Chapter 31
The third day of the conference—Kansas City, MO/North Sioux City, SD
When he got back to his room last night, Daniel promised himself he wouldn’t do anything weird or obsessive or stalkerish. He’d wait to hear from Nora. There had to be a good reason she hadn’t called him back.
But when he woke up this morning, there still wasn’t any message on his cell phone. Or his room phone. Or a note under his door. Or anything.
So he paged her again. That was at six-thirty.
At seven, when he should have been heading over to the booth, he called down to the lobby to get the phone number for her room. There was no answer.
He should have gone over to the convention center then, but what if Nora had had some kind of accident in her room last night? She was the only reporter from Livingston Scientific Network here—there wasn’t anyone to check up on her or miss her on the convention floor. Except him.
She didn’t answer when he knocked on her door, either. But if she’d had an accident and she was unconscious, obviously she wouldn’t answer, would she?
So he went down to the lobby—this was definitely bordering on stalkerish, but he didn’t know what else to do—and asked them to send someone up to her room to be sure she wasn’t bleeding to death on the floor of the bathroom or something.
“The guest in Room 2020 checked out yesterday morning, sir,” a too-perky woman at the reception desk told him.
There was nothing else to do but go over to the booth, and wonder what the hell was going on with her.
Why would she leave in the middle of the conference? She’d told him how many interviews she had lined up, how many booths she needed to visit and panels and demos she needed to sit in on. She’d been so excited about it; she was going to show what a star reporter she was beyond all doubt.
And then she just… left town.
Had something happened with her family? If there was an emergency with one of her parents, or her Aunt Rachel, she would change her plans and rush home for that, and calling him would be the last thing on her mind.
If Mom or Dad or Bianca were in the hospital, he’d probably forget about Nora until he got there and saw them for himself, no matter how wonderful Thursday night had been.
He couldn’t blame her for doing the same.
That had to be it. What other explanation could there be—unless it was all his fault. Unless he’d done or said something to scare her off.
No. Not just scare her. Traumatize her—so badly she’d flush a massive career opportunity just to put a thousand miles between them.
When he finally got to the booth, he was completely distracted, replaying every word from Thursday night to try and figure out what he’d said that was so horrible.
“Daniel, is everything okay?”
It was Red.
“Sure,” he lied. “I’m fine. What’s going on?”
“You’ve been emptying and refilling that rack of brochures over and over.
Usually you’re a little more with-it than that.
” She hesitated; he could see she was debating her next words.
“If you need to talk about something, you can carry me over to the lounge and I’ll just sit and listen.
It’s the least I can do for you, the way you’ve been helping me the last couple of days. ”
He was sorely tempted. Another perspective—a woman’s perspective—might be just the thing he needed. But he couldn’t dump all his feelings and fears on Red. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t really appropriate, either. Besides, there was a lot of work to do today.
“Thanks, Red. But I’m fine—well, I’ll be fine by the time the floor opens, anyway.”
They’d broken each other’s hearts before and he managed to function afterwards. It would be miserable, but he could do it again.
What other choice did he have?
Nora , a few hours later
Nora was impressed, both at the demonstration the Gateway people had put on, and also at the way they’d managed to throw it together on almost no notice, on a weekend.
If they could really do everything they talked about, they could be looking at massive growth. Of course, the whole point of today had been to sell her on that.
Well, mission accomplished. What she’d seen today was enough to guarantee them a cover story—and a very positive one. There was no way Mr. Brooks could argue against it.
She was back at the Prairie Gate Inn, in her room overlooking the parking lot.
Not that the view from any other side of the building would have been any better.
It was just as well she was in a quiet hotel in a quiet neighborhood.
She had a lot of work to do tonight, translating all her interview notes into something more legible, then shaping them into a story, before going to bed early so she could be up at four-thirty in the morning to get to the airport tomorrow.
She wondered if it was just company policy to book the cheapest flight, or if she was being punished, because her flight took off at six o’clock, and it went to Dallas of all places, where she’d connect to a flight to Boston and finally land at three-thirty in the afternoon.
She checked the pager; no messages, still. She tried his cell phone again and got no answer, just like last night; so she left another message.
It made no sense. Why didn’t he answer her?
Had something happened to him? He could have had an accident.
One of his team members had sprained her ankle; who’s to say he didn’t break a bone or something yesterday?
Things like that happened every day. If he was in the hospital, or resting in his hotel room whacked out on painkillers he wouldn’t be answering his phone.
Or it could be a work crisis—something with his booth, or maybe he’d even been called back to the office. She couldn’t imagine why—but before she’d taken her chance with Bill Whitaker, she couldn’t have imagined being in a hotel room in South Dakota right now, either.
There were plenty of logical—if unlikely—possibilities. She’d just have to wait and find out which one it was when he finally called. In the meantime—if she could force herself to concentrate—she had a hundred pages of notes to go through.
Daniel , nine o’clock in the evening
His team was at the barbecue place across the street from the Marriott—Hickory Moon—for another team dinner. Daniel didn’t really want to go, but sitting alone in his room would have been far more depressing.
It took two pitchers of margaritas for him to finally talk about Nora’s leaving. “I don’t get it. She was so excited for this conference—and then she just vanishes?”
Edward opened his mouth to say something, but before he could get a word out, Red and Blue shouted, almost in unison, “Shut up, Edward!”
“What? I didn’t even say anything?”
“Good,” Blue said. “Keep it that way. And, Daniel, I know it’s weird, but I’m sure there’s a logical reason.”
He didn’t bother to say that he’d already thought of every logical explanation, and a lot of illogical ones. “Yeah. Or maybe one night was all we were allowed to have. Maybe I should think of it as a gift, and just enjoy it for what it was. Right?”
He could see that nobody agreed with that, but they all nodded along with him anyway, and then Thomas changed the subject. Daniel appreciated that.
But the more he thought about it, while half-listening to the team talk about which other booths they liked the best, the more he felt like he had his answer.
God or the universe or whoever decided these things, gave them one night together, just so they could remember what love felt like.
And comfort. And safety. And all the other things they’d been for each other.
They both needed that reminder—Nora wasn’t having any more luck having a social life since graduation than he was. Maybe they’d been given one night as a gentle push to get out of their ruts and start actually living again.
Or maybe that was nonsense, because it was easier to pretend he believed the universe had a plan than to admit he didn’t have a clue what had gone wrong.
They stayed at the restaurant until nearly ten o’clock. When they got back to the hotel, Bryce asked Daniel to borrow his phone. “My girlfriend likes for me to call around this time.”
Daniel handed it over. “No problem. But where’s yours?”
Bryce shrugged. “Yeah, about that. I kind of slipped on the bathroom floor last night, and it sort of went flying out of my hands into the sink. And the sink was half full of water.” He had the decency to look down as he was telling the story.
“There were some sparks. And a really loud pop. And then a little bang, and some smoke. I’m pretty sure it’s dead. ”
Mr. Kincaid couldn’t blame Daniel for that, could he? He was responsible for his team, but he could hardly be expected to prevent his co-workers from having accidents in their own bathroom, right?
“Stuff happens, Bryce. I’m sure you’re not the first one to kill a phone when you’re travelling.”
Bryce gave him a grateful smile. “Thanks, boss. I appreciate it.” He unfolded Daniel’s phone, and looked curiously at it. “Uh—this is my phone. That’s my number.”
Daniel took it back, and he saw Bryce was right. The number written there below the tiny screen wasn’t the number he remembered. “Yesterday morning, before my panel. Our phones were both on the main podium. I must have grabbed yours by mistake.”
And he hadn’t thought about it when he paged Nora. He entered the number he remembered, because of course he’d memorized the number on his assigned phone the first time he saw it. The same number he’d given Nora to write down Thursday night.
So maybe she had called back, and left messages on a now-dead phone where nobody could retrieve them.
She probably thought he was ignoring her .
Well, he could fix that. He still had her pager number. He could page her from the phone in her room.
If she even still had the pager. She’d flown home yesterday; she might have gone straight to the office and turned it back in. But it couldn’t hurt anything to try.
Nora , a little later
She needed to get to sleep already.
Nora had been telling herself that for the past hour. But every time she closed her eyes, they refused to stay shut. Instead, they kept stubbornly popping open and focusing on the phone sitting there, unringing, on the night table.
This was ridiculous. Either Daniel couldn’t call, due to illness or accident or maybe abduction by Martians; or, as much as she didn’t want to face up to the possibility, he was refusing to call on purpose.
Every time she thought about that, she dismissed the idea. She hadn’t said or done anything that could have hurt or offended him. Thursday night felt like no time at all had passed; like it was the fall of 1988 all over again, when everything between them was new and easy and wonderful.
And maybe that was the answer.
Maybe when he got back up to his room after walking her to hers, he’d had the same thought, felt just as comfortable and loved as she had.
And then maybe he laid there alone in his cold bed, in the dark, in a strange city and realized there could only be one more night, or two, and they’d have to say another final goodbye.
And maybe he just couldn’t face it. Couldn’t bear to say goodbye again. So he just… didn’t.
Or he was protecting her from having to say goodbye.
Either way, it made all the sense in the world.
Still, she got out of bed, walked over to the dresser to take one last look at the pager, just in case. But there was no point; it was off.
She tried the power button to no effect. The battery must be dead; and she didn’t have a cable to charge it. They’d given her one, but it was—oh, God, she was so careless—sitting on her kitchen table back in Boston.
So even if she was wrong and Daniel wanted to reach her, to say a proper goodbye—or anything else—he couldn’t.
But he didn’t know that, so if he was trying to call her, he surely thought she was ignoring him. Probably for the exact same reason she’d decided he was ignoring her.
She wasn’t sure if this was some sort of message from the gods of love and romance, or their cruel joke. She didn’t even know which was worse.
She only knew how much it hurt.