Some marriages are made in hell. Jeff met his wife at a fundraiser and it was lust at first sight. Corine was a curvaceous brunette in her mid-thirties looking to settle down after having been the life of the party — and whatever came next — for fifteen years. Booze and coke had already taken a toll on her looks, but she was still a head-turner. Jeff was a nerd. Too shy to be a ladies’ man and not enough of a dreamboat to attract the spontaneous attention of women at parties. There’d been a few affairs in his life; they’d all been short-lived and less than memorable. Since his medical supplies business had taken off, he decided he could do well without the tiresome hunt for willing females and began using escort services. The escorts were above-average beautiful, professional, didn’t expect to be wooed and left without further ado once they were paid. The cool, transactional aspect of these relationships came as a relief for Jeff. When Corine homed in on him, he was totally unprepared. Corine was an experienced angler. One look at Jeff told her what bait to use. She cast her line and reeled in her prey before Jeff knew what happened. He’d never been the focus of attention of a woman so far out of his league. Resistance was futile. They landed in bed the same night. Three months later, they were married. Six months later, Corine was pregnant with twins. It all went downhill from there. Corine proved to be a woefully inadequate mother whereas Jeff was a concerned but equally inept father. When Jeff’s business was caught in a squall five years into their marriage, it forced them to drastically cut household expenses, and their relationship became acrimonious. Corine’s alcohol-fuelled histrionics, her repetitive bouts of self-pity, and the ensuing shouting matches between the spouses made family life toxic. When both sons decided to escape their parental hellhole by joining the army at age seventeen, they cleared the road for divorce. Even so, the divorce was a drawn-out affair, which lasted for the better part of two years. By then, one of the twins, Paul, had died in Afghanistan, shredded to pieces by a roadside bomb.

Being rid of his wife was not the catharsis Jeff had hoped for. He was torn by guilt over Paul’s death, and his other son, Henry, refused to speak to him. Twenty years of his life had turned into a charred sagebrush steppe after a devastating fire. That his business had survived the crisis and was flourishing again was but cold comfort. Jeff no longer had the heart to run the company and sold it for a tidy sum. He was sixty-two and felt entirely purposeless. He took a trip to Europe, visited Paris, London, Bruges, and Amsterdam, and didn’t enjoy it for a single moment. He bought a seafront property with a wonderful view of Commencement Bay and Mount Rainier on the outskirts of Tacoma, Washington, and spent six months sulking on its porch, brooding about how his life had gone off the tracks.

He played the film of his life over and over in his head. When had he ever been truly happy? His thoughts irresistibly circled back to his elementary school years. He grew up in Bend, Oregon. Bend had boomed since, but when Jeff was a kid in the 1950s, it was a small town caught between the Ponderosa pine forest and the high desert. He remembered going camping and fly fishing redsides in the Deschutes River with his father. The taste of trout roasted over the evening campfire and his old man telling tall fisherman’s tales belonged to his fondest memories. Still, if he was honest with himself, he had to admit another memory trumped these intimate moments he got to spend with his dad. There was this girl in elementary school. Nancy was her name. Smart as a whip. Tall and pretty too. One day in the last year of elementary school, when the teacher had left the classroom for a moment, Jeff got up from his desk, walked up to Nancy, and gave her a peck on the cheek for everybody to see. She’d been both embarrassed and pleased at the same time. They’d never become an item. Nancy sometimes came over to play but always in the company of other boys and girls from his class. In junior high school, they went to separate schools and never met again. Jeff was racking his brain. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember Nancy’s family name.

Nancy’s memory became Jeff’s obsession. What if she had been his true love? What if he’d missed his one chance at happiness by callously letting her slip out of his life after elementary school? How would his life have looked like if only he’d held on to her? Jeff lay awake at night, mulling over these thoughts over and over again until he couldn’t stand it anymore. He decided he’d find Nancy. He searched the web for her, but as he was unsure about her family name, he came up empty. None of the pictures he managed to drag up from his searches remotely resembled his childhood sweetheart.

In the end, he decided to get help. Jeff picked a P.I. company in Tacoma that got a good rating on Yelp. Anubis P.I. on South 56^th Street was specialised in background investigations and heirs & beneficiary cases. They should be able to find Nancy even with the limited information he could provide, Jeff reckoned. He made an appointment by telephone. Anubis P.I. rented office space in a nondescript corporate centre. To Jeff’s relief, it didn’t look at all like the seedy places where snoops in old Hollywood film noirs crawled into their bottle of bourbon. The office looked crisp and modern, and so did Travis Buckley, who didn’t bear any likeness to either Humphrey Bogart or a latter-day, sagging Robert Mitchum. Buckley was a man in his late thirties and obviously spent a lot of time at the gym. Jeff told him he wanted to get in touch with a person he’d been in elementary school with, without filling him in on the emotional reasons for the search. Buckley wrote down Nancy’s name, their year of birth, and the name of the elementary school. He assured Jeff that finding Nancy would probably not take too long. They agreed on a fee, and Jeff left Anubis P.I. with a spring in his step.

Buckley was as good as his word. Two weeks after their first meeting, he called Jeff to tell him the job was done. He’d found Nancy and performed a background check on her while he was at it. Jeff drove over and was handed a slim file with everything there was to know about Nancy.

Back at his home, Jeff took the pictures Buckley had snapped of Nancy and studied them before looking at the rest of the file. They showed a trim woman with half-long, grey hair. Jeff tried to recognise the girl he’d known fifty years ago in the features of this adult woman. The turn of her nose, her mouth, her eyes. Jeff looked hard, but the resemblance was fleeting. What had he expected? He didn’t look like his eleven-year-old self either. Had Nancy led a happy life? Jeff studied the wrinkles in her face. She had no worry or frown lines in her forehead. The crow’s feet in the outer corners of her eyes told him she’d laughed long and often. The under-eye wrinkles and marionette lines running from her nose to her chin gave away her age. Jeff didn’t have the impression that Nancy attempted to botox them away. She seemed to wear her years with confidence, refusing even to colour her hair. She was a total stranger, Jeff had to admit. If he’d met her in the street before looking at these pictures, he wouldn’t have recognised her.

The background information Buckley provided was thorough. Jeff winced. If it took a random P.I. only a fortnight to produce such a deep dive in Nancy’s private life, what obscenities could be dragged to the surface about himself? Scanning the pages, Jeff felt like a voyeur. What was he doing? It was none of his business, and yet he kept on reading. Nancy’s maiden name was Bartlett. How could he have forgotten that? She obtained a master of arts in Communication at the University of Portland — a Catholic university. He never knew Nancy was a Catholic. She worked as a journalist and editor for several newspapers and then set up her own business in Seattle, called Read All About It. It was specialised in producing in-house magazines for companies. Jeff scanned through the list of customers. Some impressive names there. Nancy had done well for herself. Buckley had included the P&L statements of the last five years. Healthy figures. How about her private life? Married twice. First husband deceased, drowned on a sailing trip with friends. Married again five years later with Phil Grünwald, a professor in Computer Science at Seattle University. No children of their own. A medical file stating Nancy was infertile. How did Buckley get his hands on that? Weren’t these kinds of data supposed to be private? Next, the adoption forms for an eight-year-old Filipino boy, dating back twenty-five years. Taped to the inside of the file, he found a USB-stick. It contained Nancy’s entire web browsing history of the last three years, her credit card statements and tax returns of the last five years, a list of charities she donated to, all the pictures and text documents she kept stored on her desktop, and all text messages she’d sent and received in the last five years. On a separate card, Buckley had noted the account names and passwords for Nancy’s private email, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, and Pinterest accounts. Her entire life was at his fingertips.

It took Jeff a week to sift through all the material. The picture emerging from Buckley’s investigative efforts wasn’t encouraging. Nancy seemed to be further out of reach than ever before. There was no indication she was unhappy in her marriage, no trace of her cheating on her husband or keeping dark secrets from him. For a moment, Jeff pondered asking Buckley to investigate Grünwald, her husband. He abandoned the idea. He didn’t want to involve the P.I. any deeper than he already was. Nancy lived in Sammamish — a suburb east of Seattle — in a two-storey, detached home on Inglewood Road. Jeff drove up to the place and parked across the street. He kept at it for five days, taking care to use different cars. He watched Nancy leaving for work in the morning and coming back in the evening. One day, he followed her to Seattle and observed her having lunch with one of her customers from a nearby table in the restaurant. She had a pleasant, deep alto voice and a contagious laugh. Jeff saw her skilfully playing her lunch partner without ever crossing the line into flirtatious behaviour. She was a professional who set herself clear goals about what to get out of a business meeting.

All the while, Jeff was thinking about how he could get in touch with her. He regretted selling his company. Otherwise, he could have contacted her for professional reasons. If he sent a message to her business email address now, she could easily google him and find out he no longer had an enterprise. Jeff had noticed that one of the charities Nancy was involved in was organising a fundraising food fair the next week. He decided to attend, well aware of the irony that he’d met his first wife at a fundraiser as well. He intended to introduce himself as a potential future donor, and then while talking over the possibilities, they could ‘accidentally’ discover they shared a bit of common history. What a small world it was!

The open-air fair was in luck. The weather was balmy; not a cloud in the sky. It was a large event with dozens of stalls and hundreds of visitors. It took Jeff a while to spot Nancy. She was walking hand in hand with her husband, talking to stallholders and visitors. It was obvious she was both well-known and well-liked in her community. She looked stunning in a flowery dress and a broad-rimmed summer hat. When Jeff was about to approach her, she threw her arms in the air and cried out with delight. A two-year-old toddler ran at her, crowing, ‘Lolááááááá!’ Nancy picked up the beaming little boy and twirled him round and round, laughing and kissing her grandchild. The parents joined in and hugged Nancy and Phil, talking happily and excitedly. Stopped in his tracks, Jeff watched this picture postcard of family bliss from a distance. He had no memories of ever having been as joyful as these two couples in his entire adult life. A bitter tide of regret washed over him as he turned around. He took his mobile phone from his blazer’s inside pocket and dialled a number he hadn’t used anymore in the past twenty years.

“Prestige Escort Services,” a warm female voice answered the call, “How can we help to make your day unforgettable?”