July 1999

You’d turned off the TV hours ago. The coverage was endless: John F. Kennedy Jr., missing. His plane had gone down en route to Martha’s Vineyard. No distress signal. No survivors found. Carolyn and her sister were presumed dead. Every news anchor wore their mourning face, mouthing words that blurred together—“tragedy,” “dynasty,” “curse”—like it hadn’t been said before, like it hadn’t already been carved into the Kennedy name long before this.

You hadn’t seen him in three years.

Three years since he told you goodbye with those careful, curated words: “You’re the only real thing I’ve ever had… but I need someone who fits.” As if you were a coat he couldn’t wear in public. As if love and legacy were ever meant to exist in the same room.

You told yourself you were over it. Told yourself you didn’t care what happened to him anymore. That Carolyn Bessette, with her white silk dress and thousand-yard stare, could keep whatever was left of the man you once knew.

And then the phone rang.

Not your apartment line. The other one. The one only one person had ever used.

You picked it up and said nothing.

The voice on the other end was calm, clinical, almost apologetic. “He’s alive,” the man said. “And he asked for you.”

There was a pause, but you couldn’t find any words. He filled the silence. “He wouldn’t let them sedate him until we said you were on your way. We’ve arranged transport. You’ll be at Mass General in four hours.”

You couldn’t remember packing. The manila envelope was handed to you on the tarmac by someone who didn’t meet your eyes. Inside: a hospital clearance badge, a confidentiality agreement, and a handwritten note in a woman’s slanted print: He’s critical. He won’t speak to anyone but you. Be prepared. He doesn’t know about the others yet.

The jet was small, fast, quiet. You sat with your hands in your lap, staring at the dark curve of the clouds outside. You kept hearing his voice in your head—the real one, not the one the world knew. The one he only used when he was drunk at three in the morning, lying beside you in that little apartment you shared before everything became too heavy for him to hold. “You make me want to disappear,” he once told you. “In a good way. Like I could finally stop performing.”

But he didn’t stop. He married her. He built the life they said he should. And now… now the ocean had taken it all back.

When the jet landed, there were no flashing lights, no reporters—just a car with blacked-out windows and a driver who said nothing. The hospital was locked down under a fake name. The Kennedy family had cleared an entire floor.

The hallway outside his room smelled of bleach and death.

You hesitated at the door. The nurse looked up from her clipboard. “You’re the one?” she asked softly. Then, a nod. “He’s been asking. Keeps waking up calling for you.”

She pushed the door open and stepped back.

He was unrecognizable.

Not his face—that was still there, though bruised and bandaged, swollen and split open in places. But he—the man you knew—was almost gone. Buried under machines and tubes, beeping monitors and the sharp scent of antiseptic. His chest rose in shallow, irregular waves. One eye was closed with stitches. The other opened when he heard the door.

It landed on you.