She gazed at the green bill, Abraham Lincoln looking back at her, a smug expression on his face. She raised her head and stared into the bakery’s window, able to make out her reflection. Her red hair was disheveled and appeared as if it hadn’t been washed in weeks. In truth, she wasn’t sure when she had last showered. She wore a torn jacket and old scarf that had seen better days, but were gifts from Landon during their time together. She simply couldn’t get rid of them or stop wearing them, no matter how decrepit they were.
She was still stuck in that time of her life, wishing she could rewind the clock to the weeks before her world turned upside down and ask Landon to come home for the holidays. After receiving that dreaded phone call from Alexander, she had remained a nervous wreck most of that night. Every buzz from her cell phone made her leap to check whether Alexander was calling with more information. Instead, she heard nothing from him or Landon. Hours turned into days as she waited, trying to distract herself from thinking the worst by pouring all her energy into her work. She spent days in the worst kind of limbo imaginable. She prayed Landon was okay.
Her prayers were never answered.
Instead, a week before Christmas, she had found out Landon’s fate with the rest of the nation on the six o’clock news. She thought it was just a cruel nightmare, that something so horrific couldn’t be real. Most of the following week was a blur as she remained curled up in her bed, barely sleeping, eating, or moving. She couldn’t remember how, but she somehow made it to Landon’s funeral, where they lowered an empty casket into the ground.
A month later, she began having contractions at only twenty-five weeks and was rushed to the hospital, scared and confused. Even then, she held on to hope that the memory of Landon would survive through their son.
“I’m sorry,” the doctor had said when he returned after whisking the baby away to the operating room. “The duct between the two major blood vessels near his heart didn’t close properly. We did everything we could, but his heart wasn’t pumping enough blood.”
She still remembered holding the small, lifeless body that barely weighed two pounds, tubes and wires, the remnants of the hospital’s efforts to save his life, still taped to him. In an instant, all hope she would be able to move on from Landon’s tragic death vanished. Her grief consumed her. Air filled her lungs and her heart continued to beat, but she wasn’t living. Most days, she could hardly muster up the strength to get out of bed. Sleep eluded her. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the grainy video broadcasting Landon’s final moments on this earth, coupled with the blueish newborn baby she never even heard cry.
As the weeks passed and she was unable to bring herself out of her deep depression, her bakery was on the verge of going under. She had no option but to sell the business to an interested buyer. In the span of less than three months, she had lost her entire world — her fiancé, her bakery, and her son. She had nothing left to live for. She became an empty shell of a woman. There were many nights she considered raising a blade to her flesh, stopping when she saw Landon’s sad eyes flash in her mind. It was at times like these, when she felt most vulnerable and ready to end it all, that his presence surrounded her, urging her to continue.
As she walked down the aisle of the local liquor store on a sunny afternoon in May, a flier stuck between a shelving unit and the dirty linoleum floor had caught her attention. She picked it up and read the advertisement for a grief counseling meeting held at a local church every Thursday night. It listed the five stages of grief, and Rayne wondered where in the spectrum she fell, doubting whether talking to a group of complete strangers about what she was going through was even worth her time.
Then Franki Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” came through the overhead speakers. For the first time in months, Rayne smiled. She closed her eyes, basking in the memory of Landon bellowing those lyrics to her on his last night of liberty all those years ago when they first began dating. Despite his horrendous singing voice, which made it perfectly clear to everyone listening in the bar that he was tone deaf, she fell for him even more. Hearing that song again had made Rayne think Landon was there, urging her to try to move on from her pain and grief. Landon had his life cruelly extinguished. He would have wanted her to look at every day as if it were a gift, and she had hoped assimilating herself with others who were going through the same thing would help her get on the path to living again.
But as the weeks turned into months, she had trouble doing that, plummeting lower and lower into the abyss of her anger. The woman staring back at her now, holding a crumpled five dollar bill, her red hair ratty, her eyes sunken, her skin pale, was a complete stranger to her.
“He did this,” she muttered somberly, fighting a thousand conflicting emotions. Yes, she wanted nothing more than for Alexander, or someone, to suffer for what had happened to Landon, but would she really feel any better if she were the one wielding the blade, so to speak? Would she finally have closure?
She shook her head, pocketing the five dollar bill and shuffling down the street. Mark was stronger than she was. He wanted revenge and went after it. What would Landon have wanted her to do? She knew the answer to that. Despite his hard exterior, Landon spent his life making the world a better place for everyone else. He was a trained killer, yet each life he took hit him hard. “It’s for the greater good,” he had said time and time again. There was no greater good here. No matter how much anger and pain she still felt, she simply couldn’t hurt anyone, especially Landon’s best friend. After all, he didn’t kill him.
Her head hung low and she hugged herself to stay warm in the frigid early morning temperatures as she trudged along the city streets. A wetness splashed the left side of her body and she stopped, lifting her head slightly to see a yellow cab speeding down the street.
Glancing at her surroundings, she laughed at the irony of it all. She wondered if she subconsciously found her way here, or if Landon’s spirit was trying to tell her something. She had walked this path on many occasions and could blindly navigate the few city blocks between her bakery and the building that housed the security firm for which Landon had worked. She considered turning around and going back the way she had come, but something pushed her forward.
She continued down the street, lowering her head once more to fight off the bitter wind whipping around her. She didn’t even need to look up to know she was walking past the large glass doors of that familiar skyscraper. There was an inviting warmth about it.