Chapter 21

Thursday I set out for a lunch date with an architect named Reza. He spent half the meal talking about how much he liked women in high heels. And sandals. And wedges. And flats. I declined dessert and deleted his profile on the grounds that I suspected he’d picked me for the wrong reasons.

Saturday I ended up getting coffee and bagels with a physical therapist named Martin. The only red flag was that we kept having long silences that neither of us could fill. It maybe wouldn’t have been such a big deal except I had conversations with Jack to compare it to.

Jack.

The one thing I did not have over the weekend was a date with him, and when I got home from boring coffee, Ranée had something to say about it. She was stretched out on the living room floor, flipping through a recipe magazine, but she sat up when I walked in.

“Coffee Martin is too quiet.” I hung up my handbag and debated whether to get some work done next or do some cleaning.

Netflix. Netflix was obviously the correct answer.

“Please tell me you’re doing something with Jack tonight.”

“I’m not.”

“Ugh. Why are you being so stubborn?”

I glared at her. “I’m not.”

“You are, or you wouldn’t be going on lame dates.”

I plopped down on the sofa. “I’m not being stubborn. Jack just hasn’t asked me out.”

“Did my grandmother burn her bra in the Elko courthouse so you could wait for a guy to ask you out? You ask him out.”

“No.”

“Stubborn.”

“For the third time, I’m not. I’m realistic. Jack is whatever. A bonus. If we fake hang out, we fake hang out. If we don’t, we don’t.”

“He’s ‘whatever’?” She repeated the word with the exact skepticism she’d had when I announced I was going off coffee. I’d lasted a day-and-a-half. She’d been right then. And she was right now.

“There’s no point, that’s all. So that’s why it’s just gravy if we talk. That’s all it’s going to be.”

“You act like airplanes don’t exist. This is a solvable problem.”

“You act like there’s some simple end to this road somewhere off in the sunset of Happily Ever After Land.” I waved my hands to indicate some serious airy-fairyness. “Let’s say Jack and I meet in person. Let’s say it goes perfectly, and we have amazing chemistry, and we fall in crazy love. Then what?”

“Then you’re in love and it all works out.”

“In the sunset of Happily Ever After Land. Not in real life, where one of us has to uproot entirely to make this work. It requires a one-sided sacrifice that neither of us is willing to make.”

“You aren’t, it sounds like. But how are you so sure he isn’t?”

“Because he won’t even tell me boring details about himself. I don’t think he’s hiding any deep dark secrets, but he’s also not willing to open up all the way. And you know what? That’s fair. He doesn’t have to, not when this road ends in a fork, one leading to Portland and one to San Francisco, and that’s that.”

She sighed. “You know I try not to mind anyone else’s business except yours, which is why I haven’t said much about why Jack is kind of touchy about that stuff. It’s not like I know his whole life history, but I know him well enough to know you guys are perfect for each other. I was trying to be all protective of his privacy and let him tell you things in his own time, but he’s being an idiot, so I’m going to give this a little nudge. I know you googled him, but did you try an image search? That might get you somewhere.”

I narrowed my eyes. “What do you know?”

“I know that people need to tell their own stories. Try that and see where it gets you.”

“No. He needs to tell me himself. You just said so.”

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t act like you’re not dying to google his picture now.”

I crossed my arms. “Nope.”

She didn’t say anything. We stared at each other for about thirty seconds before I hopped up to get my laptop. “I’m image googling him.”

“Dig,” she called after me. “It may not be front page news.”

What was “it”? Some sort of incident I should know about? I mean, obviously yes, or she wouldn’t be pushing me to search.

I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought to google images. It was the kind of thing I did when I wanted to know what kind of bird or flower I’d just seen, so it should have occurred to me. I went through our old DMs to find the pictures Jack had sent me of himself when we first started talking, the absurd Photoshop creations of him on the back of a unicorn, or the ones I’d made of him to tease him.

The first surprise was exactly how many old messages I had to scroll through. We’d had dozens of conversations, long and short, but always daily for over a month now.

Finally I found a picture that would make a good candidate if I cropped out the fake wreath of Cheetos he’d made around himself.

I pasted it into the image search and Google gave me some results. On the first page, half of the results were him. That gave me hope that the search might work. But all of them were photos he’d posted as part of his social media alter ego. They were on par with his riding-a-unicorn masterpiece. That made me despair that I’d never find anything besides the persona, but I clicked through the next page, and the one after. All of them were reposts of the same handful of pictures.

How deep was I supposed to dive? I decided to go twenty pages. After that, I’d march into the living room and beat Ranée with a pillow until she spit out whatever information she was dying to tell me anyway.

But it didn’t take twenty pages. It took fourteen, and there, on the second to last result, was a picture of Jack I hadn’t seen yet. It looked like a formal picture, the kind people sometimes had to take for work if management wanted everyone’s headshot on a lobby wall or something. Jack had short hair in the picture, but it was definitely him. His cheekbones and jawline would have given him away even if his smile hadn’t. I’d memorized it during our Scrabble session on FaceTime.

It was a shock to see him there, smiling back from the screen, clean cut and so very Jack. Except that when I clicked it open to view it more closely, the name in the caption didn’t read, “Jack Dobson.” The guy in the picture was Dr. Jack D. Hazlett.

What was going on?

I immediately Googled the full name Jack D. Hazlett. More images popped up, including one linking back to the online version of his old high school newspaper in Bend, OR. It was his senior portrait, showing him in a suit and tie, his hair a little shaggy over his ears and hanging down to his eyebrows, his cheekbones and jawline already showing the promise of the handsome man he would become.

He’d graduated five years before me, which made him around thirty-six now. The article was an interview with the class salutatorian. No surprise that someone who went on to become a doctor was a high school brainiac. He was also a two-sport athlete lettering in cross-country and swimming, and he was his senior class president.

The article listed other accomplishments, but the two that caught my attention most were his superlatives: Class Clown and Most Likely to Succeed. Well. Those were two you didn’t necessarily expect to see together.

I, on the other hand, had been on drill team and voted as “Best Sneeze.” Look, I couldn’t help it. I always sneeze three times in a row. The first two sounded like a Chihuahua and the third big sneeze sounded like an old grandpa. It wasn’t intentional, and it also wasn’t avoidable. If I sneezed while a teacher was talking, they would stop and wait for the third one and then pick up where they left off. I had everyone in my grade trained. I was weirdly proud of it. But it was no “Most Likely to Succeed.”

I went back several pages to the oldest references I could find on Jack. He’d gone to Princeton for his undergrad and then the University of California, San Francisco medical school. That sent my eyebrows up. People knew about Harvard and Johns-Hopkins, but few people outside of the Bay Area or medical field realized UC San Francisco was just as highly respected. How long ago had that been? Had we overlapped time in the city? Why had he never mentioned he’d done med school here?

He’d done an oncology residency in Boston and then, working forward, I dug up a link to a spotlight feature from a newsletter for a children’s hospital in Oregon announcing his arrival to the oncology department.

Pediatric oncology? Wow. That was like a cop choosing SWAT or a soldier choosing Special Forces.

There were research articles co-written by him and other people with long strings of credentials after their names, articles with fancy titles like “Rhabdomyosarcoma complicating multiple neurofibromatosis,” and others I understood even less.

Then the mentions began to dry up, and by the time I pulled up the first page of his most recent results, the last mention of him was dated two years prior. He wasn’t listed on the hospital’s web page. There were no more scientific articles.

I sat back and stared at the results, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. Obviously, something had happened to make him leave medicine. I almost walked out to ask Ranée about it. This is obviously what she’d wanted me to find. She probably knew why he wasn’t practicing anymore.

But as I considered the possibilities, I began to understand why she kept insisting it wasn’t her story to tell. It was a big enough deal that he’d left behind a career as a cancer doctor for kids. But he’d gone far out of his way to bury that part of his history. Did he have something painful he didn’t want to talk about? Was he hiding the wounds from working in a tough career?

Or was he hiding a secret?

I hadn’t heard from Jack since the previous afternoon before I left work. He’d asked how I was feeling at the end of my work week. I sent him an exhausted emoji. He sent me a Photoshopped picture of me wearing a snorkel and diving into a giant cup of coffee.

I’d been telling myself that I was fine with him not asking for a date this weekend. I’d been busy enough that I thought I believed it. But not anymore. I almost went out and asked Ranée her advice on what I should do next, but I heard it in my head before I even climbed off my bed. Cowgirl up and ask him out yourself.

I texted him. Hi. Are you free tonight?

He answered right away. Could be. Are you asking for yourself?

Yes, I answered.

Then I’m definitely free.

I was glad he wasn’t there to see how big my smile was. It was a stupid response to someone who wasn’t a real presence in my life. But it was an honest response. I could admit that. But only to myself.

I hesitated before sending my next message. How about a date? My treat.

His response was slower this time. Wow. I feel so honored you can squeeze me in. I didn’t think you had room on your social calendar.

I rolled my eyes. Yes, yes. You’re very lucky. I’ll be sure to remind you of it when we hang out.

What’s the plan?

I wanted to get him talking, but I wasn’t sure how to pull it off yet. I needed to buy some time while I figured out what I even wanted to know, and how I wanted to find it out. I’ll surprise you. Facetime,7:00?

He sent back a thumbs up emoji, and I set my phone down. I had five hours to figure out how to crack Jack.