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left behind, abandoned like they'd meant nothing, which apparently they were. Nothing. I don’t know what she is now. An architect, I think. I don’t care what she does.”  He took a long drag from his cigarette. 
    “Why don’t I believe you?”
    “What she does wi th her life isn’t my concern.” Yet he wondered if she was happy, wondered if she loved someone, wondered if she regretted leaving him, wondered why he cared. 
    “But yo u lived with her? Just you two together? She must have the patience of a saint. Ah, wait.  If you knew her in Italy, then Simone must know her, too.” Kevin tapped his fingers against the steering wheel.
    “Italy—what happened there—is no longer relevant.”
    “But you lived with her? You keep telling Simone that you like your privacy, your space, that you will never live with anyone yet—”
    “Simone is not Jessica, never will be.” When Kevin looked at him with raised eyebrows and a smirk, he knew he had said too much. 
    “I can’t help but wonder what she did to you to make you so angry, even now.”
    “Never mention her again, not to me, not to anyone.”
    “Sometimes you can be so…European.”
    “I’m Belgian.” He smiled and crushed the cigarette into an empty soda can.  “We are known for our calm control.”
    “You take after your mother’s French side of the family, I think, very dramatic. Make yourself presentable, you look too… Belgian at the moment.” Kevin parked the car along a narrow street. “Was that Italian you were speaking to her back there?”
    “Why?”
    “Strange that two people who hadn’t seen each other in years should fall so easily into a language not their own.”
    “Your point?” He tucked his shirt into the waistband of his pants. 
    “Making an observation.”
    "You're not paid to make observations."
    "We're photographers, doesn't that—"
    "I cannot deal with you right now." He stepped from the car and stuffed his arms into the battered leather jacket. His fingers folded over the worn piece of paper he'd carefully folded into the inside pocket before leaving New York. “Kevin, I’ve changed my mind.”
    “About the dinner? You can’t. We’re already here, there’s no way we can talk ourselves out of this one, you’re too—”
    “I’m staying in Boston tonight. Book me a hotel, I don't care where, just do it.”  He needed to follow-through, bad idea or not. He needed to find out what she'd meant about a do-over, why she wore that ring, and how she'd managed to walk away from what they'd had without a word. Now was the time for answers. She ran away, he didn't.
    “That’s just great .” Kevin slammed the car door. “We have a meeting tomorrow morning about the documentary. I…”
    He tuned out the rest of what Kevin said. His hand closed over the creased paper in his pocket. The impromptu rendezvous may have been a coincidence, but his being in Boston was nothing short of deliberate.
    * * *

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter Three
    Well, that could have gone better.  She could have avoided the bookstore, but no, the Queen of Self-Sabotage had to not only go inside, she also had to find him.  Like the information from the employee hadn’t been enough to make her look like an idiot, no, she had to basically beg him to have a drink with her and mention a do-over. What the hell had she been thinking? Pitiful. 
    A do- over? Had those words actually come out of her mouth? 
    She he sitated outside the rowdy bar. McDougal’s had been her hangout back in college. Same group of friends, actually. What would Jacques think of that? He would probably think it reinforced the theory he had about her life.
    That trip to Italy after graduate school and internship had been her reward to herself for being disciplined all of those years. She had gone there to be reckless and embrace life for a while. But her position at the architecture firm had already been secured. A person simply didn't abandon those kinds of