It took forever. Aubrey thought she’d lose her mind. She had her key in one hand and the phone, steadily redialing, in the other. The doors finally dinged open, and she took off at a run toward their room.
She wrestled with the keycard but got the door open.
The room was empty.
Aubrey knew then something was wrong. Very, very wrong. Like that sixth sense that tells you when something bad is going to happen, and the phone rings with news that someone you love is sick, or has died.
She tried to stay focused. Maybe he’d gone back to the house for something. She rang their home phone, but the machine picked up—with that stupid, goofy message they’d recorded one night when they’d both had too much to drink. Individually: “This is Aubrey.” “And this is Josh.” Together: “These are the voyages of the Starship Hamilton. Our mission: to bodily go where no married couple has gone before. Which means we’re really busy right now. You know what to do!”
No one but friends had the home number—all their business was done on their cell phones—but she really needed to change that message.
At the beep, she said, “Josh? Hon, where are you? I’m at the hotel looking for you. Call me as soon as you get this, okay?”
Arlo was finally catching her concern.
“Maybe he went home?”
Aubrey looked at him sharply. “I just called. He’s not answering there, either. Let’s check with the hotel staff. Maybe he left a message for me downstairs.”
She wrote a note and left it on the bed. They went to the front desk. She fought the urge to run, carefully placing one heeled foot in front of the other. She ignored Arlo’s occasional assurances that things would be fine, that they’d find him. With every step she said a little prayer, which quickly became a loop in her head: Please be okay, please be okay, please be okay.
When she knew in her heart things were never going to be okay again.
CHAPTER 5
Aubrey
Today
That was the moment. The moment that changed During into After. Where the seven and seventeen ended and the five began.
A beeping car horn pulled Aubrey back from her reverie. She looked up to see the intersection crowded with drivers, all of them heading into their own worlds, their own lives. Stars of their own plays.
What did all those people do? Strangers who passed her each and every day—did they have sorrow and pain and loss like she did? Surely she wasn’t the only person in the world who suffered, by whatever means.
Her therapist had once tried to get her involved in a group therapy grief program. It had been a complete disaster. The people in group were just so . . . damaged. There was a dizzying array of loss on parade, from the woman whose young daughter had drowned in the bathtub while she went to answer the phone, to the man who’d run his car into a tree and killed his girlfriend, to the quiet teenager who’d shared some bad Ecstasy with her best friend, resulting in the girl having a heart attack on the dance floor of their favorite club.
Aubrey didn’t fit into their construct.
They all had answers. Funerals to attend. Bodies to bury. Self-flagellation to attend to, especially seeing as everyone in the group was somehow responsible for the death of their loved one.
Now, Aubrey. Responsibility and accidents are different beasts entirely. You know that.
Bullshit.
Aubrey had no anchors. She had no body, no closure, and certainly bore no responsibility for Josh’s death. For a time, they didn’t even know for sure that he was truly gone. For a time.
Two things were certain: Aubrey hadn’t killed her husband. And she knew Josh had sent her the gin and tonic that night.
It had to be him.
But he never came to her rescue. Through the weeks of investigation, police harassment, the legal proceedings, the trial, the months that turned into years, through the moments when During became After, when Aubrey could finally sleep through the night without thinking about the handcuffs being slapped around her wrists and the hard metal of the county jail pallet they called a bed under her body, when she was set free and came back to their empty home and startled dog and faced his mother’s decision to petition the courts to declare Josh dead so she could steal away the insurance money, he never came.
He never came.
She had to reconcile the silly romantic she’d married with the concept of a man so callous, so vengeful, that he would allow the woman he claimed to love to be dragged through the mud, accused of his murder, hounded by the press, the police, without stepping forward to save her.
She couldn’t. Josh would never let that happen.
And that’s why she knew, without a doubt, that he was dead.
More traffic noise, and she jumped. How much time had she just lost? Her lizard brain reacted. Run more. She did, running away from the tree, away from the happy and the sad, up the hill into the darkness.
One foot in front of the other.
Again and again and again.
CHAPTER 6
Daisy