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I turned the screen toward him. Benedict adjusted the goggle-glasses. “Don’t recognize him. Why?”

“Remember Natalie?”

A shadow crossed his face. “I haven’t heard you say her name in—”

“Yeah, yeah. Anyway, this is—or was—her husband.”

“The guy she dumped you for?”

“Yes.”

“And now he’s dead.”

“Apparently.”

“So,” Benedict said, arching an eyebrow, “she’s single again.”

“Sensitive.”

“I’m worried. You’re my best wingman. I have the rap the ladies love, sure, but you have the good looks. I don’t want to lose you.”

“Sensitive,” I said again.

“You going to call her?”

“Who?” I asked.

“Condoleezza Rice. Who do you think I mean? Natalie.”

“Yeah, sure. Say something like ‘Hey, the guy you dumped me for is dead. Want to catch a movie?’”

Benedict was reading the obituary. “Wait.”

“What?”

“Says here she has two kids.”

“So?”

“That makes it more complicated.”

“Will you stop?”

“I mean two kids. She could be fat now.” Benedict looked over at me with his magnified eyes. “So what does Natalie look like now? I mean, two kids. She’s probably chunky, right?”

“How would I know?”

“Uh, the same way everyone would—Google, Facebook, that kinda thing.”

I shook my head. “Haven’t done that.”

“What? Everyone does that. Heck, I do that with all my former loves.”

“And the Internet can handle that kind of traffic?”

Benedict grinned. “I do need my own server.”

“Man, I hope that’s not a euphemism.”

But I saw something sad behind his grin. I remembered one time at a bar when Benedict had gotten particularly wasted, I caught him staring at a well-worn photograph he kept hidden in his wallet. I asked him who it was. “The only girl I’ll ever love,” he told me in a slurry voice. Then Benedict tucked the photograph back behind his credit card and despite hints from me, he has never said another word about it.

He’d had that same sad grin on then.

“I promised Natalie,” I said.

“Promised her what?”

“That I’d leave them alone. That I’d never look them up or bother them.”

Benedict considered that. “It seems you kept that promise, Jake.”

I said nothing. Benedict had lied earlier. He didn’t check the Facebook page of old girlfriends or if he did, he didn’t do it with much enthusiasm. But once when I burst into his office—like him, I never knocked—I saw him using Facebook. I caught a quick glance and saw that the page he had up belonged to that same woman whose picture he carried in his wallet. Benedict quickly shut the browser down, but I bet that he checked that page a lot. Every day, even. I bet that he looked at every new photograph of the only woman he ever loved. I bet that he looked at her life now, her family maybe, the man who shared her bed, and that he stared at them the same way he stared at the photograph in his wallet. I don’t have proof of any of this, just a feeling, but I don’t think I’m too far off.

Like I said before, we all have our own brand of crazy.

“What are you trying to say?” I asked him.

“I’m just telling you that that whole ‘them’ stuff is over now.”

“Natalie hasn’t been a part of my life in a long time.”

“You really believe that?” Benedict asked. “Did she make you promise to forget how you felt too?”

“I thought you were afraid of losing your best wingman.”

“You’re not that good-looking.”

“Cruel bastard.”

He rose. “We humanities professors know all.”

Benedict left me alone then. I stood and walked over to the window. I looked out on the commons. I watched the students walk by and, as I often did when confronted with a life situation, I wondered what I’d advise one of them if they were in my shoes. Suddenly, without warning, it all came rushing in at once—that white chapel, the way she wore her hair, the way she held up her ring finger, all the pain, the want, the emotions, the love, the hurt. My knees buckled. I thought that I had stopped carrying a torch for her. She had crushed me, but I had picked up the pieces, put myself back together, and moved on with my life.

How stupid to have such thoughts now. How selfish. How inappropriate. The woman had just lost her husband, and prick that I am, I was worried about the ramifications for me. Let it go, I told myself. Forget it and her. Move on.

But I couldn’t. I was simply not built that way.

I had last seen Natalie at a wedding. Now I would see her at a funeral. Some people would find irony in that—I was not one of them.

I headed back to the computer and booked a flight to Savannah.

Chapter 3

The first sign something was off occurred during the eulogy.

Palmetto Bluff was not so much a town as a gigantic gated community. The newly built “village” was beautiful, clean, nicely maintained, historically accurate—all of which gave the place a sterile, Disney-Epcot faux feel. Everything seemed a little too perfect. The sparkly white chapel—yep, another one—sat on a bluff so picturesque it appeared to be, well, a picture. The heat, however, was all too real—a living, breathing thing with humidity thick enough to double as a beaded curtain.