[Part One]

July 10, 2026

“I am talking to you, Nick."

“Excuse me?” Nicholas responded, looking behind him. Sitting there was a short red-haired woman in a black pantsuit. Her mascara had clearly run leaving black streaks on her cheeks. Nick deduced that she had been the tardy arrival, sliding down the pew once she recognized him. “Do I know you?”

“Shhh. Let us sing.”

Nick tried to catch up with the group. “But you are always close to me/following all my ways/may I always be close to you/following your ways, Lord.” Nick shut his eyes tight, wondering if the skeptical Rachel he knew had become a fanatic follower in her final days.

The song wrapped up and the ushers began allowing the rows to leave. Before he could slide out the side of his pew down the aisle, the red-headed woman had moved in front of his pew exit, essentially blocking his path.

“I can’t believe you showed up here, Nick.”

“Do I know you?” Nicholas peered deeply at the woman’s face, trying to recognize her. He thought there was something familiar in the glaring visage.

“Hah! I guess I shouldn’t be surprised you don’t remember me. I’m Claire, Rachel’s friend from college.”

With that, Nick’s memories came tumbling back: “Abundantly Claire” as he called her in private moments with just Rachel, a moniker earned by Claire’s unwavering sense of directness. He held out his hand. “Wow, sorry, Claire. I didn’t recognize you.”

Claire ignored his hand. “I did wear my hair long in those days and weighed a good bit more. The sin would not be you forgetting me.”

“Come again?”  Nick looked nervously around him. With Claire effectively blocking the end of the pew, his chance of getting out of the church before any post-service interactions occurred was fading away. He wanted desperately to turn around and see if the two women at the other end of the pew had departed.

Claire ignored the question, her eyes sweeping toward the main aisle. “Hey, Lenny, come here.”

Nick followed her eyes, feeling his body clench. Coming through the pew behind him was a big, burly man that Nick did remember well: Rachel’s little brother, Len. Lenny had been in high school when he knew Rachel, but even then he had the body one would expect of a defensive lineman, over 6 feet and 250 pounds of muscle. While the man lumbering toward Claire was a little flabbier, he was no less intimidating. Nick encouraged himself to relax; he was here after all to pay respect to Lenny’s older sister.

“Claire? Oh my God, you did make it!” He embraced her with a bear-hug.

“Yeah, sorry, traffic was a pain leaving Philadelphia. I got in right after the service started. Guess who appeared also to get here at the last minute?” She gestured toward Nick who did take the opportunity to swivel around to see the two women standing at the other end of the pew chatting with an old man with a cane.

Lenny looked blankly at Nick.

“How can you forget this mug, Lenny. It’s Nick Hyatt.”

Lenny stared intently at Nick, eyeing him up as if a predator sizing up his prey in the wild. “Well, well, it sure is. You’re a bit older, Nick, buddy, with the grey goatee and wild eyebrows, but otherwise you look like you did the day you slipped out of town.”

Nick held up his hands defensively. “Hey, guys,” he said, eyes darting between the odd couple of Lenny and Claire, “I came just to show my respect to Rachel. I certainly don’t want to enflame any old grudges.”

“Grudges? That’s what you call this?” Claire’s voice was controlled but her glare showed her anger.

“Uh, I don’t know what ‘this’ is. Look, if it helps, let me through and I will leave now. I certainly don’t want to make a bad day worse for any of you.”

“You don’t want to make a bad day worse? Ain’t that a hoot, Lenny?”

Lenny crowded the end of the pew. Nick took a couple of nervous steps backwards. “C’mon guys. Let’s not make a scene. Rachel would certainly not want that.”

“How the fuck would you know what Rachel wanted, you twerp?” Lenny grabbed Nick’s bolo. Lenny’s face was beet red; Nick wondered how white his had become.

Claire had slipped back into the pew behind Nick to allow Lenny full access to Nick’s pew. He had no reasonable hope of jumping the pew and escaping, but Claire certainly seemed to want to show that such a plan was out of the question. Nick glanced over his shoulder to see that the two women and the man with the cane had been joined by a couple of teenage girls. No escape route was available. He couldn’t help noting that other pews and the main aisle were emptying rather quickly, people flowing toward the doors where there was a backup as people stopped to exchange wishes with the family.

“Look, guys, I’m not exactly sure what I did to make you both mad. Whatever it was, everyone makes mistakes. I apologize for whatever mine were. Let’s leave it at that and I will leave you to your grief.”

“Everything all right?” The pastor had made his way down the aisle and stood behind Lenny. “Anything I can do to help, Mr. Cox?”

“No, sir.” Lenny said, dropping his hands from Nick’s bolo, smoothing Nick’s shirt as if that had been his plan all along. “Just reintroducing myself to one of Rachel’s old friends.”

“Well, then, thank you for coming, Mr. . . .” The pastor held out his hand.

Nick shoved his hand past Lenny’s hulking body to respond to the shake. “My pleasure, Reverend. Nicholas Hyatt. Thank you for leading such a lovely service.”

“These things are never easy, especially when the deceased had been going through such a painful fight with cancer, but I don’t need to tell you.”

“Hmm. You probably do, Reverend,” Claire spat out.

Sensing the tension, the pastor shuffled down the aisle toward the crowd at the doorway.

“I am sure these last few months sucked,” Nick confessed. “I am so sorry, guys.” He swept his eyes from Claire to Lenny.

“Sorry doesn’t feed the bulldog, Nick. Besides,” Lenny said, grabbing Nick’s bolo again, “it was more than a few months.”

“Look, I clearly can’t make anything better for you two. Why don’t you just step aside and I’ll leave immediately?”

Lenny looked past Nick at the central aisle of the nave emptying. “You know, old buddy, why don’t you, Claire, and I just sit down here for a few minutes and have a chat?” His hand swept open his suit jacket, and Nick thought for a second that he might have seen the handle of a gun tucked inside his waistband. Meanwhile, Claire had shuffled down the pew she was in and adroitly hopped over to take a seat on Nick’s right. Lenny pushed Nick’s left shoulder hard enough to force him down.

Nick looked toward the front of the church. Only a handful of people were still milling around the dais; he glanced over his right shoulder to see not many more by the door. As he brought his eyes back, he couldn’t help but see Claire fidgeting with her clutch.

“So, Nick, old boy. Tell us what you’ve been up to?”  Lenny pulled a piece of chewing gum out of his suit jacket and slowly unwrapped it before slyly slipping it into his mouth.

“Uh, what do you want to hear? I live in New Jersey now.” Nick hoped that the two of them might find some solace in the effort he made to come all the way back to their hometown to honor Rachel.

“Uh, yeah. I see you’re married.” Lenny pulled up Nick’s left hand to examine the black wedding band. “You bring your wife?”

“Uh, no, she couldn’t make it.”

Claire snorted. “Did you even invite her?” She was dabbing at her makeup with a Kleenex and a compact.

“I told her I was coming here for a friend’s funeral. She figured it wasn’t worth her time to come and go knowing no one.”

“So, you are going to turn around and drive back home?”  Lenny seemed to be inching even closer to Nick on the pew bench, and the heat was increasing. Nick could feel his undershirt sticking to his torso.

Nick determined that if he didn’t take some control now, while there were still a few people loitering in the area, he might never get a chance. “Look, Lenny, I saw your gun. I don’t know what your intentions are, but how can you bring that into a church?”

Lenny snorted. “I’m a cop, Nicky boy. More importantly, let’s follow your logic. If I didn’t expect you to return the funeral of my beautiful sister, the woman you abandoned all those years ago, why would I have come here with intentions of using it on you?”

Nick could feel his sweat rolling down the back of his neck. For a church made of stone with few windows, it certainly wasn’t cool.

“Abandoned Rachel?” Nick looked towards Claire, then back at Lenny. “Look, guys, if that’s what you thought, it’s not that simple.”

Claire lightly punched Nick in his right arm. “C’mon, Nick, don’t lie. I was there when you left her. I was the one who took her calls night after night, who drove her home from bars when she drank herself silly to try and forget how much you hurt her.”

“How much I hurt her?”  Nick almost smiled at the ridiculous notion but realized that would not help his case. “She hurt me. At worst, I would admit that we hurt each other equally. We were young and immature.”  A church official was now starting at the first pew checking for trash or other things left by the attendees. Nick felt a little less vulnerable.

Lenny tightened his grip on Nick’s Bolo tie, pulling his neck to face him. “You know that Rachel was so devastated by you leaving that her life fell apart. It was years before she regained her confidence. She hated herself for being so in love with you.”

“Love with me? You got me confused with someone else. Rachel felt a lot of things for me, but love was never one of them.”

Claire chortled. “Her diary suggested differently.”

Nick truly felt flummoxed. “Her diary?”

Claire pulled his right arm to get him to face her. “Yeah. Don’t pretend you didn’t know about the diary.”

“Of course, I knew about the diary. But I find it hard to believe she was writing that stuff about me.”

“Well, she was, hot shot.”

Nick hesitated, trying to align two versions of a past, one that had formed the foundation for the rest of his life and one that suggested he’d been a fool. “Claire, I am being honest with you. She never told me she loved me, not in that kind of soulmate way. She reiterated for a long time that I was her best friend, but not the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with.”

“Not according to the diary.”

“Well,” Nick mumbled, trying to find the mortar that might fuse these conflicted pasts, “when in the diary did she write that she loved me? Maybe she addressed her real feelings after I went to New York to start my job with the Jets?”

“Oh, both before and after that, Nick.”

Nick felt his head snapping back toward Lenny. He wondered if the Bolo tie would survive the day. “Besides, Nick, Rachel had told Mom and Dad and me that Easter before you left that she hoped for a proposal. Mom and Dad were so excited. I am not sure Dad ever really recovered from the shock of seeing Rachel so devastated by your departure.”

Nick stared speechless. He still couldn’t conceive what they were saying to him.  He could feel more time slipping away, and he knew he needed to hit the road soon if he was going to be home by 11:00 as he had promised Victoria. If this went on much longer, he would have to call her and make up an excuse for his tardiness.  That thought gave him an idea.

“Look, guys,” he said, smoothing his shirt, “is there a coffee shop nearby? It’s obvious we need a little time to sort through this. What you are telling me is, honestly, news to me. A calm conversation over a cup of coffee would help us settle it, and I could certainly use the cup before I hit the road.” He wanted to make sure they understood that he had a small window of time to explore (and in some ways, explode) the past.

“There’s a Starbucks about four blocks away,” Claire offered.

“Great. Give me the address and I’ll meet you there.”

“No, that won’t work, hot shot.” Lenny’s glare made Nick wonder how many potential criminals (or innocent people for that matter) wilted under his watch. “Claire, why don’t you drive and I will ride with Mr. Hyatt?”

Nick felt sick. So much for that exit plan. “Wait a second, don’t you need to stick around here to meet with the well-wishers?”

“Don’t worry. Lenny, I will let everyone know that we need to step out for a few minutes to chat with someone we didn’t expect to see, but that we will catch up with everyone at the park.” Claire smiled falsely.

“The park? Are you extending the service to the park?”

“More of a casual meet-and-greet for those of us who knew Rachel so well. You’d feel out of place there. Let’s go.” Lenny grabbed Nick’s arm and forcibly lifted him out of the pew and directed him into and down the aisle. Lenny nodded at a few people near the two sets of doors, and Nick could hear Claire behind him muttering apologies and even air kissing a few people still standing around.

“Where you parked?” Lenny asked.

“Up the street a little bit. You sure this isn’t a hassle? You’ll have to come back here for your car.”

“No worries. It will be on the way to the park; Claire will have to drive right past it, so I will get my ride with her. Now let’s get a move on.”

Nick made eye contact with a few people on the street, but no one had any reason to suspect anything was peculiar about two men walking very closely side by side from the church. At one point, Nick thought he saw Rachel’s mom standing and talking to two women in fancy clothes. He was tempted to ask Lenny to stop; a diversion might create some more openings to slip away, but he hesitated. He wasn’t sure it was Rachel’s mom and he wasn’t sure what would be the bigger humiliation: having it be her or having it not be her.

Instead, Lenny marched him toward the car, arm in arm. They stopped in front of his Fusion. “It unlocked?” Lenny asked. Nick nodded. “Then give me the keys.”

“Oh, come on, Lenny, what do you think I am going to do?  I’m not some common criminal who might make a dash from the police. I am going willingly.”

“I’ll feel better having the keys until we are at the Starbucks. I don’t think you want to make a scene with Mrs. Cox standing over there.”

That had been her. Nick berated himself for not taking advantage of the moment a few seconds earlier. Maybe Rachel’s mom would also have been angry with him, but he would have felt less vulnerable with her reaction, even if accumulated with Lenny’s, in front of people on the street. Instead, he handed Lenny the keys and sheepishly opened his passenger door. Lenny had quickly slid into the driver’s seat. “Buckle up,” he said smiling. “Don’t want to get a ticket.”

Nick fastened his seat belt, still wondering what nightmare he had wandered into. Out on the street, he could see Claire hugging someone and crossing the road to a small parking lot. Good or bad, it seemed unlikely he would be left alone with Lenny for long at Starbucks.

As Lenny started the car, he immediately turned down the sound on Paul Simon. “Never could stand that crap you and Rachel used to listen to. I don’t suppose you have any Iron Maiden, do you?” He looked over at Nick and smiled as he pulled out. “Nah, I didn’t think so. Well, it doesn’t matter. We’ll be there in two or three minutes.”

Sure enough they were. Not enough time for Nick to formulate any strategy other than to maybe use the restroom as an escape, whatever that might mean. He visualized one of those rather narrow clerestory windows high up a wall that is always big enough to facilitate an escape in a bad sitcom or action movie.

As Lenny pulled into a parking space by the Starbucks, he turned off the engine and glanced in the rear-view mirror. “I think that’s Claire a few cars back. She has a nifty little red corvette.” He paused. “Yeah, we tease her all the time about still living in 1999.”

By the time they had reached the Starbucks’ door, Claire was pulling into a streetside parking spot a couple of cars ahead of Nick’s car. “Wait up!” she yelled from the car. Lenny grabbed Nick’s arm again like he had at the church.

“Look out, someone is coming out.” Lenny pushed Nick out of the way of the door. Sure enough, a young girl with purple hair and a neck tattoo came out juggling a coffee. She eyed Nick suspiciously, who returned a weak smile, hoping she might see his dilemma. However, instead she gave Lenny a smile, turned and walked up the street away from them. Meanwhile, Claire had caught up to them, opening the door for them to enter.

“Claire, get me a Blonde Roast Tall. Here’s enough for you and Nicky boy, too.” He shoved a couple of bills into Claire’s hands. “What do you want, Nicky?”

“Just an iced coffee. Make it a Grande. I’ve got a long drive back tonight.”

Lenny smiled at Claire, who headed up to the counter. Lenny directed them to a table near the front windows. “Long drive, eh? So, did you drive in just for the funeral? No plans to stay in town and revisit some haunts, see some lost friends?”

“Uh, I don’t really have any friends around here anymore, Lenny.”

“I’m sure you don’t. But, let’s wait for Claire to get back before we discuss that.” Lenny had laid Nick’s keys on the table between them.

“Mind if I hit the bathroom quickly? I didn’t get a chance to stop before the service.” Nick started to get up from his seat.

Lenny grabbed his arm for a second, his forearm bumping into the keys Nick desperately wanted to reclaim. “Wait for Claire. She’s about ready to come with the drinks.”

The two of them sat in silence waiting for Claire, whom Nick couldn’t see behind him, making it an agonizing wait. He looked around the empty coffee shop, all the tables unoccupied and no one lingering near the part of the counter he could see without fully turning his head. After a couple of minutes, Lenny stood up, pulled the chair to his right and Nick’s left out for Claire, and stepped around the table to help Claire with the coffees.

Seizing his opportunity, Nick quickly swiped his arm across the table and knocked his keys into his lap. Luckily, neither Lenny nor Claire seemed to have noticed, too caught up in balancing the drinks. Claire set down Nick’s in front of him while he squeezed his legs together tight to hide the keys.

Lenny didn’t seem to notice their absence as he sat back down. He took a sip of his coffee, leaned back and said, “So, where do we start?”

“Can I hit the bathroom first?” Looking at Claire, Nick elaborated, “I told Lenny I didn’t have a chance to go before the service.”

“Go ahead,” sighed Claire.

“Wait, where are the keys?” Lenny asked.

Ready for such an observation, Nick reluctantly pushed them forward as he got up out of his seat, causing them to fall to the floor with a tinkle. “They ended up on the floor,” he said, “I think they fell as we put all the drinks on the table.”  Nick reached down for them. Lenny grabbed his arm.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Lenny, don’t! He’s not going anywhere. There’s no exit door by the bathrooms.”

Nick grabbed the key, being able to hide his disappointment as he bent down. “Be right back,” he said while his eyes scanned the coffee shop. Sure enough, it looked like the restroom to his right was nowhere close to an exit. Maybe there’d be a window.

[Part Three to be posted by 7/14/2026]