Laura Caldwell - The Good Liar

“Let’s go to your hotel,” I said.

“You’re sure?”

“Shut up.”

In his hotel bed, Michael held himself up on his arms, gazing down at Kate. Gorgeous, smart, sexy Kate.

They were stripped of their clothes, and in fact, he felt they were both stripped of everything —every pretense or artifice. His body felt as lean and hard as it ever had, and yet his core was somehow liquid and alive. They were right on the brink, about to consummate this intangible chemistry.

He stared into Kate’s eyes—neither of them had closed their eyes tonight, even while they were kissing—and he felt the momentousness of the instant. Sex had never been like this for him. He almost laughed because they still hadn’t technically had sex yet, but this was it. This was it. That phrase kept returning to his mind. His life was different now. He was taking a step back from the Trust into a normal existence, and yet he was taking a step forward with Kate.

“Ready?” he asked Kate.

Her brown eyes stared into his—into his soul, it felt like. She didn’t say anything. Not a word. Instead, never letting her eyes stray from his, she reached for his hips. Slowly, slowly, she drew him into her.

Four months later

St. Marabel, Canada

“K ate, my girl, it’s your wedding!” Liza yelled, bursting through the door of the church’s anteroom. “I can’t believe you’re shameless enough to wear white.” The sides of her auburn hair were pulled back, a few wavy tendrils escaping. She wore a soft pink dress that draped over her shoulders and exposed her collarbones.

My mother shot Liza a disapproving look.

“Liza, stop,” I said, laughing. I loved when Liza was like this—funny and over-the-top—and the fact was, she was like this ninety percent of the time. The other was a serious, soulful Liza, moody and hard to reach. She rarely let anyone see that Liza.

My mom scurried around me, fluffing my dress, and pinching off a few bouquet flowers she saw as less than ideal. We were in a tiny church tucked on an angled alley street of St. Marabel. The church was where Michael came to Mass the few times a year he did so while summering in this town. Despite the fact that I hadn’t gone to Mass in years, I found the church cozy and comforting. I needed that because now that Michael was opening a restaurant here, and Michael was about to become my new husband, and all of this meant that my life was entirely new and different and unknown. Fitting that it was spring.

“I need one minute alone with my friend,” Liza said, drawing me away from my mother and against a stone wall. Her smile waned. She looked contemplative. “Are you sure you want to do this?” she said, her voice low.

“Liza. We’ve been through this.”

Liza had seemed pleased when my first date with Michael had gone so well. She seemed delighted when he came to see me again in Chicago. She sounded cautious when I went to visit him for a weekend. And when we got engaged, she was alarmed. I understood. Our relationship had progressed so rapidly, I hardly knew how to process it myself.

Long-distance relationships are the toughest breed. Michael and I fell for each other—hard—aided by the phone sex and the long weekends and the painful goodbyes that often brought me to tears. And then I couldn’t stand being away from him. It literally wrenched something inside me that I couldn’t see him, that I was forced to only hear him at night on the phone. And so our relationship had moved with electric speed. It was either that or pretend I didn’t care and try to let it grow with a slow build. But Michael wasn’t slow, at least when it came to me. He told me the first weekend I visited him that he loved me. We were in Vermont, riding horses down the back trail of his property and watching the sun sink fast over a small mountain ridge. His horse nudged up to mine. I tightened my gloved hands on the reins, surprised. Then I relaxed when I looked into his face, a face so familiar somehow.

“I can’t believe I’m going to say this after such a short time,” he said. “But I have to.” He paused.

I heard a branch break somewhere in the woods, then the hum of a distant plane.

“I love you.” He said this with certainty. And certainty was a concept I hadn’t been familiar with for a long time. I’d been living with Scott, wondering and wondering and wondering—Would we have a baby? Would we last without one?

I didn’t return the sentiment that cold day in Vermont. I wanted to. But I also wanted to be smart. I wanted to take Michael’s words home and roll around in them. I wanted to see if they fit.

Yet the next day, when I was about to leave him at the ticket counter of the little airport, I felt a clutch in my chest. I would miss this man so much. And I didn’t want to miss him. I wanted to see him every morning, and every night. Before I’d met Michael, I’d honestly believed I would never feel like this again. Scott—like a thief who carries off valuables in the night—had stolen from me trust, hope, innocence, belief, all the components of first love. I had assumed the theft was complete and that I would never possess those things again. But now I had this surge in my chest, the return of feelings lost.

I dropped my bag on the concrete sidewalk. I stood on tiptoe and grabbed Michael’s face in my hands. “I love you, too.”

“Well, it’s about time.”

We kissed, laughing.

I went back to Vermont the next weekend. The week after I visited his summer place in St. Marabel, where he was moving to permanently open his restaurant. The weekend after that when he returned to Chicago, I walked into Michael’s room at the Peninsula to find it wasn’t a room, it was a suite, and it was filled with peonies, my favorite flower. A table was set up under the window, laden with a meal made of my favorite Chicago dishes—a cheese flight from Avec, endive salad from Bistrot Margot, sea bass from Spring and chocolate truffles from Vosges called Black Pearls.

“If you were to leave Chicago,” Michael said, “I know you’d miss the city. But I promise to try and bring Chicago to you whenever I can. My home is wherever we’re together.”

In that instant, I saw where this was going and I started to tremble.

“Kate.” He cupped one cheek with his big hand and kissed my eyes, my forehead, then, slowly, my mouth. “I want to do that every day. Will you marry me?”

I didn’t hesitate a second before I said yes.

I put my house on the market within a week. I won’t say that I didn’t sob—great, gulping sobs—when I left. But once I was in my mother’s car, on the way to the airport and away from Chicago for good, I felt like I was lifting off.

And now I was in St. Marabel, about to be married again.

“Liza,” I said. “Remember, it was you who set us up.”

“I know, I know.” She tucked a tendril of auburn hair behind her ears and peered into my eyes. “I just didn’t think…”

“You just didn’t think what?”

“That you’d get married. He was supposed to be a transition guy.”

“Well, he turned out to be my guy.”

She breathed out hard.

“What?” I said. “What is it?”

“It’s just so soon.”

“Liza, you like Michael, right?”

“Of course.”

“Why do you like him?”

She shrugged. “Because he’s an honorable guy. He’s a great man.”

“Right. And you know that just from meeting him at work. You should see his personal side. You should see him at home with me. He’s amazing.”

I watched Liza’s face as I said this. It had occurred to me early on that maybe Liza and Michael had had a fling. Sometimes the way they spoke of each other made them seem more familiar than just two old colleagues. But Liza had flatly denied this when I asked her, and Michael had laughed.