Chapter 2. Cait #2
Since moving to London, Cait had mostly avoided holidays with her family, which had turned into subdued affairs where Alice and her mother cooked, and her father made a teary toast. Instead, she’d spend them with Bram’s family in Amsterdam or would fly her parents in for the week before Christmas.
Sometimes Maggie would visit for her winter break.
Things had been— fine . That’s the word Cait supposed she would use to describe her life before Luke reached out to her last month, the first time in well over a decade.
With her endless travel for work, and the weekends consumed with shuffling the kids from piano classes to soccer practices, she didn’t have time to think beyond what was most pressing and urgent.
She’d gone on a few dates on the rare night the kids were with Bram, but often she’d find herself in bed with a bottle of bubbly, hoping to stumble across a halfway decent Netflix series that she hadn’t already binged.
Her social life was pretty much nonexistent.
She’d never been good with female friendships, and her two closest friends in London were the wives of Bram’s colleagues at Deutsche Bank.
She’d quickly come to learn that leaving her marriage made her a threat—either an unwelcome reminder that their own marriages could fail or an image of freedom they secretly envied.
When she first met Bram at a party in law school at Columbia, she thought he was just another rich European grad student who casually referenced deep-water soloing in Mallorca and spent summers hiking Mount Fuji with his grandparents.
He had grown up in Amsterdam, and his mother was half Japanese; he could speak Japanese, Dutch, German, and a beautifully accented English he’d used to seduce Cait away from all the meaningless flings and party boys she used to date.
Still, she would have laughed if someone had told her in those early days that she would marry him.
He was good-looking, and they had fun together, but he was often petulant, and his thirst for adrenaline reminded her a bit too much of Topher.
She considered him just another fling. When he asked her to marry him—while taking tequila shots at a bar on the Lower East Side a couple of days after Topher died—she thought he was kidding, but she’d just been too vulnerable and disoriented to resist.
The first few years postwedding weren’t bad.
They settled into London and their jobs, traveled for both work and play.
They lived independent lives, but that wasn’t a problem until Cait decided it was time to start a family.
They’d always talked about having kids, but now Bram wasn’t sure he wanted them anymore.
Eventually, he said he was willing to go along with it if it was important to her.
It took a year for her to get pregnant, and in that time, they started fighting about everything—in particular, Cait’s long hours at work (“Do you even have time to fit a kid into your life?”) and whether to stay in London, which she wanted, or move to Amsterdam to be closer to his family, which he wanted.
They both panicked when the first ultrasound revealed twins.
Despite the night nurses and live-in nanny, the first few years were an exhausting sprint.
She knew the marriage was over when she began to cringe at his touch.
It wasn’t just the sex that repulsed her.
Her entire body revolted if he put his feet on her lap while they sat on the couch or if he tried to hold her hand as they walked down the street.
She could no longer stand the smell of him eating his sardines and saltines, the curdled sound of his breathing—even his accent started to grate on her.
Really, though, she just couldn’t look fifty years down the road and see growing old with him.
She’d been the one to ask for the divorce, but when she shared with Dr. Wagner that she loathed being alone, he quickly scribbled something in his notebook.
She still sometimes wondered what he’d written.
She began to feel that while things with Bram had never been perfect, at least when they were together, there was someone to text when her plane landed or to wake in the middle of the night when the fire alarm malfunctioned and she had no idea how to change the battery.
She hadn’t seen or spoken to Luke Larkin since the night of Topher’s wake thirteen years ago.
But back in September, she’d sent him a condolence card after learning that his mother had died.
At the last minute, she included her email address and told him to look her up if he ever made it to London.
A week later, his name appeared in her inbox.
c,
hello from the past.
i’ll be on your side of the pond by way of morocco the last week of september.
martini(s) at dukes?
ll
After writing out at least half a dozen lengthy responses, she kept it simple:
Date? Time?
He wrote back immediately with the details.
She wasn’t sure what to expect, seeing him again, but the moment he waved to her and stood up from the plush velvet wingback at Dukes, she decided she was going to sleep with him—again, not as a dewy-eyed first-timer.
Why shouldn’t she? They were adults now.
Her parents were on another continent and his were no longer alive.
They didn’t have to answer to anyone but themselves.
As much as she tried to resist it, she caught herself fantasizing about jetting off with him on some yacht now that he’d retired after selling the tech company he’d started right out of college.
Cait and her sisters had trash-talked him, surmising that Luke’s parents probably helped him fund his company with blood money from the lawsuit after Daniel’s accident, but she didn’t know for sure.
Luke lived in Boston and seemed to spend most of his time traveling the world on his sailboat and working with nonprofits, at least according to his LinkedIn.
Not that she had stalked him or anything.
Those years under the sun had left their mark, and Cait was almost relieved to find he looked older than his forty-three years.
His hair was streaked with gray, and his forehead lined with fine wrinkles.
But he had the same relentlessly blue eyes with long, dark lashes that had mesmerized her as a teenager, and well beyond.
By the second martini, her hand was on his thigh.
“I was worried you wouldn’t want to see me because of how we’d left things the last time,” he said.
“Let’s not talk about that,” Cait said.
Why bring up what happened after Topher’s wake, with her hand where it was?
He hadn’t attended the services but had come down from Boston to see her.
She’d admitted that she often wondered if her feelings for him were just an unresolved adolescent crush or something more real.
Her whole body ached with grief from the wake.
But Luke had looked at her and said, “Go to London. Bram, the job, it all sounds right.” And so she had.
Holding his hand now, she downed the last sip of her martini and leaned in closer.
He had a slight scar on his upper lip from when they were in high school and Topher threw an errant baseball that Luke swung at and missed.
Every time she saw it, she remembered how she’d held her cherry popsicle to his lip to keep the swelling down as they’d headed to the school nurse, and she’d teased him that there was nothing sexier than a popsicle mustache on a guy.
The scar used to tickle her when they kissed.
“Do you have a room here?” she asked him.
Luke frowned. “I don’t,” he said. “And I can’t stay long. I have a benefit for a grantee’s NGO that I need to swing by. That’s actually why I’m in town.”
Cait sat back, embarrassed, and chided herself for being so presumptuous. For once, Bram had stepped up to watch the kids so she could have a night out, and she’d expected something different from the evening.
Luke stood to put on his Belstaff motorcycle jacket but stopped midway. “Will you be at the Folly for Thanksgiving?” he asked.
Cait looked up at him and smiled. “The Folly,” she said.
“I haven’t heard anyone other than my family call it that in a long time.
” She felt an unexpected pang for her childhood home.
A five-bedroom Victorian perched on a peninsula overlooking the Peconic Bay, the house had been in her father’s family since the early 1900s.
As the story went, Cait’s great-grandfather christened the property “the Folly” because it was three stories tall and more than double the size of the neighboring beach cottages—and with only a wife and teenage son, what did he need with that much space?
The original welcome sign, sea weathered and barely legible, now hung above the stone fireplace in the kitchen.
“I’ll be in Port Haven cleaning out my mom’s house that week,” Luke continued. “Come home.”
“This is my home,” Cait said.
Luke looked around the room. “Is it?”
He kissed her cheek when he put her in the cab. She waited a few days to email him, letting him know she’d booked tickets. Again, he wrote back immediately.
i can’t wait to see you