“I’m sorry-”

A waiter arrived to clear away their plates, and Earl welcomed the hiatus in his apology, then had no idea what to add when he left.

“She was married,” Janet said after a few seconds, almost to herself.

“I know, but as I told you before, there were problems, big ones.”

She shook her head and gave him a smile as if he were an errant medical student. “And you got involved with a woman old enough to know better. What’d she say? ‘Mister, my husband doesn’t understand me’?”

“It wasn’t like that. In fact she hardly ever talked about her husband’s problems.”

“Then how was it? My God, Earl, I mean I knew I wasn’t the first in your life, and you weren’t my first, but I sure never messed with married men. Considered them tainted meat.”

Earl winced at Janet’s characteristic candor. Yet she didn’t seem to be upset so much as pensive. “What can I say, Janet? Over the first few years of med school Kelly and I spent a lot of time talking together. She told me the trouble she was in, and I was young and stupid. I guess I got caught up in rescue fantasies.”

“You guess?”

Nothing, not even a lifetime of medical experience, had ever enabled Earl to unravel the mysterious power Janet possessed to make him explain himself. He knew only that once she got him started, he found it hard to stop.

“Okay, so I was an idiot. But I don’t regret trying to help her. As Chaz became increasingly abusive and controlling. I honestly thought she and I were good for each other, that we’d get her out of her mess, then see about us. Besides, you weren’t anywhere in sight to ‘save me from myself,’ as you so often put it, for about another fifteen years.”

“Hey!” she said softly. “Of course you tried to help her. You’re a compassionate, caring man. It’s one of the many things I love in you.”

“I mean, it’s not like I’ve been nursing a flame for her all these years.”

“I know.”

“Hell, I haven’t even thought about her in two decades.”

She sat back again. “And that confuses you – how it still can hurt, as if you lost her all over again?”

Like a surgeon probing for physical signs, she’d put her finger exactly on his pain. “Yeah,” he admitted. “Since I read about her body being found, I’m all tangled up in feelings from when I was twenty-four. Even though I’m not that young guy anymore, I can’t cut myself loose. Weird, eh?”

“Not so weird.”

“No? It is for me.”

She grabbed his hand again and gave it a squeeze. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“It wouldn’t help any. What to do now is the important question.”

“How do you mean?”

“The newspaper article I showed you? I’m the mystery man in the cab.”

As did most surgeons, Janet had nerves of steel, and even the nastiest surprises couldn’t catch her off guard. Yet her pupils pulsed wide. “That was you?”

“Yeah, and maybe the cops haven’t taken up the chase just yet, but that Dr. Mark Roper will be trying to pin a face on him.”

“Oh, my God.”

“So do I go to him or the NYPD and make a clean breast of things before they get to me? As nice as Roper was, he made me nervous.”

Though they’d been talking barely above a murmur, she leaned forward close enough to whisper. “And confess you were having an affair with her? That’s nuts!”

“It’ll be worse if I say nothing and Roper or his sheriff find me out on their own. At the very least they could charge me with obstruction of justice, now that it’s officially a murder case.”

“And how the hell will you explain not coming forward for twenty-seven years?”

“I had a lot of reasons, some pretty complicated, but I could make them understand.”

“Try me first. I’m a lot more sympathetic.”

“Okay. For starters, from the very beginning she made me promise never to reveal our affair.”

“Jesus, Earl, give me a break!”

“Hear me out. At first I thought she wanted to avoid a scandal. Adultery is no small thing, and back then it was a very big deal. But, no, that wasn’t it. She told me later that she really didn’t give a damn what people thought, that she worried about Chaz and how he’d react if he ever found out. The possibility of losing her obsessed him, which fueled the abuse, to the point she figured not only did she have to make a clean break – disappear, change her name, and start over – but he must never know about our affair because it might enrage him even more.”

“She wouldn’t even trust you enough to tell you where she was headed?”

“Refused, but the issue wasn’t a lack of trust.”

“What then?”

“I told you it was complicated.”

“ ‘Screwy’ is the word I’d use, Earl.”

“Okay, okay! She wouldn’t tell me because she insisted she wasn’t going to ruin my life with all her baggage.”

“Her baggage?”

“Will you just listen? She knew she’d already jumped into Chaz’s arms to escape her parents. As a result, she didn’t entirely trust her feelings about me, wasn’t sure whether she loved me or was just using me to escape again. She promised to contact me if she ever figured it out and the time was right.”

“When the time was right? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“There were other issues, too. Ones that even I hadn’t thought of until she warned me.”

“Such as?”

“Such as how powerful the Braden family was at the hospital and NYCU. If Chaz ever did find out about me and Kelly, not only would he go after her, she was certain he’d get ‘Daddy’ to pull enough strings that I’d never graduate from medical school. So she remained adamant I do nothing to risk that happening, such as trying to follow her, and refused to tell me where she’d be in case I might come anyway.”

Janet mulled that over a few seconds. “But after no word from her at all, you didn’t get suspicious something had happened?”

“Of course! I was frantic. I even took my month’s vacation and went searching for her, despite the promise I made. But just like the police said, there were no leads.”

“Didn’t you ever think then she might have been killed, that her husband had gotten to her after all?”

“At the time I couldn’t think of anything else. Whenever I saw Chaz Braden in the hospital, I could barely keep myself from grabbing him by the throat and demanding to know what he did with Kelly.”

“Yet you still didn’t go to the police.”

He felt his cheeks start to burn again at the thought of how he’d floundered around like a complete wimp – so detestably opposite to the man he’d become. “No, I didn’t. I made a decision to keep quiet and save my ass.”

Janet’s eyebrows quirked.

“I’m not proud of it,” he continued, “but logically, I couldn’t see any point in doing otherwise. The police already suspected Chaz, and were investigating him big-time. Me, Jack, Melanie, and Tommy Leannis – we’d all told the cops everything we knew about her relationship to him, how possessive he could be, and verbally abusive. If I had confessed our affair, it would have taken their attention off him, maybe even shifted it to me, disgraced Kelly, and probably tanked my chances at NYCH. So I kept my mouth shut.”

“But when the police didn’t make a case against Chaz-”

“I again considered taking matters into my own hands. I even began to follow the creep, waiting for a chance to get him alone.”

“My God, Earl-”

“Don’t worry. I came to my senses before anything happened. What I saw, the way he ran around, red-faced, pestering everyone in my class, even me, to find out if we knew where she’d gone, I began to think maybe he hadn’t done anything to her and couldn’t find her either, that she had just run away after all, gotten rid of her ghosts, and didn’t see me as part of her life anymore. It took a long time, but eventually I accepted it…”

As he talked, he realized just how immature his desire to rescue Kelly had been. Yet he let himself be so stupidly vulnerable back then, enamored by a notion as old as Galahad, Lancelot, and Robin Hood – saving damsels in distress. Talk about naive. What’s more, the belief that he’d pulled it off – helped her get away clean from Chaz and freed her from her own ghosts – it was simply the way he needed to see things, the better to sustain himself while he got over her.