He went to the French doors and looked out for a minute before turning to me. “First of all, I didn’t know it was you. At first you were just some girl that Jim’s wife knew, a total stranger.”
“Yes, but why say you were an environmental lawyer when you weren’t?”
“It wasn’t the environmental part.” He sighed. “Can I sit down?”
I nodded, and perched on the edge of the futon myself.
“I’d been going on blind dates, using dating sites, all the stuff they say you’re supposed to do to meet someone. And all the girls I met were gold diggers. Maybe having a known billionaire sitting across from you turns perfectly nice women into gold diggers, I don’t know. I could tell that they were a lot more interested in my money than they were in me. I just wanted to meet someone nice, someone who didn’t look at me and see dollar signs. So I told Jim to say I was a different kind of lawyer, a kind that hardly ever gets rich.”
I nodded again. It made sense. “But why did you keep telling me all those stories?”
He shook his head. “It just.... It worked too well. I met a wonderful girl who didn’t care about money, and who thought environmentalists were going to save the world. Every time I told you something about it, you’d look at me like I was some kind of hero. I got hooked on it.”
I just nodded.
“Plus, once I got to know you, I knew that you wouldn’t want to be part of my life. I don’t know if you realize this, but you kind of hate rich people. I figured once you knew, you’d break up with me.”
“It still seems like lying.”
“It was lying. No question about it. And Casey, I apologize. I didn’t mean it to go so far, I just didn’t know how to stop.” He stopped talking for a minute and looked at me. “Casey…of all the things to accuse me of…. You’re not exactly Honest Abe here either.”
“I know.”
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What, tell you I was your stepsister?”
/>
“Of course. I don’t even know why you’d want to set it up with Jim’s wife in the first place.”
“What?”
“Why would you want to trick me? Why would you want your friend to set you up with me?”
“I still don’t get it. Do you think I knew it was going to be you sitting in that restaurant?”
“You didn’t plan the whole thing out?”
“NO! Shannon just said her husband’s friend was looking to meet somebody, did I want to go out. Wait, you thought I cooked this whole thing up, knowing ahead of time I’d be dating my stepbrother, and he wouldn’t even know who I was?”
He looked at me for a long moment. “I guess that means you didn’t. Right?”
“Of course right! My god, Mick!”
“So, what happened?”
“I went on a blind date. I saw you sitting there, and thought you would recognize me and we would chat about old times and that would be that. I never dreamed you wouldn’t know it was me.”
“But I obviously didn’t, like right from the first minute. And you said nothing.”
“I kept thinking, ‘Any minute now, he’ll recognize me.’”
“But when I didn’t, you just kept up the pretense. Why?”
I didn’t know what to say. We were broken up, he had already decided that on the sidewalk in front of Mom’s house. Should I admit to thinking of him for all those years? I looked at him. Every line of his face was dear to me. The dark circles under his eyes, the beard stubble, the wildly disheveled hair—they all just made him look better. Less perfect. More real. I knew I’d lost him. What more did I have to lose? I might as well come clean, after all these years.
“Because I wanted to believe, for just one night, that the dream I had when I was in high school had come true.”
His face moved. “That’s.... I need to hear more about that.”
“Well. That’s all. You were my ideal when I was a girl. No man since then has ever come close. I mean, I’ve dated, of course, had some half-assed relationships. But no one was ever as good as the image of you that I had in my heart.”
“Really?” he whispered.