The Follower (30 page)

“God knows I need to relax,” she said. “That sounds great. Yeah, I’d love to.”

Peter smiled, happy with himself for pulling the Buddhism card. He’d had a feeling it would impress Katie, make him seem deep, and it worked.

The rest of the meal couldn’t have gone better. Opening up to her about his mother’s death had created an even greater closeness between them. There was no awkwardness in their conversation. He didn’t have to think of things to say and he knew it was the same for her. He could tell she was starting to realize that she was falling in love with him, and he knew it was almost time to tell her the truth about everything.

After dinner, when the check arrived, Katie thanked Peter for the meal, then looked at her watch and said, “Well, I guess I should be getting home soon.”

“I want to take you someplace first,” Peter said.

“Where?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“Not another carriage ride.”

“No, nothing like that. I want to show you something.”

“What is it with you and your surprises?”

“Trust me, you’re going to love this one.”

“I don’t know. Tomorrow’s a workday and I have—”

“I promise you’ll be home before ten o’clock.” He put his hand over one of hers. “Come on, what do you say?”

She smiled, then said, “Well, all right.”

Holding hands, they walked to Fifth and he had no trouble hailing a cab this time. There was such a strong connection between them and the conversation was so lively that the fifteen-minute cab ride to East Thirty-second Street seemed to take only a few minutes.

When the cab came to a stop in front of the brownstone, Peter said, “This is it.”

“This is what?” Katie asked.

“You’ll see.”

Peter gave the cabbie a twenty, letting him keep the ten-plus dollars change. Then Peter took Katie’s hand and led her up the stoop.

“Whose apartment is this?” Katie asked.

Peter didn’t answer, just took out a set of keys. He opened the door, flicked on a light and watched Katie’s expression. He’d expected to see a combination of shock, awe, and disbelief, but she seemed more confused than anything. But this was okay—she didn’t know that the place was hers yet.

“So what do you think?” Peter asked.

“Where are we?” she said.

“Your future home.”

She looked at him seriously and said, “My future what?”

“This is where you’re going to live,” Peter said. “Where
we’re
going to live, I mean. So what do you think? It’s not fully renovated yet, and, don’t worry, you can make whatever changes you want. We can throw everything out if you hate it, start over from scratch. The important thing is that you’re comfortable, that it’s a place you can call home.”

“Wha-what?” Katie stammered. “Wait, what’re you talking about?”

“This is our apartment,” Peter said. “I bought it for us.”

Katie stared at him, probably in shock, then said, “You bought an apartment for us. Come on, this is, like, a joke, right?”

“I know it’s a lot for you to handle all at once, but I wasn’t really working at the health club. Well, of course I was working there, but I only got the job so I could meet you. I thought it would be romantic if we met like that, like something in a movie. And it was, wasn’t it? I mean, the way we met. Wasn’t it perfect?”

She still didn’t seem very happy. It was okay. She needed a little more time to digest everything, that was all. The joy would come soon.

“Look, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. “You got the job to meet me? Why did you have to meet me?”

“Because I was in love with you,” Peter said. “I’ve always been in love with you, Katie. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.” He dropped to one knee, took out the ring box from the inside pocket of his jacket, opened it to reveal the sparkling two-carat diamond, and said, “Will you be my wife, Katie?”

He’d been planning for this moment for weeks—hell, in a way, for years. He knew she would look at him with shock at first, and then the smile would come and she’d be so excited that she’d probably start shaking. It might take her a while to be able to speak, but at least she’d start nodding and eventually she’d say,
Yes. Yes, of course I will. Yes
.

“What the fuck’re you doing?” Katie said.

The response was such a surprise, such a total shock, that Peter continued looking up at her, smiling expectantly for several seconds, before the words registered.

Wondering if it was possible that she actually didn’t get what was happening—maybe it was too overwhelming for her—he proposed again.

“I want you to be my wife, Katie. Will you marry me?”

“Can you just get up, please?” she demanded.

He didn’t understand.

“But why—”

“Just fucking stop it, okay?” she said.

He stood up and tried to hold her hand, but she wouldn’t let him.

“Come on, seriously,” Katie said. “Whose apartment is this?”

“Ours.”

“Oh, I forgot. Because you’re so rich, right?”

“Right,” Peter said.

“Oh, yeah. Where’d you get the money?”

“When my parents died. There were insurance policies.”

“And you spent all this money on me, why? Because you’re so in love with me?”

“Exactly,” Peter said.

“I don’t even know you.” Katie was nearly screaming. “We just met. I mean, met again. I mean, please,
please
tell me this is all a joke.”

“It’s not a joke, Katie. I’m in love with you. Always have been, always will.”

He didn’t understand why she wasn’t hugging and kissing him and telling him how much she loved him. She was looking at him like she hated him. This was all wrong. How had this happened?

“I’m sorry I proposed,” he said. “It was too much, too fast, wasn’t it? I should’ve showed you around the apartment. Wait till you see the bedroom. I got us a Charles P. Rogers bed.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“If you don’t like it, we can exchange it. We can exchange everything.”

“Just shut up!”

Why was she yelling?

“I know this all must seem sudden,” he said.

“Sudden? This is absolutely fucking nuts.”

She left the apartment and hurried down the stoop. He followed her, not bothering to close the door.

“Wait, where are you going?”

She didn’t answer, just kept walking. This wasn’t like a love story at all, or was it? The guy tells the girl he loves her, the girl panics, the guy stops her and convinces her he really
does love her, the girl realizes she does love the guy, and the guy and the girl live happily ever after, the end.

“Katie, come on. I really do love you. Everything I said is true.”

“Please just leave me alone.”

“You’re supposed to stop now.”

She shot him a look, then walked faster, nearly at a jogging pace, and he reached out and grabbed her. He meant to do it gently, just to get her attention, but he yanked too hard and spun her around back toward him and she nearly fell down.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean that. Are you okay?”

“I’m going home,” she said and marched away toward the corner of Third Avenue.

Following her, Peter said, “Let me take you home at least. I want to make sure you get there safely.”

At the corner, Katie signaled for a cab and one zigzagged across the avenue and pulled up next to her.

“I’m going with you,” Peter said.

“Don’t touch me,” she said.

He backed away and she got in the cab and slammed the door.

“I’ll call you tomorrow!” he screamed as the cab sped away.

Staring out the cab Window
, past her blurred reflection, Katie’s thoughts were swirling and she was getting a migraine. It seemed like her life was getting crazier every day. She had no idea what she’d done to deserve all this crap, or what she had to do to get things back to normal.

In her apartment, she popped two Advils, washed up quickly, and got into bed, waiting for her headache to subside. Finally it did. She still couldn’t believe that what had happened tonight had actually happened. Had Peter really
proposed
to her? Did he really say that he’d bought an apartment for them? Up until the apartment thing, she’d been having a pretty good time. It had been annoying that he’d made her wait in the cold while he tried to hail a cab, and all the over-the-top romance crap, with that ridiculously expensive French restaurant and all the gushy hand-holding, was too much for her. Still, he’d seemed like a nice, considerate guy who’d survived an awful tragedy. She couldn’t see going out with him, though, and she’d been planning to tell him at the end of the night that she wasn’t looking to get into a relationship right now and that she just wanted to be friends. Then, next thing she knew, he was kneeling down, asking her to fucking marry him.

She had to tell someone about what had happened. This was way too nutty to keep to herself.

She called Amanda and said, “You won’t believe what just happened to me.”

“What?” Amanda sounded bored, uninterested.

“Did I get you at a bad time?”

“No,” she said, like her mind was still elsewhere. “What’s up?”

Katie told her the whole story, expecting her to be floored. But when she was through, Amanda just said flatly, “Wow, that’s pretty weird.”

“Pretty
weird? Are you fucking kidding me? It’s beyond weird, it’s ridiculously weird. But it’s funny you said weird because my friend Jane was telling me just yesterday that when Peter was growing up he was known as the weird guy and I was, like, defending him. And then I go out with him tonight and all this shit happens. I mean, he actually bought an apartment for me. You should’ve seen this place. It was spectacular. It must’ve cost him, like, a million dollars. He said he got his money from some insurance policy. I thought he was this poor guy, working at a health club, and he turns out to be Mr. Moneybags.”

“That’s funny,” Amanda said, but she seemed very distracted.

Amanda’s lack of interest was really starting to piss Katie off.

“Are you even listening to me?” Katie asked.

“What? Hey, I’m watching
Lost
. Can I call you back in about an hour? Or maybe tomorrow?”

Katie couldn’t believe how rude and self-centered Amanda was being. Last night, when Amanda was upset about Will, Katie had stayed on the phone with her for a half hour, letting her vent. But now that there was a crisis in someone else’s life, she couldn’t even pause her stupid show to give some support. Bitch.

“Whatever,” Katie said, and hung up.

Katie went out to the living room to see if Susan was around. The door to Susan’s room had been closed earlier, and it was still closed. Tom was probably over and they were probably doing it. Susan had such a perfect, stable little life. Katie couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have a steady, reliable boyfriend, to not have some new crazy thing happen to her every fucking day.

Back in her room, Katie’s head was throbbing—though it wasn’t nearly as bad as before. She went online and checked her e-mail, and then she mindlessly surfed the Net, going on craigslist for a while, and then visiting friends’ blogs. It was too hard to concentrate because she was distracted, replaying stuff Peter had said to her. She didn’t know if that apartment really belonged to him, and he really was rich, or if he was just fucking with her head. And, God, had he really said that he’d “always” loved her? Growing up, she’d never had a clue that he was in love with her, or that he even had a crush on her. And it was kind of disgusting, considering she’d only been thirteen when he’d moved from Lenox to upstate New York. What was he, some kind of pedophile?

Then she remembered how he’d pulled up his pants at the restaurant to show her that scar on his leg. When he’d told her about the fire and what had happened to his parents, she’d felt sorry for him. But wasn’t it weird that he’d never mentioned the fire before? Maybe he was self-conscious about the scar or didn’t like talking about his past—a lot of guys were like that. That made some sense, but the other day he’d talked about how his parents had died, but said nothing about a fire.

Katie realized she hadn’t Googled Peter at all yet. This was unusual for her because she routinely did Web research on every guy she went out with. Most of the time she couldn’t find a lot of information online, but any little tidbits were nice to know and helped to make her feel secure that the guy she’d met at a bar or wherever wasn’t some lunatic. Although Googling guys sometimes gave a false impression and worked to her disadvantage. Before she’d gone out with Andy, she discovered that he’d graduated with honors from Michigan and had been in a fraternity. She’d thought he was an all-American, clean-cut, nice guy. Nothing she’d learned online indicated he was a raping misogynist.

“Idiot,” she said. “You’re such a fucking idiot.”

The searching was getting her nowhere. There were too many Peter Wellses in the world, and none of the results seemed to relate to the one she knew. Then she remembered him saying that he’d moved from Lenox to Colonie, New
York, which was very close to Albany. It figured that a fire that had killed two people and seriously injured another would have been a major local story.

She went to the Albany
Times Union’s
Web site and did an advanced search in the newspaper’s archives. She thought he’d mentioned that his parents had died six years ago and she hoped the stories were still available online. She did a search for the past seven years and was discouraged when she went through several pages of recent results that yielded nothing. But the newspaper’s database seemed to be large, going back at least several years, so she continued searching. After a couple of minutes, she was getting tired and was ready to give up when a headline caught her eye: