The Blue Zone

CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX

It took several days for Kate to feel she could see him again. Days for her to get back on track with her medication and regain her strength.

And she had several meetings with the police and the FBI to go over what had happened at the lab. Everything that had happened, this time. She replayed those last moments over a hundred times. Could she have pulled that trigger? Could he? It made her sad, in a final kind of way. At least it had all come to an end. Raab’s debt had been paid. He had raised her. There was a part of her that still felt tears for him. Whatever he’d done.

He was right. You can’t just erase twenty years.

Kate and Greg decided on a cup of coffee at the Ritz, a café around the corner from their loft. “This time no secrets,” Greg promised, and Kate agreed. She wasn’t sure how she felt. She wasn’t sure if what Mercado had told her made any difference. All Greg said was, “I just want the chance to show you how I feel.”

How did she feel?

Kate got there a few minutes late, taking the train in from Long Island. He still looked cute to her there, with his messy brown hair, a long woolen coat and scarf. Kate smiled-his Latin blood. And it was only November.

When he saw her, Greg stood up. She came over.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” he said, and smiled.

She smiled back. The first time he’d tried to use that phrase, their second date, he’d said, “You make my eyes sore.”

They ordered, and he brought the tray to their table. “A little cinnamon, yes?”

Kate nodded. They’d been doing this for four years. He finally got it right. “Thanks.”

They talked about anything at first: Fergus, who was missing her, of course. As she was missing him. The electric bill, which had come in high this month. One of their neighbors down the hall had delivered twins.

“What’s your name?” Kate stopped him. She looked in his aqua-blue eyes. They were hurting and a little guilty, as if saying, Kate, this is killing me…

“You know my name,” Greg answered. “It’s Concerga. My mother’s sister married into the Mercado family ten years ago. She is Bobi’s, the youngest brother’s, wife.”

Kate nodded, shutting her eyes. All these years she’d been living with a stranger. These were people she’d never heard of or met.

How do I feel?

“I swear, I never meant for anything ever to hurt you, Kate.” Greg reached for her hand. “I was only told to watch out for you. I’d been sent here to school. It was just a favor at first. Not to your father, Kate, I swear, but to-”

“Greg, I know.” Kate stopped him. “Mercado told me. He told me everything.”

Everything she had to know.

Greg wrapped his fingers around her hand. “I know how corny this may sound, but I’ve always loved you, Kate. From the first day I met you. From that first time I heard you say my name. At the temple…”

“I butchered it, didn’t I?” Kate said, blushing. “Gray-ghoree…”

“No.” Greg shook his head. Tears glistened in his eyes. “It sounded like angels to me.”

Kate stared at him. She started to cry and couldn’t stop. It seemed as if everything she’d held inside over the past year-her father’s fall from grace, her mother dying in her arms, Raab twisting at the end-came uncontrollably pouring out. Greg moved from across the booth and sat next to her. He wrapped her in his arms. She just let it go, unable to stop.

“Kate, are you ever going to be able to trust me again?” Greg squeezed her, resting his forehead against her shoulder.

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

Maybe what the old man had told her at the end changed things, just a little. How he’d looked up at her with nothing left to protect in his life and said, at peace, “I had to make a choice.”

Maybe we all had to make a choice, Kate thought. Maybe we all had a place, a space between certainty and trust, truth and lies. Between hatred and forgiveness.

A Blue Zone.

“I don’t know.” Kate lifted Greg’s face up to hers. “We’ll try.”

Greg looked at her, elated.

“Promise me, we never keep anything from each other ever again,” she said. “No more lies.”

“I promise, baby, no more lies.”

He hugged her. Kate could feel the emotion in his embrace. “Please come back, Kate,” he begged. “I need you. And I think Fergus would like to say hi.”

“Yeah.” She nodded. She wiped away the tears with the heel of her hand. “I think I’d like to say hi, too.”

They left and went outside, to Second Avenue. Greg put his arm around her. Kate let her head fall to his shoulder as they walked. Everything was familiar. Their life. Rosa ’s Foods, their little bodega. The Korean dry cleaner. It felt like she’d been away for a long time, and now she was home.

As they turned onto Seventh Street, Kate stopped. Smiled. “So is there anything else you’d like to tell me before we go in, now that it’s all out on the table?”

“‘On the table’?”

“Before we open that door, Greg. Because when we do, we start over. Who we are. Where we go from here. We can never take it back. It’s a freebie, Greg. A chance to turn the page and put the past behind us. A last chance.”

“Yes, there is something.” Greg bowed his head. He took Kate by the shoulders and looked deeply into her eyes.

“I’m not sure I ever told you,” he teased. “I actually hate dogs.”