Jenny had the pictures set to automatic slideshow, and my jaw dropped at what I saw.
“Wait. Go back a couple,” I said. She clicked back a couple of times, then pressed play on the video.
It was twenty-two year old me in a bar, with my arm wrapped around two of Jenny’s friends. I had clearly been served a few adult beverages. It must have been after the Jimmy Buffet concert.
“Ladies. Gather round,” I was saying in my deep, growly voice. “I just met the girl I’m going to marry.”
They all rolled their eyes. “You always say that,” Jenny said, from behind the camera.
I scoffed. “No, I don’t. I always say there goes my princess of the night. This time, I used the M word.”
I could hear Jenny sigh from behind the camera. “Alright. We’ll humor you. Who’s the unlucky—I mean lucky—girl?”
I turned around and scanned the crowd, left for a moment, then came back with my arm wrapped tightly around a blonde.
My heart damn near stopped when I looked at her.
“Oh. My. God,” Jenny said. Her margarita slipped out of her hand and dropped all over the floor. But neither of us even flinched as the glass shattered. Jenny had paused the video on Fio.
Her hair was dyed blond, but her eyebrows were still brown. She was eight or so years younger, but her hesitant smile still produced those gorgeous dimples. Still, all of those things might not have been definitive evidence of “Fio’s” real identity.
But the slightly dinged up, heart-shaped locket was undeniable.
My skin tingled everywhere, my buzz rolled through me, and I stood up, wondering where my passport was because if I wanted a sign from the universe, there was none clearer than this.
The real name of the one-night stand I had fallen in love with eight years ago was Catarina Vidal.
AKA Catarina LeBlanc.
“Oh my God,” Jenny said, her jaw wide open. “This means…
“This means we didn’t lie in that video! This means our marriage and our story is…”
“Real,” she said. “Holy crap. This is the wildest thing I’ve ever heard.”
CHAPTER 33
CATARINA
Sunday afternoon,I did something I hadn’t in probably too long: I went to church.
St. Pedro’s was the church where I used to go when I was a kid. Somewhere along the line, I think after I turned twelve or so, I stopped going.
I slipped in the side door. The old cathedral was mostly empty and had that musty but holy scent that was hard to express with words. A few older women in the back couple of rows made the sign of the cross and then exited as I sat down in a pew.
The last twenty years of my life seemed like they had gone by in a flash. My earliest memories, my father’s death, studying abroad in Ireland as a teenager to perfect my English, then moving to the United States to pursue my dream of being a doctor. And after all that, it seemed like things had fallen apart again.
I took a deep breath, and I knew why I had stepped into the church. Because I wanted an answer to the unanswerable. Why did it all happen like this? Was it some sort of karmic justice for past misdeeds of mine in another life? Perhaps in this life? Something my dad did?
It was the question of all questions. Why did innocent people sometimes seem to be punished in their earthly lives?
I kneeled—something that just had never sat well with me. Why would I kneel in the presence of a God who thought my father’s life wasn’t worth living?
Still, I kneeled, closed my eyes and thought about everything I had done, and why it could be poetic justice in some way that I had voluntarily left the only relationship with a man that seemed to cut through to my heart.
I had always been weird about men. When my college boyfriend at Yale started wanting to have sex after a few months—which was a totally normal request, looking back at it—I freaked out and wanted to know why he only wanted me for his ‘little plaything.’ It was childish, really. What I couldn’t see then was that I was truly scared of how attached I might get to him. Looking back on it, those pesky issues never quite went away.
My post-Yale life at University of Michigan med school seeped into my head. There, I had really lost control of myself on a larger scale. I recalled a few of the nights out there with fright.
