LIBERTY
The second to last time Ellis saw Kat was as unexpected as the last.
The night was like any other in his young life. Having spent much of his middle school years the gangly odd one out, Ellis was late to the game and already beginning to feel hopeless having only just turned 18. Ellis had developed an unruly anxiety that manifested as a deep and abiding fear that he would leave for college without the secret code that would make him normal, the thing that made his older brother Neil a beloved member of their community whose homecomings filled their house with friends and girlfriends and parents and cousins all eager to see how the old sport was doing.
Ellis didn’t understand what Neil had that he didn’t. Why, when Ellis’s friends came over, did his parents never lavish them with attention? Why, in fact, did his friends rarely come over at all? Neil’s friends were like foster brothers, big men in North Face jackets whose booming voices carried up from the unfinished basement to rattle Ellis’s second floor bedroom and whose appetites could never be sated by the pancakes and nachos and pizzas his mother happily served up. After their visits the fridge would remain barren for weeks, Ellis left to fend for himself. If he ever complained, his mother would scold him for his lack of hospitality.
This secret code, Ellis had come to believe, was what life was all about, and the fact that Ellis did not possess it was a sick joke played by the universe. Ellis stayed up late at night thinking of it; he thought about it during class, twisting it around in his mind like a math equation he couldn’t solve.
Why him, he could not tell. Ellis didn’t understand why his words always came out wrong. He didn’t know why he would find himself standing still at the edge of a gathering with nothing to add. He didn’t know why he sat alone each night paralyzed by some rootless anxiety coursing through his system.
All this Ellis could’ve weathered easily were it not for the virginal status his problems had caused. Once the hormonal olympics began, his stilted affect became conspicuous. When Ellis’s best friend Rick started ‘hanging out’ with Lauren, the cute girl in their AP Stat class, the one with the dimples, Ellis knew his days of peace were nearing an end.
Ellis tried to decipher what differentiated him from Rick. On any metric he could calculate, they were equals. They wore similar sneakers, they lived a few streets from each other, Rick’s house wasn’t much bigger or his parents more loving (in fact, if anything, they were worse, in Ellis’s estimation). They both drove hand-me-down cars with terrible mileage and stuffy seats. Even their hair were similar mops of dirty blonde curls.
Why, then, did Lance and Leon never bro around with Ellis the same way they did with Rick? Why did Rick always have someone pushing to get his attention? When Ellis found himself spending his Sunday idly watching reruns of Ice Road Truckers, he didn’t know why he had not been invited to the lake trip Rick had posted on Instagram.
But it was the girls that stabbed his heart. As he watched his friends begin to return triumphantly from after-school hangs with tales of wet mouths and warm thighs, Ellis was left to nod along silently. They were being inducted into the world of the adult. They held secrets Ellis could barely imagine. He felt the gap between himself and his friends grow and grow until he felt like a childhood stuffed animal about to be thrown out in the spring cleaning.
Ellis made the pact one particularly dark evening as Rick posted Instagram stories from Lauren’s hot tub where Rick had brought the crew to drink, Ellis’s heart ripping open with each notification as he sat in the dark, waiting horribly long minutes for the next update.
There and then Ellis decided, if it wasn’t going to happen naturally, he would force himself to change. He could torture himself forever about the ‘code’ he didn’t have but it wouldn’t change the fact that he didn’t have it. He decided to take his brother Neil as his model. Even if he didn’t understand it, he would now live as his brother did.
Ellis began to lift weights and joined the soccer team. He cut his hair, started drinking, and found ways to make the boys at school laugh. Ellis was a bit shocked how easy it had been. All he had to do was repeat their own jokes back, never disagree and nod along. Pretty soon he was at the parties, he was in Lauren’s hot tub.
Even after his success with Rick’s crew, Ellis still ended every evening of hard drinking crashing on the couch with Tommy Anderson while everyone else paired off and rushed to claim bedrooms. With the boys, he could simply mimic their behavior and it always seemed to work. But girls demanded more from Ellis. Their eyes asked for something he didn’t know how to offer.
It was a few scant weeks before graduation when Ellis, Tommy, Lance, Leon and Rick drove up to a party in the neighboring ‘burb, Liberty Village, which, while only 25 minutes away, felt worlds apart, for it had its own school district and strip mall.
Liberty, with its high-end boutiques, sit-down restaurants and fancy dine-in movie theater, was spoken of in equal parts loathing and desire by the residents of Commack Falls. Ellis never really understood this obsession as he had lived in Liberty before Ellis’s father, an electrician, had been pushed out of Liberty by the competition from a nationally franchised home improvement corporation and they’d been forced to relocate.
Ellis didn’t remember much about Liberty. This would be the first time he had been back since he was a kid. All he could really remember was green, exuberant green; massive lawns, parks that never ended.
They arrived fashionably late, the party was packed and they didn’t know a soul. Ellis noticed the clothes first; boutique athleisure and Travis Scott tees and even an Off White shirt he’d only seen on Instagram before.
Ellis and Rick pushed their way to the kitchen. The kitchen was stacked with high-end bottles of liquor and racks of beer. Ellis drank a Hamm’s, a High Life and a Bud in quick succession. As the alcohol warmed the edges of Ellis’s mind, he fell into a conversation with a girl whose name sounded like Jane or Jean; he hadn’t really been listening. Ellis nodded along as Jane or Jean talked about school, her friends. When Jean or Jane said goodbye without a second glance, Ellis felt more relieved than disappointed.
The night wore on and the boys drank more and more. Tommy dragged Ellis into a conversation with two block-chested bros with long curling blonde hair pulled tight under identical ball caps. Ellis began to imagine who he would have been if his family had stayed here in Liberty. Perhaps he would be one of these bros. Perhaps he would still have come to this party, wearing a designer tee and wandering home down well-paved streets to a house full of frozen pizzas and gourmet snacks.
As his mind wandered, Ellis noticed a girl staring at him from across the room. The eye contact sent a jolt of panic into his heart. He tried to focus intently on the two boys in front of him, feeling inexplicably guilty. He peeked back at her. She was still staring. He quickly averted his gaze.
Ellis turned back to Tommy’s conversation but couldn’t find a place to jump back in. He snuck a look back at the girl. She sat between two energetic friends, all three dressed in a gothic hippie style Ellis had never seen in Commack.
Was she checking him out? Was that what that looked like? Was that what that felt like? What was he supposed to do? Ellis decided that the only thing that would truly curse him now would be to ignore her and set himself up for a lifetime of cowardice.
So Ellis stepped towards her. As he got closer, the girl waved to him meekly. This confused Ellis. They faced each other across the room for a moment before Ellis remembered his mission and set out toward her once again. But before he could think of anything to say, the girl leapt forward and embraced him. She pulled away and asked him if he’d moved back to Liberty and exclaimed how excited she was to see him.
This was not what Ellis expected. He stammered that no, he lived in Commack Falls and was only here for the party. He tentatively asked her name. An imperceptible shudder came over her face as if all her energy had dropped into her chest.
“It’s Kat.”
The name took a moment to sink into Ellis’s alcohol-slogged brain, falling smoothly past layers of thoughts and memories, landing, with a thud, in the pit of his stomach. Little Kat Werner. He’d almost forgotten her. Or in fact he had forgotten her, forced her out of his mind, along with all that didn’t fit with who he had become.
“Kat. Oh my god. Hi.”
“You didn’t remember me.”
“I just didn’t expect to see you.”
“Me neither.” Ellis felt sweat pouring down his face. He waited for her to say something else but she simply stared at him with those piercing eyes.
“How are you?” He finally managed to squeak out. Kat smirked slightly.
“I still live here so how well can I be?” If Ellis was older, he may have thought he was having a heart attack.
“I kinda thought you’d left Commack and moved somewhere far away… I don’t know why I thought that.” Ellis knew why she thought that, that he had never been back, never called, never opened that door ever again.
“No, I was still here. I just got… busy.” Ellis wanted to kick himself.
“Sure, we all got pretty busy in middle school. Big tests.”
“I really didn’t expect to see you.”
“Clearly.”
“Are you off to college? I’m going to Indiana. Accounting.”
“I’m supposed to. Not sure if I’m going to go or not. I think the whole thing is a bit of a scam really. I mean, what kind of education could we possibly be paying for that we couldn’t find on our own?”
Ellis remembered the drive to her house. It had been short, just down his street, over a little bridge, up that steep hill. He could remember the feeling of his head pressed against the cool glass of the car window waiting to arrive, the world spinning in front of him. The uncomfortable silence was punctured by Kat’s squeal as she grabbed Ellis by the shoulder.
“Oh my god. Did you ever finish Raccoonauts?” Ellis would sit behind Kat watching her play that game for hours. They’d hole up in her room and only come out when Ellis’s mother would call. Ellis remembered being told he could sleep over at Ryan’s house but not Kat’s, a boundary he never understood. He loved that room and especially loved Raccoonauts. He had felt something very close to happiness then, watching her curly head shaking with the ferocity of her button pushing. He had peed his pants once, desperate to hold onto that feeling as long as he could.
“Oh my god. I forgot about that. We were obsessed.” Ellis felt like he would be sick.
“You play the second one?”
“I don’t really play many games anymore.”
“That one was… fun.”
Ellis felt a strange clarity as he studied Kat’s face. He knew this was the moment he’d been expecting all night, all year, maybe all his life, and that whatever he did now would determine the path of his future. He felt sure of this in a way he couldn’t explain. And really, if he thought about it, his choice was already made for him, he was only following a trail that had been built long ago.
A howl built in Ellis’s chest. He wanted to grab hold of her shoulders and plead that he never meant to leave, that he never meant to lose her, that they could go back and play Raccoonauts again if only they could escape this party, these boys, this code. If he could just say something, anything, a new life would open up before him, a life full of warm breath and love and feeling, far from the icy Commack winter that had settled on his heart.
But Tommy was calling from the living room and the words evaporated the moment they touched the hot air of the party. Ellis was aware, even as he mumbled that he’d be right back, that he would never see her again, and that the door to that life was shut for good. Ellis walked back to Tommy, Rick and the girl with the pukka shell necklace Tommy was chatting up, who might have a friend Ellis can talk to about school or soccer or tv and who might, if he tries hard enough, let him kiss her.
Ellis didn’t look back, knowing that if he did, he would not survive it.
The last time Ellis saw Kat would be the last time anyone saw her.
Ellis had kept track of her life somewhat. It was hard not to, in the way that any successful once-upon-a-time citizen of a small town is a never-ending source of pride and envy. Ellis would never admit it but he followed her a bit more than most. He read her profiles, he watched her interviews, he enjoyed her work. To his wife Annie, Ellis’s interest in Kat was an easily understood affection for an old classmate. Ellis still looked for her name in the paper every Sunday and often looked wistfully out towards the cul-de-sac where she had once lived.
For Ellis had settled in Liberty after all. He’d spent his college years in Indiana, then a few years in Chicago. But the city was more trouble than it was worth and when Annie took his hand one day and nodded yes she did want kids and sooner rather than later, it was to Liberty that he took her.
Ellis had felt like a hero. He was not returning to Commack, where the houses rarely extended past the first floor, no, he would raise his children in Liberty where his neighbors mowed their lawns and he could send his children to play without fear. Indeed, Ellis had succeeded, in spite of what he had begun to feel was his inherent propensity for mediocrity. So Ellis and Annie settled into a modest four bedroom and got to procreating.
The years were blissful for a while. Their daughters were beautiful and carefree, his career advanced in slow but steady increments. Ellis settled into it happily,18 years lost in a blur of early morning coffee, commutes, work, dinners, weekends full of group activities and playdates.
A year after his youngest left for college, Ellis found himself promoted to project management supervisor, which allowed him to buy the new car Annie had been hinting at, but which brought an emptiness to his days he’d never felt before. Ellis spent hours staring at emails and spreadsheets, unsure what anyone needed from him. He made busy work for himself, micromanaging his subordinates and making up excuses. Mostly he just stared out at the industrial car park, listening to the hum of the highway until it was a decent hour to run out the door as if he was late to a meeting.
Ellis had trouble sleeping for the first time in his life. He would lie next to Annie for hours before slipping downstairs to watch the early gray light of dawn rise above the tennis court. In those long mornings, he found himself lost in foggy memories. It was as if he was catching a glimpse of a lost ghost town, the Liberty of his childhood. In those moments, he remembered how every lawn, street and fence had contained the universe, how they had rambled through the world, him and Kat, filled with magic.
One Saturday, Ellis woke to an email from Kat.Werner@Gmail.com. He excused himself from the living room mumbling about urgent work and headed to his rarely-used study where he read the email again quickly, then once more, slowly. Kat was sorry if her email was a disturbance but she’d found his address on a list sent around by the organizing committee of the Liberty school reunion and couldn’t help herself. She wrote tentatively; How was he? Where did he live now?
Kat confessed she didn’t know why she was emailing him, that maybe he didn’t remember her, but seeing his name had awoken memories of their time together and she felt compelled to write. She hoped Ellis was well.
That afternoon, Ellis sat down to compose a response. He had no idea how to start. He spent two hours at the computer procrastinating by playing his daughters in internet chess. Then he turned back to his open tab. Ellis told Kat it was wonderful to hear from her and he of course remembered her. How could he forget?
He stopped, unsure of how to broach the elephant in the email. Ellis feared that Kat would still see him as who he had been that night, fueled by hormones and insecurity, that he had erased whatever Ellis she had known before.
That night. he wrote back. He told her he was sorry too. He tried to explain he had been quite drunk the last time they spoke. But not just that, he tried to explain everything he had been going through then. His explanation became another thousand explanations. Once Ellis started he couldn’t stop. He explained how he was homesick every day of college, that he almost bombed out his sophomore year, and he only got his job in Chicago through the father of a friend. Maybe that same insecurity had led him to marry Annie only a year after meeting her, reasoning that for the first time here was a girl who wasn’t waiting for a chance to slip out the door. And maybe, he supposed, that same need had led him back to Liberty.
Soon enough, Ellis had written for four hours and had a 15 page email draft saved. He couldn’t send this to her. He took out most of the part about Annie and his kids, cut his ‘apology’ to a few sentences, and sent it.
Kat’s reply came less than two hours later. She was glad to hear from him, that she had been worried her email would have scared him off. She feared he had forgotten everything. What had happened after that, she wanted to know. She wanted to know about everything, every detail of his life, every boring anecdote he’d told thousands of times. She wanted to know about his wife, about his children, about Liberty; did the sign still have mold growing over the L or did they finally fix it?
The few details she provided about her life confounded Ellis. She was living just a few hours north of Liberty in Grand Mire, a resort town on Lake Superior where she was living in the basement of an old friend’s house. She was writing her emails on her friend’s laptop in the one cafe with public wifi.
Kat spent most of the email remembering Ellis. She had come to believe their time together was the most profound of her life. She believed they had been two halves of a whole, the only two souls that existed in the world. Her elaborate, looping writing style spun Ellis’s head right round. She must not have edited it at all, he surmised.
In his response, Ellis told her of course he remembered it all.
-Do you remember the games we’d play in your backyard? And that film we wrote?
We made your father play the part of the monster in the woods.
Kat wrote back immediately. Ellis was still in the study and was shocked to hear the ding of his inbox.
-He hated that. Complained the whole time. But he did do it, didn’t he.
So began a month of a free-flowing jagged exchange, a fervent 24 hour conversation. Their email chain grew, dozens of bite sized bits of memory. At first Ellis didn’t hide anything from Annie since there was nothing to hide. But when, one night, he found himself making an excuse just so he could check his inbox once more before bed, he realized he had been hiding all along.
What Ellis felt with Kat was something he couldn’t find anywhere else. Ellis took great pride in being a good father to his daughters, but he had always felt like he was playing a role. He was glad he knew his lines and felt the applause every time he saw the grown-ups his children had become. But his memories with Kat lit kindling in a hole in his heart he had forgotten had once been a bonfire.
So he kept emailing.
When Kat casually suggested Autumn was the perfect time to visit Grand Mire, it felt natural for Ellis to suggest he come up and see her sometime. She didn’t respond for a day. Ellis spent the morning staring out his office window. At noon, he walked to the bathroom and puked up his breakfast. He skipped the staff lunch and went straight home, where he discovered Kat’s email waiting for him.
Kat would love for him to visit but she knew he was very busy and may not have the time. It was short and Ellis could feel the fear in every word. Her fear filled him with relief.
He emailed back that he usually drove past Grand Mire when heading to Milwaukee for conferences (true) and he actually had one coming up shortly that he could extend for a night to swing by (false).
He told Annie that night about the conference sprung on him. They negotiated the specifics over lukewarm rotisserie chicken from Kroger’s. Ellis wrote back that night. He finally ended an email with “see you soon”.
They met at the Bear Tracks Resort & Lodge, near-deserted at 2pm on a Friday. Ellis was shown to her table by the squirrel-cheeked waitress who seemed moderately excited to have two paying customers at once. They embraced awkwardly. Kat patted his arm strangely. Neither spoke. Ellis was vibrating.
“Find this place okay? I know it’s a bit out of the way but it’s the only place to get some real grub around here.” Kat picked up her plastic menu and perused it over-enthusiastically. “They’ve got great breakfast food here. Oh and the coffee! Brilliant!”
Ellis took stock of Kat. While he had seen pictures of her online, most of the photos were from decades ago. Her appearance was different, sure; her gaunt face, her hair cut clumsily short, her hands stained with tar, but it was her energy that most surprised him. She was fidgeting constantly, leg bouncing, eyes fluttering to and fro. She burst in and out of conversation as if pouncing on prey.
As they ordered, Ellis became more and more perturbed. Maybe it had all been a mistake. Maybe the Kat he had imagined, and the Ellis he was sure she had constructed, would never appear.
“How’s your wife? Annie, right? I read it in the database- And you have kids right? Do they live at home?” Ellis had assumed she would have avoided the topic of Annie on pain of death. She looked away, scratching at the back of her ear.
“Annie’s okay. I have two daughters. Both in college. We’re adjusting.”
“Wow. Two kids in college. Incredible. We’re really grown up, huh.”
If Ellis didn’t know better, he’d have said drugs. But she was too conscious for that. Maybe drugs in the past, he wagered. Maybe she was simply another lost soul like Tommy who’d took a turn and started calling Ellis on every drunken night to complain how his life hadn’t turned out how he wanted. Maybe he should get back up, go home, and tell Annie the conference had ended early due to some poorly-refrigerated shellfish.
But then Kat leapt forward, grasped his hand tightly and looked at him with those big sad eyes.
“Ellis. You’re wandering.” He smiled reflexively, heartlessly.
“I’m still… y’know. Reeling.”
“Me too.”
“I’ve thought a lot about seeing you again. Obviously.”
“Me too.”
“And now here you are. And I realize I had forgotten you’re a real person.” Her eyes grew red as she smiled, holding back tears. “I’m working through it. Maybe I’ll write you an email about it.”
They walked along the beach afterwards, holding their jackets tight against the wind. Kat didn’t have a hat or scarf, her curls bouncing dangerously.
“I never stopped.”
“What?”
“Thinking about you. Obviously I wasn’t thinking about you, more like my memories of you… Sorry, I’m rambling. This is a lot harder in person.”
“I get it.” Ellis didn’t really get it.
“Sometimes I would stop. And I would think… Is this really me? Is this the same girl who ran away into the park behind our houses and lived off berries and Lunchables? Who used to capture little insects with my bare hands? Did she become this?”
“Who did she become?”
“You wouldn’t understand.” They kept walking in silence. “I’m just scared that I may have ruined it already.” Kat shuddered. “I’m sorry. I knew I’d react to seeing you but not this much. Not ever this much.”
Ellis reached out to console her but she recoiled from his touch. For a moment, Kat eyed him, all signs of girlishness gone in an instant. Then a smile rippled onto Kat’s face and she pulled away. “This is so embarrassing, but I have this fantasy that always comes back whenever I’m sad or something bad happens or I just don’t know what. I used to say it was a joke but it was always real to me. Whenever people would ask, y’know, do you have a plan? Are you going to get married? Have kids? Have a family?
‘I’d say ‘well, yeah. I know who I’m marrying. All three of ‘em. There’s my first husband that I’ll marry young and passionately, who I’ll love with my whole body and soul… but that kind of thing never lasts, you can’t build a life on that. So we’ll divorce in some heart-breaking way. But once I’ve recovered, I’ll marry my second husband, an old friend who moved away. We’ve both had our first loves and first heartbreaks. We rekindle our feelings slowly, taking our time. We settle down, we have kids, we make a life… But those things end too. The kids leave, things stagnate, you still love them but you don’t love love them. You don’t think about them in the shower or when you’re wasting time on a lazy afternoon. They’re just facts then, not people, just facts of your life. So it ends but it ends amicably. Then I’m old and alone, and making do. Working on myself, my goals, my career. And that’s when I meet you again.”
Kat turned to Ellis. He felt as if he was seeing her for the first time.
“And we have both lived for so long and we are so tired of life but still living. We’ve gotten into trouble and gotten ourselves out of it and that comes with baggage but we’ve gotten rid of the baggage. We just don’t care anymore. We’re free! And so we meet, and we know that… We’ve always loved each other. From the very first moment I met you, you were mine and I was yours and all this other time was just the in-between. And now here we are, old and together and happy. And we’d get to do whatever the fuck we want.”
Ellis can’t help himself but lean in when she does. The kiss is unlike any he’s felt in years. Ellis wondered if she’ll ever pull away. But she does. And big droopy tears flooded down her face. And she seemed to have barely noticed Ellis’s lips at all.
“And I worry I’ve ruined it, Ellis. That maybe that was once my future and now it isn’t. That along the way it was taken from me. And now we’ll never find each other.”
“We are right here, Kat.” He pulls her in. He needs it. Whatever she can give.
He barely sees her place until it’s all over and the sun has set. Before that it was all just limbs and breath. He knew this was what he came for but it still shocked him when it happened. It had been unlike any of the sex he’d had with Annie. Even in their passionate early days, Annie had always been more interested in the moments surrounding sex than the sex itself. But Kat didn’t want anything from him except his body. Maybe it was different, sex in your middle age, sex without marriage, sex that didn’t have to match up to all the sex that had come for decades before.
He sat on the side of the bed and watched her breath. His heart beat out of his chest. The sunset was a gorgeous blaze of purple and orange on the lake.
Ellis did not want to be here when the sun came back up. After two decades, he’d thrown it all away in an afternoon. He needed fresh air. It was too hot in here, there was no circulation and the heater was blasting.
Kat woke up to smoke, huddling outside in a matronly nightgown. She came back in and wrapped her arms around his chest. He thought about when he will get home tomorrow and tell Annie he’d decided to skip the second day of the conference. He will sit on the couch with her and watch trashy tv before dozing off.
In the morning, they got breakfast at the little cafe in town. They ordered bear claws and coffee and watched the elderly patrons sip oversized lattes. Ellis reminded her he had a conference to get to. She simply nodded.
“Do you have any plans today?” Ellis asked to break the silence.
“I… cleared my schedule. I guess I’ll probably go out on Peter’s boat.”
“Who’s Peter?”
“He’s the only real friend I’ve made here. We go fishing most days. That’s what I do now. I’m a fisherwoman. More of a fisherwoman’s wife to be honest.”
“His wife?”
“Not like that. Just that I haul in the fish, do the busy work, that sort of thing.”
“Sounds relaxing.”
“Very Zen.”
They lingered for a few more minutes before Ellis couldn’t take it anymore and said he should really be going. At the last minute, Kat took his hand and, barely above a whisper, pleaded with him to stay. For a moment, he wavered.
“We’ll see each other soon, okay?”
“Okay.”
He didn’t hear for a few days. It was only in the second wave of the investigation that they found his emails. Ellis and Annie were eating dinner in front of the TV when they called. He assumed the local number was just some robo-caller trying to sell him spamware. Only after the show ended did he see the voicemail.
They’d searched for her body for a week but were calling the investigation off. They’d keep her case open the standard ten years but, the detective muttered into the phone, he shouldn’t hold his breath. The detective confessed that was a poor choice of words.
Peter was adamant she was alive. He said this was the kind of game she always played with him. He told the police that she had brought a strange bag onto the boat with her that morning, which had disappeared, even though she’d left her clothes and backpack on deck.
The police, her ex-husband, the media, and everyone else who knew her thought otherwise. Even Peter admitted the hard facts left little room for hope; he had only been below deck for a few minutes, not long enough for her to have swam very far, and he had looked for her for a half hour, trying to spot a head bobbing in the water.
While Peter protested quietly that she had been happy, it was easy for everyone else to build a case against her. Here was a tragic woman who chose a brutal way out. She was eulogized with the standard amount of passion. She was given the obituaries, the feuding critical re-evaluations, the mourning tweets, and then the slow fade into a Wikipedia article.
Ellis drove straight up to Grand Mire the night he heard the news. He told Annie his oldest friend in the world was gone. He booked a room at Bear Tracks. Every morning, he would eat at the same table they had sat at before heading out to the search and rescue boats.
Ellis told the police everything. He knew he’d just be the cheating bastard to them but he didn’t care. Maybe she had left a secret message for him and if he just cracked it, she’d reappear and they’d embrace again. He hoped to at least find some note addressed to him that told him why it had to end like this. She could explain he had just been part of some sick final game, a last hurrah in the world, a last fuck you to him and to everyone else she was leaving behind.
He stayed long after the official searches were over and the boats cleared out of the harbor. He told Annie he couldn’t come home. He would wake up before sunrise and head out to the beach before anyone was awake. He’d listen to the waves and the wind and close his eyes and imagine they were Kat whispering just to him.
Only Peter noticed. He, too, couldn’t sleep, and spent his mornings on his boat, watching the lake for signs of life. After a few weeks, Peter invited Ellis out on his boat with him. Peter took the same route he had taken that day everyday now. Together, they looked into the inky black water and waited for her to appear.