Comeback Love

Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

For my son, Ben,

And my wife, Annis,

With love and gratitude beyond measure

For winter’s rains and ruins are over,

And all the season of snows and sins;

The days dividing lover and lover,

The light that loses, the night that wins;

And time remembered is grief forgotten,

And frosts are slain and flowers begotten …

—ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

Part I

Present

Chapter 1

TWO DAYS AFTER Christmas, the snow was still falling.

I should have been at my older sister’s outside Boston, visiting with Elaine and her husband, but the snow had started on Christmas Eve, closing the airports, and by morning the world was white and silent.

I decided to drive to Elaine’s from DC and make a couple of stops on the way. Traffic was light and the plows were out on I-95, but with the storm it was slow going, so I didn’t get to the Mt. Lebanon Cemetery in New Jersey until early afternoon.

The snow had piled up between the long rows of carved granite, and after tucking the cuffs of my corduroys into my boots, I high-stepped through the drifts to the Meyers family plot. My father had bought these dozen graves in 1951. Around then, my mother was bugging him to buy a house in Jersey, like his brother, but my father had refused to leave Brooklyn, saying he had plenty of time to go to Jersey—when he was dead.

Now he was there, with mom, my aunt, and uncle. There was even space for me. Someday. And probably sooner rather than later, since the men in my family weren’t notable for their longevity.

I cleared the snow from the footstones with a windshield brush, then stood in the pale gray light, talking to my parents, Aunt Lil, and Uncle Jerr until tears were freezing in my eyes.

Then I drove to Manhattan and checked into the Grand Hyatt.

Much of my life has been passed alone in dilapidated hotels and guesthouses in the peskier backwaters of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East—not necessarily places you’d go unless, like me, you had been a civilian consultant to a handful of intelligence agencies.

Yet even in the most genteel cities, when the accommodations were five-star, the rooms filled me with loneliness.

Television helps. So does vodka. And after turning on the news and pouring a Stoli from the minibar, I sat on the bed and reread the page I’d printed from the DoctorFinder on the American Medical Association website: