Page 87 of Little Last Words
“How many years ago?”
“Eight, nine, maybe. I don’t know. She’d just graduated from high school. The first time I laid eyes on her, I was blown away. Not just with her looks, with her personality. She was this amazing ball of intoxicating energy.”
“I’ve heard she was a kindhearted person.”
“She was the most wonderful person I’ve ever known.”
“What happened after the two of you met?”
“After her shift ended, we started chatting. I got her name and her number. We started talking on the phone. One weekend her parents went out of town, and she invited me over. I had no expectations. I knew she’d just been through a breakup with a guy she still cared about.”
“How was the weekend together?” I asked.
“Everything I hoped it would be. She showed me around town. The more I saw, the more I fell in love with this place.”
“Did you see Penelope again?”
“I was willing to drive back and forth to see where things could go, and I did a few times. Then she told me she was going off to Canada and didn’t know when she’d be back. She said if both of us were single when she returned, she’d look me up. That never happened, though, because I met my now ex-wife and she met Douchebag Dean.”
Douchebag Dean.
It had a certain ring to it.
I thought about the timeline Becker had just given me. I also thought about the night Vanessa saw Penelope talking to someone through the bedroom window. Becker could have been the guy Penelope had been with that night. It made perfect sense.
“After Penelope went off to Canada, did you see or speak to her again?” I asked.
“We talked a handful of times, but no. We didn’t reconnect again until she moved back here.”
“It must have been a surprise to see her again.”
“It was, for both of us.”
“How did you come to buy this house—a house located on the same exact street she grew up on?”
“After the divorce, I decided I needed a change of scenery, so I moved here. I travel a lot for work, and the airport in San Luis Obispo is close enough. I’d looked at several houses, and then this one came up. It had everything I was looking for, and I bought it.”
No doubt with a feeling of nostalgia when he did.
“I had no idea the house across the street had belonged to her grandparents when I bought this place,” he added.
“Tell me about the first time you saw her again.”
“I was getting in my car, and I saw a woman unloading boxes from the trunk of her car. I did a double take. I couldn’t believe how much she looked like Penelope. She turned toward me, and I knew it was her. For years, I’d wondered what had become of her, and there she was, right in front of me.”
“Did she recognize you?”
He nodded. “She ran over and threw her arms around me. The moment Penelope walked back into my life, I stopped all the nonsense. No more partying. No more random women.”
“How did she feel about you?”
“The feeling was mutual, except … here we were again. She was going through another breakup, and I knew I had to be patient and take things slow.”
“How slow?”
“She slept over a few times. We cuddled, did other things, but we never had sex. I told her I wanted to wait until she was ready.”
He was being candid, for the most part, willing to share intimate details of their time together in recent weeks. It could have been because he was ready to talk, wanting to get it all out, or it could have been that he was telling me what he thought I wanted to hear.