A Hidden Affair: A Novel

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Go after Aaron and find out why he is interested in the wine. Try and stop him before he runs into any trouble. Don’t worry,” she adds, seeing my expression. “My cousin is the strongest person I know.”

  Her words are no comfort. The possibility that something might happen to Ari fills me with a terror and sadness that I have not felt in a decade. In that moment, despite everything that has happened, I understand exactly what he has become to me in the very short time we have known each other. I cannot lose him.

  I should go with Nicole, I think suddenly. Ari and I made a pact to protect each other. As badly as I want to see Jared, I am even more desperate to make sure Ari is all right.

  “Go to Jared,” Nicole says, seeming to read my thoughts. “There’s nothing you can do for Aaron. And the sooner you get your closure,” she pronounces this last word with all but a roll of the eyes, “the sooner we can all move on.”

  She’s right, of course. But still I linger uncertainly. “If you find Ari, I mean, when you find him, please tell him . . . ” I falter. Tell him what, exactly? I’m not sure how to explain my feelings for Ari to myself, much less to him through this near-stranger.

  “Tell him yourself,” she says, “when you see him.”

  Without speaking further, she steps from the boat onto the dock. I start to call after her to thank her, but she is already walking away. I watch as she recedes in the distance. Then I climb into the boat to begin the end of my journey.

  chapter SIXTEEN

  I FOLLOW THE COASTLINE as Nicole instructed, my discomfort with the water muted by anticipation. Seconds stretch to minutes and minutes to hours as I navigate the small boat through the gentle surf. Finally, I round the curve and a white cottage, set back from the beach on a rocky hilltop, comes into view.

  And then I see him, a figure crouched low by the water’s edge, untangling something in the surf. My breath catches and my eyes begin to burn.

  As if he senses my approach, Jared straightens, face breaking into a smile. But it is not me he is searching for, I realize, as his eyes widen with anticipation. He is waiting for Nicole. Confusion clouds his eyes as I dock the boat, a ghost from the past instead of his wife, the woman he never thought he would see again in the last place he expected. I know now that Nicole had not told him about our meeting or the fact that I have been looking for him, either purposefully or because she never had the chance.

  I guide the boat in alongside the narrow dock and climb out. Then I start cautiously toward Jared. He does not move, but blinks twice, his mouth slightly agape, expression helpless. “Jordan?” he says, hoarse and disbelieving.

  “Hello, Jared.” And at this moment I have waited for so long, my voice is calm, my breath even.

  I step forward, close to him now, expecting the questions to spill forth, but they do not. It does not matter how we have come to be here, what has happened in the years in between. He reaches out and touches my face like a blind man, reacquainting himself with the familiar topography, making sure I am really there. I close my eyes.

  His fingers stop in the deep space just below my lips and I can feel his gaze burning through me, measuring the changes brought by time. I am suddenly mindful of my damp clothes, hair pasted flat from my earlier fall into the water. This is not how I anticipated appearing for our reunion. But then I open my eyes and, seeing his rapt expression, I know that he has not noticed or does not care.

  “Jo,” he says, more breath than voice, using the name I have not heard for so long. He opens his arms and wordlessly I fold myself into them, wrapping myself hard around his midsection, not caring if it is right or wrong or awkward—I need to touch him and be this close, to know that this is real. I bury my nose in his white T-shirt, inhaling deeply, and as his scent envelops me, I feel the years melt away. Suddenly, I am twenty-two again, stripped of all pain and fear.

  “I don’t understand,” he whispers, his words muffled in my hair. Reluctantly, I pull back. “How did you . . . I mean, what are you doing here? And why do you have Nicole’s boat?”

  I try to figure out how to answer, then decide to take the last question first. “Nicole had to take care of an errand related to the wine shipment and she sent me here to see you.”

  “Bloody hell!” he swears, pulling back. His face is instantly fearful, as though he had expected something bad to happen, rehearsed for this moment a thousand times in his mind. “I asked her not to do this. Is she all right?”

  I’m jealous at his concern for Nicole and annoyed at its intrusion upon our reunion. “She’s fine.”

  “How do you know each other anyway?”

  “We met in Monaco a few days ago,” I reply. “I was there trying to find you.”

  “And you know that she is my . . . ”

  “Yes.” There are several seconds of silence. I study his face. From a distance he seemed timeless, the same boy I saw on the deck of the boathouse the day we met. Closer now, I notice the passage of time, the receding hairline not quite hidden by his longer locks, the fine lines of worry etched at the corners of his mouth. They do not, I decide instantly, detract from his looks. His eyes are the same emerald green as they had been and though less haunted than in those final desperate months before his disappearance, they seem to carry a heaviness of years, of memories that he cannot outrun or erase.

  How do I appear to him, I wonder? In my mind I am the same girl I was a decade ago but surely the differences are palpable. Do I seem more mature, enigmatic? Or simply worn down by the care and burdens that time and age have brought?

  “Maybe we could go sit down and talk somewhere?” I suggest.

  “Sure,” he replies, his voice matter-of-fact. He leads me from the beach, up a steep pebbled path to the white cottage. Inside there is a modest-sized room with a table and chairs, a sofa with overstuffed cushions set close to a fireplace. A bright orange rug covers much of the crude wood floor. “Coffee?”

  “Please.” There is something surreal about the mundane nature of the exchange, as though I had simply stopped by his college room on the way home from the library.

  As he busies himself in the kitchen nook at the rear of the cottage, I glance around once more, taking in the large bowl of flowers on the table, the bright linen curtains framing a breathtaking view of the sea. There are intimate touches: a basket of clothes waiting to be folded by the door, a note hastily scrawled on the pad by the table. Little signs of Nicole and Jared’s life together. I feel like an intruder.

  “It’s like something out of a movie, I know,” Jared concedes with a laugh as he fills the kettle. “No television. We catch fish, buy rice and vegetables from the village market.”

  “So tell me,” he says, sitting down at the table a few minutes later with a glass coffee press and two cups. “How did you find me?”

  I hesitate; I had not expected to be the one answering questions. “I came back to London on assignment for my job, State Department, you know.” He nods in a way that confirms my suspicion that he’d been keeping up on me over the years. “Sarah is sick with ALS and I thought she needed me. After I arrived, Chris contacted me almost immediately and told me that he didn’t think you really drowned.” Quickly I recap for him our trip to the coroner, the subsequent developments that led us to the answers. “It wasn’t until later that I learned the truth—that they had brought me to London to try and find your research.”

  “To find me,” Jared corrects, his jaw tightening.

  “Right. Anyway, when I realized that someone had faked Sarah’s letter to get me to England, I confronted my boss, Mo. She confessed everything, including the fact that you were alive. She gave me the information she had on you and I went to your last known address in Monaco. That’s where I met Nicole. She didn’t want to admit that she knew you or tell me where you were but I followed her.”

  He smiles faintly. “She’s protective like that.”

  Jealousy rises in me again, followed quickly by a
nger. I didn’t come here to exchange pleasantries about his wife; I came for answers.

  Seeing my expression, his face grows serious. “Sorry, Jo.”

  Jo again. At the sound of the nickname only he called me, my insides crumble. “Why?” I ask simply, knowing that he will understand the question.

  “I was desperate,” he says, his voice cracking. “We had to get the information we’d found into the right hands.” I know he is referring to himself and Duncan, his partner in the research. “But we were shut down at the Madrid conference, not allowed to present our findings.” I listen as he recounts the now-familiar details, seeing the events unfold from his eyes for the first time. He stands and begins pacing. “Then the threats started coming. And after Duncan caved in and agreed to give up on publishing our report, they focused the pressure on me.”

  He stops in front of me. “I could handle it when they were just threatening my life. But then one day I came into your room before you got home and they’d left a photograph on your pillow—it was a man standing behind you in the library as you read, totally unaware. They were trying to send me a message, that they could get to us anytime, anywhere, that the people I loved were not safe.”

  I shiver. I always felt so protected at Cambridge—how could I not have known? He continues, “The government had turned its back on me when I asked for help and the police would be useless, even if they did believe me. So I bought those plane tickets to Rio. I figured I would surprise you after the last day of the race, maybe plan it as a vacation and then see if you would keep running with me once we were safely away. But they found out, even before I’d left the travel agency.” His eyes grow fearful as he relives the events. “I knew then that there was nowhere we could run that they couldn’t get to us. The only way I could keep you safe was to get as far away from you as possible. So I made plans to fake my death and disappear.”

  “But the timing . . . ” I rub my eyes, overwhelmed by all that I’ve learned. “I mean, it was the night of the May Ball. And the race . . . another day and we would have finished the Bumps, taken the Head of the River.”

  “I felt horrible about it,” he admits ruefully. “You know the race never meant to me what it did to some of the guys.” I nod. The May Bumps were the pinnacle of the rowing calendar and for other boys, like Chris, the chance to finally win them and reclaim the title, which the college hadn’t held in a generation, meant everything. But to Jared, the race had been just a game. “Ironic, isn’t it? I was brought to college to help us win the headship. And we almost did. We would have done it the next day, barring a broken blade or some other misfortune. But because of me, my disappearance, we didn’t. I was the one person who was supposed to make it happen and I was the reason why it couldn’t.”

  “Then why?”

  “It wasn’t my choice. I didn’t even know I was leaving that night. I’d gone to the Master a few days earlier, asking for help, and was waiting to hear back from him. Then, the night of the May Ball, I received word, just hours before I was to go. It was only then that he told me how he planned it, the fact that everyone would think I had drowned. I tried to come back and give you a sign, some clue of what was happening, but . . . ”

  His voice trails off. I see the moment in my mind. Jared coming back to speak with me after our fight and finding Chris and me behind the marquee in that stupid, meaningless kiss. How might things have been different if he had been able to talk to me and explain what was going on?

  He sits down again before continuing, “I decided then that my initial impulse was correct.” He sounds so unapologetic now, so certain that the course of action he had taken was the right one. So Jared. I feel a faint tug of irritation, a familiar feeling forgotten through the years. “That by not telling you I would be setting you free, leaving you to move on.”

  Except that I hadn’t. The exact opposite had, in fact, happened.

  “But if you meant to tell me yourself, why did you leave the ring?” I ask.

  “I had done that a few weeks earlier, before the Master agreed to help me. I was terrified by the threats and I thought that I might be killed. So I wanted to leave you a message to help you find my research, just in case. I meant to move the safe deposit box key to a better location,” he adds. “One where you were certain to find it if I was gone. But I never got the chance.”

  And so it had lain taped to the underside of that student desk for a decade, I think. If the furniture had been moved to another room, if someone else had found it, I might never have known. If he had only told me. So many things left to chance.

  My hand travels to my pocket, circles around the ring. For a minute I consider offering to give it back. It doesn’t belong with me anymore. But I’m not ready for that. “How did you manage it?” I ask instead. “Being on the run for so many years?”

  He folds his hands behind his head, stretching out in the chair and gazing out the window toward the sea. “It wasn’t easy at first. When I left that night, I was scared and alone. I had nothing. But the Master proved to be as good as his word—better in fact. He provided everything I needed, put me in touch with the people who could help me keep moving. It turns out there’s a secret society of some sort, Jo. You and I never would have heard of it, but it’s comprised of well-placed Cambridge alumni all over the world, people in high places who can be trusted. He called on them to help me.”

  Sarah and I had always joked about such a conspiracy. I smile inwardly, imagining her reaction to learning it actually exists. “Why would he do it?” I ask. “I mean, I know the Master liked you, but to call in those favors and take such a risk . . . ”

  “I wondered that myself any number of times,” he admits. “In the beginning, I think it was simply out of concern—one of his students came to him in serious trouble and he did what he could to help. But then, about a year later, he came to me with a request—a professor he knew at one of the other colleges was struggling with some research that was close to my area of expertise; would I be willing to help? I said yes, of course; after what he had done for me, how could I say otherwise? I worked on a paper for the professor and he was able to finish his research.”

  “And publish it, without giving you credit,” I add.

  He shrugs. “Does it really matter? He needed help that I was able to give. And it isn’t as if I could publish under my own name anymore. Over the years, the Master came to me with other such requests, always acting as the intermediary to protect my identity and whereabouts. In a funny way, my situation actually worked in my favor—I could travel to the places that the academics needed primary research done, slip in and out easily. The arrangement worked.

  “Of course, I don’t travel much anymore.” He gestures around the cottage. “But we’re settled now. Nicole’s work, combined with some of my consulting projects, has brought in enough income to support ourselves. It’s not as if we need a lot of money to live here. And I make donations to the college, anonymously, to continue to show my appreciation. Without the Master’s help, I would have been killed years ago.”

  “Why didn’t you let me know you were all right? Afterward, I mean.”

  “I wanted to. But it still wasn’t safe. As long as I had the information, they would always be looking for me. So I kept moving, South America, Africa.”

  “I expected to find you in one of those places,” I remark. “I never imagined Greece.”

  “I was a little surprised myself,” he replies, half laughing. “When Nikki suggested it . . . ” he stops, a faint blush creeping into his cheeks. So he has a nickname for her, too. There is an intimacy to the way he says it that tells me now that despite whatever feelings he ever had for me, or may still have, his marriage to her is real. “But it’s turned out to be the perfect hiding spot,” he adds.

  He still has not explained why he chose a life with her instead of me. “So how did you and Nicole meet?” I ask, posing a question just shy of my real one, forcing myself to use her name without changing my inflection.
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  “It was the spring of 1999 when we ran into each other again and—”

  “Again?” I interrupt.

  He pauses, looking away uncomfortably. “Yes. Nicole and I had met once at an archive in France when I was doing some research for my dissertation.”

  “But . . . ” The words stick in my throat, and I am unable to speak. Jared had known Nicole before his disappearance. When he was with me.

  “It was nothing, Jo.” His voice has an urgency now, a need for me to believe him. “We had a cup of coffee in the library canteen, talked about our work. That was all. We didn’t even exchange contact information. I was completely wrapped up in my research . . . and you.”

  I believe him, of course. For all of the questions that have arisen, there has never been a doubt in my mind that Jared was faithful. But the notion that he could have been interested in Nicole back then, even if he didn’t act on it, still makes me nauseous. Why her? I want to ask.

  “It wasn’t until the following year that we met again, when our paths crossed in a bar in Belize one evening,” he says. “I had been alone on the run for months. It was good to see a familiar face, talk to someone who knew me back when I could still be myself.” I imagine it: a beautiful woman, a shared interest in research. Now I understand. She had been there when I could not. I curse the fates that brought them to the same place and reunited them that night.

  “It was almost a year after I’d been gone,” he says gently. I nod, but inside I am screaming. A year was a heartbeat in the lexicon of my grief; the pain then as fresh as the day he had left. “We were both in Belize for several weeks, Nicole taking a holiday after completing a business transaction and me doing research. We got along really well and when she was ready to move on, I was, too. It happened very quickly,” he adds. “Like us.”