Seaside Sunsets (26 page)

Did it really matter what she did for a living? She obviously played the cello, and he didn’t care if she did it professionally or for shits and giggles. He saw the way she was carried away when she played, the blissful look that drew her eyes closed and her body to move through the motions of playing in an ethereal fashion. She was a beautiful woman, but when she played, she radiated happiness; her movements were fluid and even more graceful. He sighed with the memory, exhaling all of the tension that had buried itself in his muscles. He’d felt the same happiness coming from her when he was buried deep inside her, their bodies joined as close as two people could be, their hearts opening more to each other with every embrace, every kiss, every breath.

Jamie glanced at the envelope again and sank into his chair. She’d lied to him. Wasn’t that enough? Shouldn’t he forget her? Move on?

He thought about the issue he was working on and the long journey it had taken for him to reach the pinnacle of his career. The years spent meeting with executives, building capital, working eighty-hour weeks while everyone around him told him he was wasting his time. Spinning his wheels. Going up against an eight-hundred-pound gorilla that no one could compete with. Still he’d pushed forward, driving himself harder, working his fingers to the bone, because after all, Google had started somewhere, hadn’t it? What made the founders of Google better than Jamie Reed?

The people who had been there from the beginning and encouraged him rather than try to dissuade him were Vera, Mark, and his Seaside friends. They believed in
him
. They’d never doubted that he’d do what he intended. And yet the only people he’d ever spoken to about his most intimate, hurtful time, when he’d lost his parents, were Vera and Jessica. He’d sidestepped the details around even his Seaside friends. But he’d opened up to Jessica in less than a week.

That had to mean something.

The phone on his desk beeped, and Amelia’s voice came over the intercom. “Excuse me, Jamie?”

“Yes, Amelia?”

“The management team is ready to meet with you in conference room three.”

He had to pull his head together and dig deep if he was going to find the root of this issue in miles and miles of code. “Thank you.”

He scrubbed his hand down his face, still thinking about Jessica. He couldn’t reconcile the look in her eyes as being that of someone who was lying. No matter how hard he tried, no matter how much the pieces weren’t fitting together in the real world, in his gut, and more than that, in his heart, he believed she’d been honest with him from day one, despite the fib about the cell phone not being hers. He smiled at the memory of her clocking him in the head with it.

Before going to the meeting, he made two phone calls. The first was to one of Blue’s brothers, Gage Ryder. Gage was a sports director for No Limitz, a community center in Allure, Colorado, where he developed and ran sports programs for teens. He was well connected in the sports world, thanks to having played Division 1 baseball in college and being scouted by the major leagues. His father had played professional baseball, and Gage had seen firsthand how the rigorous travel and practice schedule affected their family.  He’d chosen not to go that career route, in hopes of one day having a more stable and less stressful family life.

Jamie’s call went to voicemail. He left a brief message. “Gage, it’s Jamie Reed. I need a favor. Call me when you get a chance.”

The second call he made was to Kurt Remington. Kurt’s brother Sage was well connected in the arts community and could get him tickets for anything at the spur of the moment. He didn’t want to rely on reports; some things he needed to see with his own eyes to believe. He hated to call in so many favors at once, but if ever there was a time he needed them, it was now.

After talking with Sage, he picked up his files, laptop, and the envelope, and headed into the meeting.

“FIVE MINUTES.” CHARLIE patted Jessica on the back and lowered his voice. “It’s nice to have you back.”

“It’s nice to be back.” It was Monday evening, and they were already playing the second concert of the week. Although Jessica was prepared, her stomach was queasy and her hands were shaky. Not sleeping and eating very little was not a good combination for such a rigorous schedule as the one she’d had to keep lately, but apparently this was what being heartbroken did to a person. She had no experience with this sort of thing, and she wasn’t enjoying it one bit. Going from hopeful to hopeless, then finding an inkling of hope to cling to again—even if made up in her own head.
He’ll call. He’ll hear my voice on his voicemail and miss me just as much as I miss him
. She had no idea how women went through this roller coaster of emotions over and over, some starting as young as high school.

Charlie leaned in closer. “I was going to wait to tell you, but it’s too exciting to keep to myself. You’re going to be invited into the Chamber Players. The formal invitation is forthcoming.” He squeezed her arm and smiled, then put a finger up to his lips.

Jessica couldn’t have responded if she’d wanted to. She was stunned silent.

An invitation to play with the Boston Symphony Chamber Players would be the pinnacle of her career, what her mother had always hoped she’d achieve. The icing on her already perfect career cake, and still, her heart ached.

“I…” She couldn’t figure out how to express what she was feeling. She knew she should feel overwhelming joy and pride, but she felt numb. Any happiness she was supposed to feel was buried deep inside her grief over losing Jamie.

“Exciting. I know. We’ll talk.” Charlie hurried off to talk with another musician.

The Chamber Players
.

How was she supposed to concentrate now? This was the chance of a lifetime, and she was too heartbroken to enjoy it.

“Put your phone away,” Greg, another musician, said sharply.

She hadn’t realized she had it clenched in her fist. She checked for a return message from Jamie one last time and realized that for a woman who hated cell phones, she’d become awfully adept at texting and checking messages in the last two weeks. She had two text messages. One from Jenna and one from Bella, both telling her they missed her and she should come back to the Cape. Even with the happiness over their friendships, her stomach still took a nose dive when she realized that Jamie hadn’t returned her way-too-desperate message.

It’s really over
.

She tried to swallow past the lump in her throat as she shut the phone off and tucked it into her purse.
Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t cry
. She closed her eyes for a beat and conjured up her mother’s stern voice.
No pouting. No whimpering. No frowns. Up, up, up with your chin.
Jessica lifted her chin, doing her best to swallow the ache seeping from her heart and filling her chest, tightening her throat, and making her heart race. With another deep inhalation, she recalled her mother’s voice again. 
Shoulders squared. Eyes forward, serious and happy, happy, happy. Remember, when you’re on that stage, there’s no place else you’d rather be.

Shoulders back, chin up, she followed the group to the stage.

There’s no place else I’d rather be. There’s no place else I’d rather be.

Liar, liar, pants on fire.

AMELIA WALKED ACROSS the conference room where Jamie was meeting with the directors and managers of several divisions, strategizing new ways to track down the drone in their system.  The large conference room looked like a war zone, with empty coffee cups scattered around the table, whiteboards filled with strategies for deciphering where the drone in the code might be, and documents and files spread across the large mahogany table. There were twenty-seven managers and directors around the table, each looking worn-out and frustrated, but because of their dedication to OneClick, and in turn, Jamie, they were still there, hours past closing time.

The group continued discussing the issue while Amelia handed Jamie an envelope and whispered, “Sage’s contact had this delivered. It’s for tonight at eight. It was the best he could do.”

Jamie glanced at his watch.
Seven thirty
. “Thank you.”

“I had Marcia bring your tux. It’s in your office, and she said to tell you not to spill anything on it this time.” Amelia smiled at that. Marcia was Jamie’s housekeeper. In addition to cleaning, she ran various errands for him, and after six years as his employee, she knew him well.

“Please thank her for me. I’ll never make it in time, but maybe I’ll catch the tail end.”

“I’ll tell her.”

Jamie turned his attention back to his division managers and programmers. They’d spent hour upon hour trying to track down the damn bug, and still, no one had any clue where to look. There were too many levels of code, too many paths to follow. Jamie was stymied as badly as his staff was, and it made the situation that much more untenable. Jamie was a master troubleshooter, and when it came to coding, whatever his highly effective, experienced staff couldn’t handle—which was almost nil—he always could. But after days of going through enough code to scramble his brain, he was still at a loss.

Jamie listened to his top-level managers tossing ideas back and forth and realized that there was only one way to ensure nothing had been missed. It was late, and no one wanted to be there, least of all him, but he had to try to get to the bottom of this.

He addressed the group. “Obviously we’re missing something, somewhere, and the only way I can see to do this is to start at the top again. We’ll work our way through each level with a fine-tooth comb and find this goddamn drone.”

A collective groan rose from the group.

“Jamie, we’ve gone over this, starting from scratch, for over a week. Do you really think starting from square one is going to help? Maybe we need to start someplace else.” Rick Masters was the director of programming at OneClick. He had a wife and three young children waiting at home, including a newborn baby. He looked like he’d been up all night, and Jamie hated to keep him even later, but he had no choice.

“Do you have a specific suggestion of where to start?” Jamie asked. “I’m all ears, Rick, but if we don’t find this, you know the consequences.”

Computer glitches happened. Users knew that and to a large degree generally overlooked those things, but when an issue lingered, it tended to magnify in the eyes of the public, and the glitch had already hit the media. Not to mention that children and military hardware did not mix. It was only a matter of time until they began losing credibility
and
users at an insurmountable rate, not to mention sponsors.

“I don’t know. I just can’t imagine that we missed something at the top level,” Rick said.

“I hear ya, Rick. And believe me, I have more faith in the people in this room than I have in the Oval Office, which is why I think we start at the very beginning.” Jamie held his gaze.
Time to hit home
. “If your son were being bombarded by ads for guns and ammo, would you want us to start at square one, or would you want us to sit and knock our heads against the same wall for another few hours?”

Rick sighed loudly. “Point taken.”

“Okay, let’s start at the top. We’ve got kids searching for dragons, toys, games, movies, and videos, and they’re resulting in ads for military hardware. What do they all have in common?”

Two hours later, they were still knocking heads. Selfishly, Jamie ended the meeting, and they agreed to regroup in the morning.

Traffic was thick for a Monday night, and as he watched the minutes tick by, his nerves started to get the better of him. He glanced at the sealed manila folder Mark had given him. Maybe he was being stupid, following his heart instead of his head. Mark had never led him astray before. Why would he now? What did he have to gain? Jamie was too nervous to think it through. He debated opening the envelope. It would be the most efficient way to know the truth, but Jessica wasn’t a job. Jessica wasn’t an employee. She was the woman he’d fallen hopelessly in love with. The woman he thought about night and day, and ached to see, to touch, to love.

He reached Symphony Hall at ten minutes after ten and punched the cracked dashboard as he drove into the lot. He’d missed the concert.
Damn it
. Was this what Vera had been trying to tell him? That he just needed to see for himself that he and Jessica were not meant to be together?

He floored it to the rear entrance where the musicians came and went, still refusing to believe she’d lied.

The devil on his shoulder whispered,
You’re a fool. You saw the musicians’ roster on the BSO website. She wasn’t on it.

He cut the engine, feeling as though he was living on deep breaths lately. The devil tried to be heard again, and this time Jamie made a deal with him. He was good at deals.
If she doesn’t walk out that door, I’ll walk away and never look back.

With his heart hammering against his chest, he stepped from the car and into the dark night. He was parked over to the side, beyond the bubble of lights illuminating the lot. He didn’t need strangers thinking he was some poor sap stalking one of the musicians.

The thought made him feel even more stupid. What was he doing standing in a dark parking lot waiting for a woman who probably didn’t even exist?
She wasn’t on the list.
Jessica Ayers could have been a made-up name, for all he knew. Christ, she could be anyone, anywhere.

And still, he had to see for himself.

He paced in the dark, every second sucking more air from his lungs. Finally, an interminable number of minutes later, the doors opened, and musicians carrying large black instrument cases walked out. Jamie’s heart slammed against his chest as he watched them file out, say their goodbyes to one another, then turn and get into their cars. He waited as the parking lot emptied, his hopes deflating further with each passing car.

When the last car left, the remaining air left his lungs in a rush. He couldn’t believe it. He’d
felt
her honesty. Felt it!

He was a fool.

An idiot.