with her. The other answer, though, is that I need to break up with her.
Living apart isn’t working. We can’t be each other’s priorities. I can’t be the boyfriend Willow deserves. Maybe I’ll find happiness with Ariana and maybe I won’t, but either way, I need to let Willow go so she can follow her dreams.
“Look, Willow,” I say, “when I get everything straightened out here, I think we need to sit down and have a long talk. About us.”
I half expect her to make a joke and defuse the tension by saying, Are you breaking up with me? But she doesn’t, which is even worse. It means she knows what’s coming and it’s no laughing matter.
“You’re right,” she says. “We need to figure this out.”
The tone in her voice tells me she’s thinking what I’m thinking—this relationship just isn’t working anymore.
An awkward silence hangs in the air, and it occurs to me that if I’m going to break the law and go into hiding with Ariana, it might be a long time before Willow and I can have this conversation. And the truth is I could be killed before I ever get to see Willow again. I don’t want our last conversation to end this way, with both of us feeling uncomfortable knowing that we’re not right for each other.
“Willow,” I say, “what I’ve got to do over the next day or two might be pretty dangerous.”
“You’re scaring me, Rory.”
“I’m sorry. But if anything happens to me, I want you to know how much I love you.”
She tells me she loves me, too, but I’m not finished with what I have to say.
“You met me at a difficult point in my life,” I say. “But you aren’t just some rebound girl I’ve been using to get through a hard time. I think we both know where this relationship is headed, but if something happens, if I don’t live long enough to have that conversation with you, please know I love you with all my heart and soul. I honestly can’t imagine loving anyone more than I love you.”
I can hear her crying on the other end. She knows what my ex-wife, Anne, meant to me before she died. For me to admit that I love Willow as much as or more than her is a surprise even to me.
But it’s the truth.
I realize it as I’m saying it.
It’s just that maybe soul mates don’t always get to live happily ever after.
Maybe some soul mates only get a brief, burning romance as they pass in the darkness, like two shooting stars going in opposite directions.
Chapter 73
I PULL INTO the parking lot at the Rio Lobo Record and go inside to see Tom Aaron. I find him sitting behind his desk, with a handful of hardback books open around him, each page filled with black-and-white pictures.
“Find anything?” I say, startling him.
He closes the book he’s looking at with a snap.
“Sorry,” I say. “Didn’t mean to catch you off guard.”
He asks me to sit and starts to tell me about the hunch he’s been following.
“At a small-town paper like this,” he says, “it’s common practice to keep each consecutive school yearbook. They can be a consistent resource for background information about people.”
I page through one of the open books, noticing that the volume contains information about students from kindergarten through grade twelve.
“Your hunch was to look at old yearbooks?” I say, surprised. “What were you looking for?”
“I wasn’t sure,” he says. “But Susan Snyder went to school here. So did Skip Barnes. And Gareth McCormack. Even Carson McCormack grew up in this town back in the day. Most local people have contacts that well predate my arrival.”
His logic is sound. In fact, I wish I’d thought of it. You never know what you might find browsing through old records like this.
“Did you find anything?”
“Maybe,” he says, “although it isn’t what I was expecting.”
He opens one volume to a page of black-and-white photos. The heading at the top of the page says HOMECOMING, and the photos all show high school kids hanging out at a dance. Their clothing and hairstyles seem about ten or twelve years old. Maybe a little more recent than when I went to high school, but not that much.
“Recognize anyone?” Tom asks.
My eyes scan the pictures from top to bottom, and when I reach the last photo, I feel an instant recognition. A young Ariana Delgado is pictured dancing with a handsome young man. She looks younger, not quite