Be cool, Ari. Act like an adult who has it all together. Because you are. Don’t think about that toast . . .

“What exactly have you been doing for the last year?” I lowered my whiskey glass to the table.

Rhett sipped his, and if the abrupt change in subject threw him, he didn’t let it show. “PI work. Mostly surveillance on spouses suspected of cheating.”

“Wow. That has to be a little depressing.” I picked up my drink again and tipped some back, the heat from the liquor warming a path down my throat.

Rhett shrugged. “Yes and no. What’s depressing is the fact that there’s no trust between them, and they get to the point where they feel like hiring someone is all they can do. Honestly, they could save themselves a lot of grief by just asking the other person where the hell they’re going.”

It sounded like there was a story there. “What do you mean?”

Rhett picked up his drink again. “I had one client who swore up and down her husband had to be cheating on her because he was gone the same time every week and withdrawing cash from the ATM on the same day. She told me it had to be a hooker, but she wasn’t going to file for divorce without proof.”

“Oh my God. That’s terrible.” After the way things ended with Carlos, I never wanted to deal with a situation like that ever again, and we hadn’t had anywhere near that level of commitment between us.

Rhett tilted his head. “Only if you don’t trust your husband enough to ask him where he’s going.”

“What was he doing?” My curiosity piqued, I leaned back in my chair, my glass poised to take another sip.

“Laser hair removal on his back. Technician I talked to after I got the pictures said he felt self-conscious when his wife called him a wooly mammoth on the beach, so he wanted to be ready for summer.”

I laughed, choking on my drink and practically spitting it onto the table. “Oh my God. You’re joking.”

“No, definitely not joking. She cried a lot and apologized. They booked a cruise to the Bahamas as a second honeymoon.”

“Wow. That’s better than the alternative.”

He nodded. “For sure. Plenty of the cases end up using my photos for evidence in divorce proceedings, which is depressing as hell. The best cases are the ones where I’m able to prove that they’re not doing anything wrong. Like the guy sneaking away to play bingo to try to win his wife a new car.”

“Seriously?”

“Dead serious. I can’t make this stuff up, and these aren’t even the crazier stories.”

“Tell me the crazy.”

Rhett studied me for a moment. “You sure you want to hear this?”

“Of course. It’s fascinating. I’ve never understood people, but I still find them interesting.”

He took another sip and settled back in his chair. “My favorite client was a guy who joined the military when he was eighteen. He went off to boot camp and ended up going to war, and didn’t make it home to find his girl for almost twenty years.”

“Oh my God.” Sympathy washed through me, rivaling the heat of the alcohol.

“Yeah. Vietnam POW. The kind of thing you’d see movies about. He was messed up when he got out, and it took him a long time to pull himself together to the point where he felt he even had the right to go looking for her.”

I shook my head, unable to imagine what it would have been like. “What happened?”

“He looked for her but the trail was cold. She’d left town and disappeared. No one knew where she went. He called in favors, and someone led him to me.”

“You found her?”

Rhett’s lips tugged up in a smile. “Are you going to let me tell the story? You’re just as impatient as you’ve always been.”

I grinned sheepishly. Impatience was a fault I’d openly own and would probably never overcome, and I was perfectly okay with that. “Tell your story.”

He took a sip and then continued. “I had a hell of a time finding leads, until one day it occurred to me why someone would disappear in that day and age.” He looked pointedly at me. “Go ahead. I know you want to guess.”

Rhett knew me well. “She was pregnant, wasn’t she?”

He nodded. “Yeah, she was. The reason he couldn’t find her was because she changed her last name—to his. Said she was a soldier’s widow so her son wouldn’t bear the burden of being raised by an unwed mother. When I tracked them down, he was in college. I found him first. He could’ve passed as his dad when he’d gone off to war. When I showed the surveillance pictures of the kid to my client, he broke down and cried in front of me. Couldn’t believe he had a son he’d never known, but was so damn happy she’d raised him as his.”

I was practically bouncing in my seat to know what happened next, but I was exercising a modicum of patience.

“When I told him she’d never remarried, never dated, and still wore her POW/MIA bracelet with his name on it every day, he was stunned. It devastated him that she’d been alone for so long, but at the same time, he was amazed at her loyalty to his memory.”

My patience dried up. “What happened next?”

“I contacted her and told her that he was alive. She bawled in my arms and begged to see him. When I told her he was waiting in a car out front, you would’ve thought I told her the house was on fire. She barely looked at me before she ran. She threw herself into his arms, and he caught her and held her tight. They stood in her little front yard for an hour, not saying anything.”

Unable to hold them in, I felt tears slip down my cheeks. The image was too powerful. “That’s amazing.”

“It was. I’m not too proud to admit I shed a few tears watching them together. It was absolutely incredible. Made me believe that things can last, even after all the cheating and bullshit I had to deal with on a daily basis.”

For someone like Rhett who prized honor and loyalty, the job sounded horrible. I was glad he’d had some cases that restored his faith in humanity. “Did he meet his son?”

Rhett nodded. “I wasn’t there for that reunion, but the client wrote me a letter a couple days later telling me he didn’t get his life back when they released him from captivity. He got his life back when I found his world. I framed it. Reminded me that what I did mattered.”

I snuffled and lifted my cloth napkin to my eyes to dab the tears away. “Wow. You gave him his happily-ever-after. That’s huge.”

Rhett’s smile wobbled, as if recalling what the letter said. “Sometimes it’s the little things that make it all worth it.”

“I’d say that was a big thing.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

As I dealt with my tears, trying to pull myself together after his emotional story, our server arrived with our entrées.

“Ma’am, are you okay?”

“Totally fine. Don’t mind me.”

She settled our beautifully plated food in front of us and disappeared just as quickly. Before I picked up my fork, I had to ask the question hovering on my tongue.

“What do you want to do? I mean, after you find out what happened with your dad. Do you want to join the police force again, or keep doing PI work?”

Rhett got quiet and his hand stilled before closing around his fork. I could have kicked myself for the abrupt question and the change in mood it caused.

“Haven’t thought about it. Taking it one day at a time.”

The concept was foreign to me because I planned by weeks, months, quarters, and years. I had a five-year plan and accompanying goals, along with a ten-year plan.

When I didn’t respond, he added, “I’m just a guy trying to make a living after the rug got pulled out from under him. I don’t have grand plans of building an empire like you do.”

I tried to put myself in his shoes and imagine what it would have been like. For as long as I’d known Rhett Hennessy, which was all my life, he’d wanted to be a cop. Nothing more. Nothing less. That was his identity, and he’d lost it all in an instant. How did someone recover from that and forge a new life?

I thought about the company I’d built and how many directions it had taken. If it were all gone tomorrow, I’d be completely adrift. I had to have purpose in my life, and Rhett was the same.

That was when it dawned on me—all these years, I’d kept Rhett Hennessy on a pedestal, untouchable and unattainable. And now, he was real to me. He was a man, flesh and blood with hopes and fears, victories and disappointments. The shift in perspective was groundbreaking and rocked my world. This Rhett, the real Rhett, was better than I’d imagined.

I was self-aware enough to know that this was huge. And what’s more, I had something I could offer him—a willing ear to listen and a creative mind to help him figure out what he could do next.