a sweet story.
“You’ve been dating a long time.”
She shrugged. “Yeah. A lot of our friends figured we’d get married right out of high school. But we both wanted to wait.”
“That was smart. It’s hard to know whether high school crushes are real love or not.”
Crystal looked at me like I was nuts. “Oh, we knew it was real love. Love is love, no matter how old you are. But we both have plans, ambitions. We were afraid that if we got married, we’d start feeling obligated to buy a house and have babies and all the rest of it . . . and then we might not both get to go to law school.”
Jason had just finished his third year and would be taking the bar exam later in the summer, and Crystal planned to start school in the fall.
“Weren’t you afraid that Jason would meet some girl up at Tech?”
That mysterious womanly smile returned. “No, ma’am. I always knew Jason would come back to me. If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.”
I envied her that certainty. Maybe if I’d been as confident about Finn’s love, certain he would come back to Dalliance for me, I wouldn’t have married Wayne Jones. But then again, maybe what Finn and I had wasn’t as strong or as real as the love Crystal and Jason shared.
I’d learned the hard way that there was no point living in the past, second-guessing the choices I’d made.
“I never doubted Jason,” Crystal continued, the smile fading from her lips, “but this whole thing with Bryan has made me glad we’re getting married now. Not waiting even longer. Jason, I trust. Life, not so much.”
“Your mom said you and Jason knew Bryan pretty well.”
“As well as anyone could know Bryan.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he was a tough nut. He had big dreams, wanted to be important and make money. But most people want to be good at something particular, like Jason wants to be a really great prosecutor, and my mom wants to be an amazing caterer, and my stepdad wants to raise the very best horses. Bryan didn’t seem to care what he was successful at, as long as he was successful.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” I said.
She tilted her head, a skeptical expression on her face. “I guess not,” she conceded, “but it meant Bryan was easily distracted. He’d be your friend, but then if he saw a better path to getting ahead, he’d never talk to you again. He wasn’t mean, just driven.”
“That sounds like a lonely life.”
She nodded. “Last time I saw Bryan was at a holiday party. A bunch of debaters got together and hit the Bar None for cocktails a couple of weeks before Christmas, right after a lot of us came back from school on the semester break. We were doing the whole ‘What are you up to?’ thing, and we got to Bryan. Everyone else had talked about school and significant others, even a few babies and weddings, and Bryan starts telling us about his five-year plan. How he’s going to graduate and get a postdoc and write a novel and sell a screenplay.”
I frowned, not sure what point she was trying to make.
“The rest of us were talking about what we were doing, then, at that time. Bryan never even mentioned what he was working on at Dickerson, his dissertation, his classes, anything. It was all what he planned to do. That was Bryan in a nutshell, so busy scheming three steps ahead of the game that he never got to enjoy what he’d already accomplished.”
“Maybe he didn’t want to talk about school because of all the trouble he was having with Dr. Clowper.”
Crystal scrunched her face. “Nah. Jason asked him about that, pulled him aside and said, ‘Hey, I know some lawyers if you need one.’ Bryan waved him off, said there was nothing to worry about, he had bigger fish to fry.”
“Just because he didn’t want to talk about his troubles with his old friends, doesn’t mean they weren’t weighing on him,” I insisted.
Crystal balled up a napkin and scrubbed at an imaginary spot on the café table. “I guess you’re right. And he did get pretty drunk that night. Hooked up with a girl who called him ‘Dr. Campbell.’” She snorted. “He left with her, without even saying good-bye to the rest of us.”
“Was she his girlfriend?” If Bryan had a girlfriend, the police needed to know. Maybe she wouldn’t be a suspect,