Three Wishes(35)
Author: Kristen Ashley

Nate was walking into the bedroom to change clothes and he stopped.

Then he froze.

“Nathaniel?” Laura called when he didn’t respond.

“Sorry, Laura, I’ll ring you back,” Nate murmured.

He pressed the button without listening to her good-bye and stared around the room.

Lily’s cosmetics were not messily piled on the bureau. He could smell her perfume but the bottle was gone.

He walked to the bathroom.

Her toothbrush and all the other bottles and jars (and Nate had noted there were a great number of them, the sight of this, he found to his surprise, made him feel an unusual sense of contentment), were gone.

He went back to the bedroom and pulled out one of the drawers she’d moved into.

It was empty.

He pulled out another one.

It, too, was empty.

He walked back into the living room and saw some mail on a table. She’d had another mess of post forwarded from her friend Maxine. It was all still there opened but left.

Nate noticed her mortgage was overdue as were two credit cards. Nate found this surprising and wondered, vaguely, why she hadn’t given them to him. He’d told her he’d take care of it, take care of everything. There was absolutely no reason her bills should be overdue.

There was also a letter written in a neat slightly creative handwriting. Her mother, telling Lily of the “latest antics” of Fazire and her excitement at their imminent holiday to Hawaii.

He got himself a drink and sat on the couch and waited.

After darkness had fallen, he smoked and drank more, a good deal more. He hadn’t had a cigarette since that night outside the front door of his parent’s home. Hadn’t even wanted one but he wanted one then.

She didn’t come home. She didn’t call.

Not that night, not the next.

The movers moved him and, on that day, he went to the address on her mortgage bill.

The town where she lived was smart and he could tell it was expensive by the number of BMWs, Mercedes and Jaguars parked in the drives.

Her house was right on the seafront, he could see from its position that there was a view of the Victorian pier from the back windows. He noted with detachment that it was a very fine piece of real estate, an excellent location. It was a terraced house, three stories at street level but likely another one set in the cliff. It was a lot of house for just Lily. It was also rather stately even if it looked from the outside a bit run down. She’d planted two enormous terracotta planters with a wealth of flowers and they sat on either side of the front door.

He knocked, looking to his left into a sun room that sat at the front of the house. It had mosaic tiled floors and wicker furniture in it with gaily printed cushions inviting you to sit. He was not in the mood to notice the furniture was not new and rather battered. He was not in the mood because no one answered. The house looked deserted.

Then he heard, “Are you looking for Lily?”

A neighbour had come out to walk her dog and Nate turned to the old lady. “Yes, is she here?”

“Nope, moved, moved back home I heard. Just up and left, gone back to America. Surprised me, she seemed a solid sort of girl. But there you go. You never know people.”

She kept walking her little dog and Nate watched her move down the small street Lily’s house was on. He watched her hit the wider pavement that edged the larger road that was the turn off to Lily’s street. He watched her as she disappeared down the steep hill toward the pier.

Then he got in his car and drove back to London.

* * * * *

Three days after Lily left, Nate moved into his new apartment, the same day he disconnected his old phone. His secretary took a leave of absence due to an unexpected extended illness.

His temporary secretary had never heard of Lily Jacobs. When she took the calls from the woman, she lost most of the messages under a pile of ones marked urgent (nearly all calls to Nate McAllister seemed to be urgent and the secretary simply couldn’t cope). She lost a lot of messages in the two weeks Nate put up with her, none of them nearly as urgent as the ones from Lily.

The ones Nate’s temp didn’t lose, Jeff stole.

Danielle was awash with delight at the strange abrupt exit of Lily. So much so, weeks later, she made her last, desperate attempt at capturing his heart by seducing his body. He’d been so revolted and he’d told her, in more words than he would normally use, exactly what he thought of her. Unbeknownst to him, five minutes after he pulled his Maserati out from in front of his parent’s house after this somewhat dramatic scene, Lily had walked up the stoop for the last time with her beloved Fazire. It was very unfortunate timing as, at that moment Lily was the last person on earth Danielle Roberts wanted to see. And anyway, Danielle and her brother had prepared well for this moment.

Victor and Laura were, at first, confused then worried then they both became angry at Lily’s unexplained departure. Surprisingly, for the first time in Nate’s life, he saw Laura’s anger turn to rage and it didn’t blow itself out in a matter of minutes. She seemed to nurse it for days, weeks, even, if Lily’s name ever came up in conversation (usually by Jeff), years.

Jeff was also quite happy and very smug about Lily’s departure. He knew something; Nate understood this by the way Jeff acted. At first he was cagey and jumpy as if he expected whatever he did to backfire which happened often with Jeff. But when it didn’t the smugness was complete and it, too, lasted for years.

Nate knew that Jeff told Lily about his past life, how his relationship started with Jeff’s father and she ran. She had told him that nothing Jeff could say would change how she felt about him but she had lied.

Nate was well acquainted with people who lied. This didn’t surprise him one bit. A glorious, twenty-two year old virgin from Indiana who probably lived in a palatial home that looked like a plantation (at least, this is where Nate saw her in his mind whenever he thought about her, which was a great deal for the first few months but later, as a well-honed defence mechanism, not at all, or at least, not during daylight hours) and had been cosseted and sheltered all her life, confronted with what Nate was…

She was probably still showering to wash away the filth of him.

* * * * *

The day Lily Jacobs found out her parents died was the day the Nate McAllister that she’d breathed new life into died.

He found new women, none of them a single thing like Lily. His father became Chairman of the Board while Nate took over as CEO. He bought an enormous penthouse apartment and commissioned an even bigger bed.