Page 83 of Come Back To Me

“It was the first thing that popped in my head,” he admits.

“It did torment me,” I say in wonder. “I would lay awake at night turning the possibilities over and over in my head. A scrap of paper with the number 49 written on it. She’s a bloody genius, that Penny.”

“It’s always the eccentric ones who have the most wisdom,” he tells me.

I roll a piece of napkin between my fingers. “I don’t know how my mother had my phone number,” I say. “I change it so often…”

“I gave it to her.”

“How did you have it?”

He sips his coffee and studies me over the rim. “Posey.”

I nod. “She never used it…”

“I think she would have eventually. She was working up the nerve. When I gave it to her I wrote it on a notepad she had on her fridge, so it was right there—your name and number.” I nod. This was all so hard to talk about.

There’s something I want to ask him that I’ve been putting off.

“Did Petra tell you that I went to your houseboat?”

“Yeah,” he says. I wait for him to say more but he just stares at me. Fine, I’ll play.

“Um, where is she now?”

He leans back in his chair and puts his hands behind his head as he stares up the ceiling. “She’s still there. We ended things shortly after we got back from Paris. She’s staying there until her new place is ready. I moved into the Four Seasons.”

“Nice view,” I say. “Did you end things because of what I did?”

He repositions himself so that his elbows are resting on the table and he’s leaning toward me. “Are you talking about that one time you went on live television and announced to the world that I was yours? Yeah, that caused some problems between us. Especially when I watched it and she caught me smiling.”

I put a hand over my face, shaking my head. “That’s just awful. I was being vindictive, acting on impulse, per usual.”

“Well, I enjoyed it,” he admits. “I waited for years for a sign that you loved me, and there it was. Go big or go home, right, English?”

His laugh warms me. I squirm in my seat as tiny cliché butterflies fly around in my belly.

“Yara, I’m just a man, you know? I lost hope and Petra…”

“It’s all right,” I say quickly. “Let’s worry about today, not yesterday or tomorrow. We’ll leave tomorrow to worry about itself, yeah?”

“Yeah,” he smiles.

We eat our sandwich in silence and then he says, “There’s something I have to tell you that’s unrelated to us.”

I set down my mug of coffee and look at him warily.

“When I was looking for you I Googled your name. That’s how I found your mother. I came to see her, but she knew less about you than I did.”

I press my lips together. Posey had already told me, but it was still unsettling to hear it from him. He’d spoken to her before she died and I had not.

“But how did searching for me on the internet lead you to my mother?” I ask him.

“Have you ever Googled yourself, Yara?”

I shake my head.

He smiles. “I didn’t think so.”

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