fine wine. But his passion for women made it impossible to take him seriously for the long haul. At the time, she had still wanted to remarry eventually. He wasn’t a viable option, and she had ended the relationship without bitterness. Eventually he drifted away and they lost touch. He had been thinking about moving to Chicago already by then. He had a job opportunity there, and she didn’t want to uproot her kids to move with him.
She saw that his five high-end restaurants in Chicago and in Palm Beach were called Masson, and the one in Las Vegas was called Chez Jacques. There was a photograph of him with a very young girl on his website, and she wondered if it was his daughter. He could have married and had a family in the last twenty years. He was handsome, slightly overweight, and looked like a teddy bear. Despite some gray in his thick mane of hair and the beard he still wore, he hadn’t changed much and had aged well. He was fifty-five now, and from the reviews on his website, his restaurants were a major success. He had done well.
She found Bob Holland on Google just as easily. The website said he was the founder of Holland, Hampstead, and Ahern, a venture capital firm in Boston specializing in high-tech investments. They’d both been very young when she went out with him. She was thirty and he was thirty-one, and had just graduated from Harvard Business School with his MBA. She was almost exclusively in fashion then, working furiously and taking care of her kids. They were barely old enough to remember him, and she doubted that they would, although she had gone out with him for two years. He had been a serious contender. He was originally from Boston, although he was working at Lehman Brothers in New York when she knew him. He was responsible and ambitious, and not as much fun as Jacques was when she met him later, but Bob was also steadier, and he wanted to make his mark in the world of high-tech investments. He’d had an offer from a firm in Silicon Valley, when everything was booming and starting to take off out there. He wanted her to move to California with him, but there was little fashion photography happening on the West Coast, and her career would have taken a major hit if she went. She had three children to support and didn’t want to be dependent on him. All of it had added up to staying in New York seeming like the right decision.
She remembered that he’d had a chip on his shoulder about not having enough money of his own to invest. He had gone to school with some heavy hitters, and wanted to be one of them. She’d always felt a little out of her league with him. She had no money then either, except what she made, and she spent all of it supporting three kids.
He hadn’t liked the people in her fashion world. The photograph on his website showed him looking a lot older at fifty-nine, and the list of companies his firm had funded was impressive. He had clearly made it to the big leagues and fulfilled his dreams. And as much as she loved him for a time, she could never see herself with him long term. She always had the feeling that he would clip her wings. Giving up New York and her career for him had been too much to ask. She couldn’t do it.
In the twenty-six years since, he had made his way back to Boston, and apparently started his own venture capital firm, so he’d obviously done well on the West Coast, before heading east again. She hadn’t had any regrets about him, although she had missed him at first, but Jacques had been a good distraction six years later, and different from Bob in every possible way. Jacques had seemed much less serious about his career at the time, but had done well anyway, probably not in the same league as Bob, but seven restaurants for a French chef from the provinces was a major coup for him. Both men appeared to have lived up to their dreams, and so had she.
* * *
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It took her a little longer to locate Andy Wyatt, and there were several options that turned up in her search, and then she found him. He was still in Wyoming, listed