iv. Big Leaf Maple
Sometimes when he looks up at the big leaf maple trees towering over everything in the Seattle forest, he thinks of her. More often than not, he's only there at a crime scene or trying to escape his house and his wife and his whole fucking life. The damp and mossy maples of Seattle are nothing compared to the fresh scent of palm trees mingling with the salty ocean breeze through the open windows of her bungalow in St. Lucia.
He tries to think logically, something he has always excelled at. They had a four week whirlwind romance, if it could even be called that. But fuck his logic, he would definitely call it a romance. He had felt something for her, still feels something for her, even as he lies next to his crying wife every night. She means something to him. On the worst nights, he thinks about how he loved her. How he still loves her.
She leaves him the morning after he asks her to take the next step in their relationship, leaves him in her bed without so much as a note. She just up and leaves St. Lucia without a word to him or her bosses at the bar. He doesn't expect that his invitation to come with him back to the United States would have sent her running, but he's been wrong about a lot of things when it come to women he loves. He waits around for two days before he gets a call from Haley, always emotional. He used to love that about Haley, her passion. Towards the end, he just found it annoying.
But Haley tells him over the phone that she's late, that she had originally figured she hadn't had her period because of the stress of the divorce but now she doesn't know, that obviously he's the father, that she doesn't want to take a pregnancy test without him there. She never filed the divorce papers after all.
So he leaves a letter for her at the bar, begging any god who's listening that she would somehow magically appear back on the island and read it. It's just words, but it means something. All of this has to mean something. The flight back to Seattle is dreadful at best, agonizing at worst, but at least he's alone and can pretend that he doesn't cry in the airplane bathroom.
As luck would have it, and yes he considered it luck, Haley is wrong. She's not pregnant. He stays with her anyway, mostly out of guilt from her crushed excitement about having his child.
When his boss tells him that he's up for a promotion to Unit Chief of the Behavioral Analysis Unit in Washington, D.C., he wishes he could tell her. His first instinct is to want to tell Emily, not his wife.
And that say a lot about him.