Found and Lost: The Jake and Cait Story
Music, aging, connection, and the passage of time are examined in this interfaith love story by Howard Lovy
Found and Lost: The Jake and Cait Story follows Jewish guitarist Jacob Rosner and Christian violinist Caitlin Doyle, who, as young musicians in 1985, created something transcendent each time they locked eyes and finished each other’s musical phrases—until the music stopped. Forty years later, in 2025, their long-forgotten song unexpectedly goes viral, pulling them back into each other’s lives. This novel, which examines love, aging, faith, fame, and the passage of time, will be released on April 29, 2025, from Vine Leaves Press and is available for preorder here.
“Well, folks. I can always entertain you with some juggling and tap dancing,” Jake told the restless audience. Some were getting a little hostile and booing. Others were giving up and leaving. “You know, this wasn’t supposed to be a full show, anyway,” Jake continued. “It’s a rehearsal to see if we can still play together. And what did you think? I suck, but wasn’t Caity wonderful?”
The crowd cheered in agreement. Some of the young female campers began to chant, “Cait! Cait! Cait! Cait!”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “I agree. And Caity will come back to the stage soon. I promise. She’s—um—resining up her bow, or whatever it is that violinists do. You see, she was in a fiddle-playin’ contest with the devil, and, of course, she won …” Jake’s voice trailed off. None of these kids would recognize the Charlie Daniels Band reference, and his face was beginning to drip with sweat.
“Anyway, nobody wants to see my old, ugly mug. We’ll take another fifteen-minute break, and I’ll be back with the real star of the show, the lovely Caity Doyle.”
If I can find her, he thought. “Meanwhile, please give a round of applause to the Accidentals, who will entertain you while we old people go play some shuffleboard.”
Jake jumped off the stage, which he knew was a mistake as soon as he launched. It’d be a miracle if he was able to land on his feet without his knees buckling. Fortunately, he didn’t stumble, although every muscle and bone in his body complained at the outrage.
Now what? Jake thought. Now fucking what?
They were so close to a real reunion. These past few hours of pretending to be a rock star were hard on his body but incredibly rejuvenating to his soul. There he was, making music with Cait by his side, and the world was perfect again for the first time in forty years. He had almost fooled himself into believing it could last.
But then Cait’s husband and daughter practically kidnapped her right in front of his face, taking her when she was exhausted and vulnerable. They were probably headed down Route 115 and halfway to Cadillac by now, en route back to Rock Island. And, like Cait had said, nobody wanted to see only half the act. He was missing his Garfunkel.
That was it. He got three hours of feeling whole before half of him was ripped away again. Jake was going to wait fifteen minutes and then tell everybody it was all over.
***
Brian gently took his wife’s hand, and they both walked to a building with a long corridor featuring display windows of the accomplishments of Interlochen students. In the summer, it was a camp, but the rest of the year, it was a world-famous arts academy, and its alumni could be found in the music, TV, and film industries.
“How are your hands, dear?” Brian said, taking them into his own and then lifting her trembling hands to his lips, gently kissing them. “You need to rest them before you can play again. The shaking might not stop otherwise.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Cait said. “I’ll be fine. But I can’t rest them yet because I’m going back onstage to play some more.”
“No,” Brian said. “You’re not. I think we’re done here. This is enough now. You’re too old to play pop star, and you’re only hurting your body, dancing up there like you’re still a teenager. I think you’re embarrassing yourself, and you should act your age. You had some fun, relived the old days with that man, but it’s time to go home now. There will be no reunion tour if this is what it does to your body.”
“I don’t think so, Brian,” Cait said. “You don’t get to—”
“Yes, I do get to tell you what to do,” Brian said. “After thirty years of marriage, I get to tell you when you’re being self-destructive. How long do you think this could last, Caitlin, before the public gets tired of your nostalgia act and moves on to something else? Then where will you be? Your old body will be in ruins, and our marriage will have suffered maybe irreparably. I see the way you look at that Jacob character when you’re onstage. It’s indecent and certainly not very Christian.”
“Ahh, here it comes,” Cait said. “If you bring up the fact that he’s Jewish . . . I don’t care what faith he is. We’ve always had a spiritual connection that transcends my Christianity and his Judaism.”
“No,” Brian said. “I wasn’t going to bring up his Judaism, although I don’t see how you believe that’s compatible. I’m talking only about your Christianity. Do you think you’re doing anything to spread the word of God by singing silly songs and making a spectacle of yourself? Do you think it’s very Christian of you to look that way at a man who is not your husband?”
Brian didn’t think of himself as an antisemite, although he wondered how his wife could reconcile her belief in Jesus with her involvement with a Jew. Maybe religion had something to do with their breakup forty years ago. The thought gave Brian hope that he was on the right track toward separating Jake and Cait. Even if he were the Yoko Ono, and the world hated him for splitting up their musical heroes, at least he would have his wife back, and that was good enough for Brian.
Cait took a long pause while they continued to walk through the corridor. She enjoyed gazing at the displays filled with photos of young musicians, actors, and artists. She stopped at a showcase that featured Jake and Cait. Jake was eighteen years old, very skinny, with shaggy brown hair that partially covered his eyes. He was holding his borrowed Yamaha guitar, and his mouth was partially open in front of a microphone. He stood with his head slightly cocked back in a pose that could be mistaken for arrogance, but Cait knew it to be joy.
In this photo, she was standing to the left of Jake, her violin under her chin, playing a now-forgotten tune. She was looking at Jake, taking musical cues from him. And, wow, did she look young and lovely. Her green eyes positively glowed, her face pale with scattered freckles, her red hair slightly mussed, and her body without a hint of fat.
Now, she was a fifty-nine-year-old woman who was in pain from head to toe after three hours of intense playing and singing with that young boy who had turned into a middle-aged man. What did she think she was doing? Maybe everything belonged in its own time. Were people actually laughing at her for trying to act young? Maybe the girls who chanted her name were being ironic or sarcastic? She wasn’t sure, although the adoration seemed sincere.
Cait was so lost inside herself, she barely registered that her husband was speaking. She snapped back to awareness at the sound of scripture. Brian was quoting it.
“Caitlin, ‘What God has joined together, let no one separate.’ That’s Mark 10:9. We made vows to each other.”
Really? Cait thought. Is Brian really going to start this with me? But Cait could not help herself. She knew how to sling the Bible just as well as her husband.
“I know, Brian,” she said, turning around and looking up into his eyes, which were slightly dewy with tears. “But Ecclesiastes says there’s ‘a time for everything,’ even ‘a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing.’ Right now, I feel it’s a time for something new, something I can’t ignore.”
This time, Brian had an answer ready right away.
“But Proverbs 5:18 says, ‘May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth.’ I’m still rejoicing in you, Caitlin. Why can’t you see that?”
“Brian—” Cait paused for a beat, wondering if she should continue this silly Bible battle, then continued. “Jeremiah 29:11 talks about God having plans for us, ‘plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.’ I believe this musical journey with Jake might be part of God’s plan for me.”
Brian raised his voice for this next sortie. He was entering into territory that he would later regret, but desperation overcame him.
“Then what about Ephesians 5:22? ‘Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.’ We have commitments, responsibilities.” It was out before he had a chance to censor himself, which Brian immediately regretted.
Cait frowned, thought for a few seconds, and came back with this one.
“Yes, but the Gospel also teaches us to seek first the Kingdom of God,” Cait said. “Sometimes that means stepping out in faith, even when it’s uncomfortable. Remember Peter stepping out of the boat onto the water? That’s what this feels like for me.”
All this was true, Cait thought, but she also knew that to follow her own arguments, she would have to leave her husband. She had to commit to Jake—body and soul—for this to work at all. But how much did she really know Jake after forty years? He was familiar, but she had changed a great deal in that time. She was not certain that what she felt for him now was anything close to love.
But seeing Brian, a man who had given her so much for thirty years, standing in front of her, Cait knew she was being selfish. She could not pretend to know what God wanted, and it was arrogant of her to presume. The right thing to do was devote herself anew to her husband and walk away from Jake.
Brian sensed the turmoil inside his wife but remembered what his daughter said about the need to get tough now. His marriage was at stake. He took a deep breath, his hand trembling slightly as he reached out to touch her arm.
“Caitlin, dear,” he said. “If you go back onstage with Jacob Rosner instead of going home with Erin and me right now, you will lose me. This isn’t a threat. It’s a fact. And you know this to be true.”
Cait paused for a few beats, then bobbed her head from side to side in a kind of surrender.
“Well, Brian,” she said. “At least I’ll have a story to tell our grandchildren. ‘Did Grandma ever tell you about the time she was a rock star for three hours?’”
She paused, then stood on her toes to kiss Brian on the cheek. “Let’s go home, my husband,” she said.
“Gladly, my wife,” he replied.
***
Sacred Choir
Music and Lyrics by Jacob Rosner (Copyright 2025)
May the strings of my guitar
Strum with my beating heart
May the bow of your violin
Sing like an angel’s hymn
For our music is a prayer
And our voices are a choir
A sacred offering to the world
A light in the darkest hour
May our melodies bring light
To the shadows of the night
May they lift us up and heal
Every wound that we may feel
In a dream, I heard a voice
A calling that gave me no choice
“Your music is a sacred gift
A calling that will always lift”
So let us play with all our might
With passion, love, and holy light
Our voices soaring, reaching high
A choir that touches the sky
Well, that was it. That was Jake’s Hail Mary. If Cait was still within the sound of his voice, that was his final plea, his apology, his message that he understood what their musical and personal partnership meant to her—what it meant all those years ago and what it could mean again today if she only stayed.
Jake had been playing around with the tune for some years and had the words only partially written in his head. He wanted it to resonate like Leonard Cohen’s “If It Be Your Will,” which gave the act of creating music a divine mission. It was a final farewell song to the people who had shown up to watch Jake and Cait rehearse. And it was a last-minute plea to Cait, who likely was nowhere near the sound of his voice.
Many regrets had consumed Jake over the years. One of them was how he was never completely comfortable with Cait’s insistence that their partnership was divinely inspired. Although he could never adequately explain this feeling between them that went deeper, more intimate than love, he had not thought of it as supernatural in origin. Yet, he knew that it was the secret to their musical success, how they truly sang and played as one.
Bruce Springsteen liked to say that musicians know one plus one equals three, that an otherworldly force is created when two people play. But that was not the case for Jake and Cait. For them—and it seemed for them only—one plus one equals one. Apart, they were insignificant. Together, they were united in one song and in one soul, a unity so powerful that audiences could feel it with them and through them and bathed in their light.
For somebody like Cait, raised in Catholicism, a faith of miracles, it felt almost logical to attribute the whole thing to God. To Jake, an atheist Jew, it was more complicated. Forty years ago, Jake unequivocally rejected the idea so often and so bitterly that Cait stopped talking about it altogether. It was one of the few subjects on which they argued.
But when you’re a teenager, you think you know everything and can lecture others about the nature of reality. Jake, at age fifty-eight, had at last learned to accept people for who they are and to understand that he did not know everything. And this was who Cait was forty years ago and who she was still today. Her faith was a part of her; it guided her, gave her a calm beauty with which Jake fell deeply in love from the moment he stumbled on her on the beach.
Cait’s faith was a fundamental part of her character; it directed her talent and grace. Detaching her from her belief in God would be to strip her of her light.
And, more cynically, Jake knew that if he had any hope of bringing Cait back to him, it would come through a reminder of how their music, their partnership, their love, was sacred rather than terrestrial. After forty years of wandering in the wilderness, Jake would gladly accept all of Cait’s religious delusions rather than live without her another day.
So, after fifteen minutes of waiting for a no-show Cait, he finished writing “Sacred Choir” in his head and told the audience that this would be the last song he ever performed in public.
***
Caitlin Doyle Fitzgerald walked arm in arm with her husband, Brian, toward one of the many small Interlochen parking lots nestled among the trees. They were among a few scattered people making their way back to their cars. Now that Cait had disappeared from the stage, there was no show to watch. Just some old guy with a guitar. Nothing special about him at all.
Cait laughed to herself at how nobody recognized her when she walked with her husband. With Brian, Cait was out of context. Without Jake, she was just another middle-aged lady with bright red hair—probably bottled—walking with her even-older husband. Only an hour earlier, boys and men had been whistling at her, and girls and women admiring her, chanting her name.
It wasn’t real, she thought. It was a silly dream.
Before they reached the parking lot, Cait paused and turned around to take one last look at the place that had played such an important part in her life so many years ago. Interlochen was a beautiful campus, but for her, it belonged in its time. It was best to leave the past in the past. She was about to allow Brian to take her arm again and guide her to the car when she heard it—the unmistakable sound of Jake’s guitar. Then his voice was carried on the wind.
In a dream, I heard a voice
A calling that gave me no choice
“Your music is a sacred gift
A calling that will always lift”
So let us play with all our might
With passion, love, and holy light
Our voices soaring, reaching high
A choir that touches the sky
Cait covered her face with her hands. When she removed them, the trees, the dirt road, the distant lake all seemed to spin around her, and her eyesight began to go dim. Brian caught her to prevent her from falling and guided her over to a bench to sit.
“Caitlin, dear,” Brian said. “You’re suffering from exhaustion after playing so hard for hours. Don’t worry. When we get home, we’ll make sure a doctor checks you out thoroughly. Sit and rest for a few minutes.”
But Cait knew it was not exhaustion she was feeling.
Damn you, Jacob, she thought. You’re manipulating me.
The awareness did her no good, though. It was working. Had Jake really changed, and was he willing to accept her spiritually as well as physically? At the age of eighteen, Jake could be very cruel and dismissive of her Christian beliefs. But could you really condemn a man for the arrogance of his youth? Was the song she heard Jake’s way of telling her that this time, things would be different?
But it didn’t matter. Faith means your actions follow a calling no matter what others think and how they act. Cait knew that something bigger than the two of them was at work when they were together— especially when they made music. Individually, they were average. Together, they moved the universe. How could this not be God speaking through them?
But that was what she believed forty years ago, too, and rather than face it, Jake had turned and run. Well, she never learned the real reason Jake had disappeared. Perhaps there were other factors beyond her awareness.
She was sure of one thing. This song was Jake’s apology to her and a final reminder that, this time, it was she who would be running away from God’s command. But, like the biblical story of Jonah, there was no place they could truly hide if God wanted to speak through them. She could run in fear, even enter the belly of a great fish. Or she could accept her destiny, her divine calling, and return to Jake.
Cait knew she was being manipulated by her husband and Jake. Both were telling her what they believed she wanted to hear. But to Cait, there was only one still small voice to whom she would ultimately listen, the same one the prophet Elijah heard after he had fled to a cave on Mount Horeb in fear for his life in 1 Kings 19:11–13.
The Lord spoke to Elijah not through powerful wind, earthquake, or fire, but through a gentle whisper. And Jake’s song entered and whispered to her as clearly as if she were there with him, gazing into his eyes. Jake used to have a Yiddish word for their silent communication. It was bashert, or destiny.
A passage from Psalms came to her. “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.”
Why was she thinking of this verse? Perhaps it was a sign that her joyous musical connection with Jake was a desire of her heart that aligned with a higher plan for her life.
“I’ll be fine, honey,” she told her husband. “I’m probably dehydrated after playing for so long. Could you go up to the camp store and buy me a bottle of water? That’s all I need.”
“I don’t want to leave you,” said Brian. “You almost passed out back there.”
“I promise that my head is very clear now,” said Cait.
“Okay,” said Brian. “Relax, and I’ll be right back.”
With those words, Brian Fitzgerald left his wife of thirty years sitting on a bench at Interlochen Center for the Arts in Northern Michigan and never saw her again.
Howard Lovy is a longtime Jewish journalist and author whose work has appeared in The Jerusalem Post, The Jewish Daily Forward, JTA, and other publications. He is also the nonfiction editor of Judith magazine and the author of the forthcoming novel Found and Lost: The Jake and Cait Story. He is currently working on From Outrage to Action: A Practical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism. He lives in Northern Michigan with his wife, Heidi, and dog, Henry.
What a fascinating premise! So looking forward to the release.
It sounds interesting! Looking forward to reading the book soon.