his mother said. “Don’t drop her.”
“Maybe I will,” Eric said, shifting his weight to give Cassidy a dropping feeling. She shrieked with happiness.
“Don’t worry,” Mrs. Maxwell said to his mother. “She’s fallen on her head about fifty-eight times today already.”
Eric set Cassidy down, right side up, on the grass. “From now on,” he said quietly, so only she could hear, “remember that even if it takes a long time, all you have to do is wait. I’ll figure out where you are and I’ll always come to get you.”
Cassidy tugged on his hands until he brought his face near hers. Then she bumped her forehead onto his, once, twice.
Then she leaped away from him, launched herself into the air and turned a perfect cartwheel, her toes pointing straight up to the sky.
Chapter One
October 2005
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
