eric said in his mind. What I said, what she said, the promise we made—this is the second moment I can’t let myself remember.
“No problem,” the doctor said.
What Cassidy and Eric had vowed to each other kept him wide-eyed awake, excitedly alive, until Cassidy’s last semester as a senior. Then something… A toothache had sent Cassidy into emergency oral surgery, and she was laid up. Eric had tried to help her keep up with her work, but stubborn Cassidy had pushed him away, wanted to do everything herself. He’d seen less and less of her, and when he had seen her, she was pale, thinner, with bags under her eyes as big as coin purses. That last time he’d seen her, two days before her graduation, she’d been in the library, scribbling madly into a notebook. When he’d tapped her on the shoulder, she’d jumped, stared at him with frightening, bloodshot eyes, and bolted from the library, mumbling an apology, or something that sounded like it.
Graduation day dawned. A horde of black-robed seniors hurtled themselves off the main building’s stone stairs, shrieking with joy. Eric waited in the spot they’d chosen. Waited with a locket in his sweating hand, the one he’d wanted to give Cassidy as they began their new future together. The quad emptied around him as he stood alone in that moment…
“I understand,” the doctor said.
Eric was glad. That third moment he couldn’t let himself remember, that one was the hardest. The one he’d had no explanation for—for ten years.
He clutched the empty plastic cup in his hand, crumpling it, and suddenly a smiling flight attendant was there. He dropped it in the trash bag she held out and leaned back again.
He never searched Cassidy out. He’d refused to. His pride wouldn’t let him. But now, Professor Gilbert needed help from his former students to save his job, and everyone knew reliable Cassidy Maxwell would do anything for a friend. One conversation with a fellow Saunders alum and suddenly Eric was over the Atlantic Ocean, traveling to another continent to bring the only woman in his heart back into his life.
The main lights in the cabin blinked out. People around Eric reached for headsets and neck pillows, reclining their seats back.
“I’ll let you get some sleep. Good luck on your trip,” the doctor said.
Eric knew the luck wasn’t for him, but decided to take a little anyway. He was about to need it.
All he’d ever wanted to do was to help people. That’s why he became a professor. He wanted to teach young people, guide them, assist them in any way he could in making decisions that could affect the rest of their lives.
Now, there was one person Gilbert Harrison was powerless to help. Himself.
Gilbert laid his head down on his cluttered desk. His forehead knocked several file folders to the floor and he heard papers scatter, but he didn’t bother to bend down to pick them up. He just closed his eyes and listened to silence. It was nearly midnight, but he couldn’t go home. These days, it was hard to leave his office, because each time he did, he was forced to wonder if it would be the last time.
He’d done so much in this office, for so many students, for so many years.
The Board of Directors’ investigation, led by the vindictive Alex Broadstreet, was a humiliating chapter in Gilbert’s professional life at Saunders University. So far, he’d had his name dragged through the mud and he’d been forced to ask former students to return to campus to appeal to the board on his behalf. It was ironic, considering they didn’t even know the half of what he’d done for each of them, but he had taken a chance that their successes as alumni could sway the board and save his job. The only job he ever wanted to do.
And just as a candle of hope had begun to flicker, it was blown out again when he got Eric Barnes’s phone call today. Eric had called from Logan International Airport, about to board a plane to London to bring Cassidy Maxwell back to Massachusetts.
“Are you sure you want to do that?” Gilbert had asked after a stunned pause.
“Ella Gardner and I had lunch last week,” Eric had answered. “She told me about you, and your trouble there at Saunders. Are you all right?”
“I’m hanging in there,” Gilbert had answered honestly.
“Look, you know you’re everyone’s favorite professor. It’s our turn to help you. I’ve thought this over. I know—Cassidy—would want to help you if she could. And I’m going to London to ask her.”
He can barely say her name, Gilbert had thought. Eric was as afraid to face Cassidy Maxwell as Gilbert was, though for entirely different reasons. “I don’t think that’s necessary,” Gilbert said, measuring his words. “She’s now Ambassador Alan Cole’s chief go-to girl.”
Good for her, he thought silently, in spite of his growing fear. “She has a busy schedule. Don’t bother her with this, with my problems.”
“You know her, Professor. If she finds out about this later, she’ll be angry no one told her.”
“True,” Gilbert had been forced to admit. “Why not just give her a call or e-mail her?”
“I think she’ll be more likely to come back if she’s summoned in person. Besides…” His voice had trailed off and Gilbert had waited a moment before Eric added, “Phone calls and e-mails are too easy to ignore. And she’s done an admirable job of ignoring me for the past ten years. For your sake, I need to talk to her in person.”
“For my sake, huh?”
Gilbert could tell by the silence that perhaps a decade wasn’t long enough to heal a broken heart. “Are you sure you are ready for this?”
“It’s time,” Eric had said shakily, then more forcefully, repeated, “It’s time.”
“What if she doesn’t…”
“I don’t plan on dragging her back by her hair. I’ll tell her what’s going on and leave it up to her.”
Gilbert had sighed then. Eric knew what dire straits his old professor was in. If Gilbert protested any more, Eric would grow suspicious, and he couldn’t afford that. He’d wished his former student luck and hung up.
Then he’d sat here in his office chair, without moving, for hours. His anxiety, already high from his job crisis, had expanded until he felt he’d be eaten from the inside out.
He lifted his head and looked out the tiny window next to his desk, but saw nothing but his own reflection. That was the last thing he wanted to see: Gilbert Harrison staring into himself. He snapped off the small desk lamp and sat in darkness. He could see the outline of leaves against the sky. When a breeze blew through, the leaves fluttered slackly, beginning to lose their hold on the branches. In harsh New England winter afternoons, Gilbert could see the Liberal Arts building across the street. In late spring, the lush greenery again obstructed his view. He had noticed this every year—for thirty years.
In the last few weeks, he’d seen his past come back to him: Saunders sweethearts David and Sandra Westport, crack attorney Nate Williams, the still-beautiful Kathryn Price, sharp-as-a-tack Jane Jackson, a transformed Dr. Jacob Weber. He’d been glad to see each of them. His heart had puffed with pride as he’d examined their older, different faces and heard their stories.
But Cassidy Maxwell might come back, as well.
Her former classmates had gotten wind of her possible return and were excited at the prospect of seeing her again. She had been the good girl on campus, a brilliant scholar, a willing tutor, everyone’s friend. The alumni were convinced she could play a major role in keeping Gilbert on the Saunders faculty.
“Won’t it be great to see her again?” they asked Gilbert, one by one. “It’s been so long! Isn’t it terrific she might come back?”
What no one would have ever guessed was that if Gilbert had his way, he’d keep good-girl Cassidy as far away from Saunders University as possible. The other side of an ocean wasn’t even far enough.
If Cassidy came back, she’d also bring back Gilbert’s deepest, darkest secret. A secret she’d discovered a long time ago, accidentally. A secret no one else knew.
That secret could not only destroy Gilbert’s career, but his entire life as he knew it—his and the lives of others.
Gilbert put his head in his hands again. I’m so sorry, Eric, he thought with shame. I’ve never before wanted one of my students to fail.
But I hope you do.
Chapter Two
“What do you mean, we can’t get the Château Clinet?” Cassidy asked.
She held the phone slightly away from her ear as the wine supplier offered a rambling explanation for not being able to meet Cassidy’s wine order for the ambassador’s reception tonight. Unfortunately, Cassidy didn’t have much time for explanations. She was more a solutions person.
“Right,” Cassidy interrupted. “Well, since it won’t do to be without wine tonight, we need a Plan B. Can you replace the Château Clinet with Château Clos Fourtet? If I can’t get the Pomerol, the Saint-Emilion should be just as good.” The wine supplier put her on hold to check and, lifting her chin to her open office door, Cassidy called, “Sophie?”
The eager junior staffer appeared almost immediately. Cassidy waved her in and handed her a stack of paper samples. “If you’d please call the paper shop, the number’s on top, tell them the stock they recommended for the official stationery is excellent, but the color was a little dark. Tell them the light cream is what we want.”
“Right away.” As Sophie scurried out, the wine supplier came back to the phone to report they could indeed deliver the needed quantity of Château Clos Fourtet to the ambassador’s residence that afternoon. Cassidy was relieved. Ambassador Alan Cole was hosting a Winfield House reception that night for his good friend, the artistic director for a prominent Chicago ballet company, who was in London to collaborate on a project with the Royal Ballet. The ambassador was pleased to have his friend in town, and Cassidy didn’t want any problems, no matter how minor.
Of course, as Ambassador Cole’s office management specialist, Cassidy’s job was to ensure all U.S. Embassy problems were kept to a very bare minimum.
Cassidy thanked the wine supplier and hung up, and the moment she lifted her finger from the End button, her cell phone jingled again. “Maxwell,” she answered. She looked at her index finger, where a permanent dent seemed to have formed. The front desk secretary informed her that the plumber had arrived.
“I’m on my way,” Cassidy said. She breezed through the front office, where many people were typing, faxing, taking calls. Charles, another junior staffer, stood and sprinted over to her. People in the embassy were always running to catch up to Cassidy.
“MP Violet Ashton wants to meet with the ambassador as soon as possible,” he said. Cassidy was appreciative that Charles knew to waste no time on pleasantries. “And Sir Neville Pritchard of the House of Lords wants to see the ambassador, also.”
