“I don’t know. A few kids came out. Most of them went over there.” The woman pointed to a group of adults near the exit door, then put her hands on the twins’ shoulders and led them away.
Something crawled through Diana’s gut. She returned to the exit, watching as other children streamed out. Could Ethan have somehow gotten lost in the fun house? She caught the door as a couple of kids came out and stuck her head in.
“Ethan?” she called into the darkness. “Ethan!” she repeated, her voice rising.
But he couldn’t be inside. She would have passed him on her way out.
She walked around the side of the fun house to the rear of the building where a number of electrical cables snaked across dirt and brown grass toward the temporary carnival booths. A few cars and trucks were parked in the alley. A sickly stench rose from a nearby dumpster.
He wouldn’t have come back here, but she called his name anyway, listening for his voice. Nothing except the distant shrieks of children and off-key organ music.
It had been almost fifteen minutes since she’d lost sight of him.
The booths, cars, cables, and dumpster whirled around her as though she were trapped inside a tornado.
Fifteen minutes.
So much could have happened in that time.
CHAPTER 2
Something was missing.
The emptiness in the front foyer of their loft apartment caught Aubrey by surprise. No man’s clunky boots waited on the doormat to trip her. Jackson’s fleece-lined suede coat wasn’t draped over the brass coatrack. And Wolverine’s worn leather leash was gone from the hook beside the door. She listened for the skittering sound Wolvie’s toenails made against the wood floor when he ran to greet her.
Then she remembered.
Not their apartment. Hers.
Jackson didn’t live here anymore. He was what was missing. He must have come by to pick up the rest of his things this afternoon while she’d been at the university library.
She ran her finger along the bookshelf by the brick wall, erasing the lines of dust that marked where the thin volumes of Jackson’s tormented poetry had been. But erasing six years of living with Jackson wouldn’t be so easy. She could still smell amaretto pipe tobacco and Wolverine’s dank doggy scent.
She missed Wolvie. She did not miss Jackson.
She shrugged off her parka, damp from melted snow, and hung it on the rack. Flurries had been coming down thick when she left the campus. She’d hidden in the library all afternoon, unaware the weather had taken a turn for the worse. Thoughts about Jackson’s treachery had preoccupied her when she should have been preparing for the Perception versus Reality class she’d be teaching this coming semester.
Perception versus reality. How ironic. Here she was, almost finished with her PhD in social psychology, with a specialization in interpersonal relationships, and she had completely missed the signs that the man in her life was a lying scumbag.
She went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of merlot. The hanging copper pots and vintage blue-and-white porcelain canisters she’d found at flea markets were still in their places. She wasn’t surprised that Jackson hadn’t taken them. He’d always scoffed when she came home with a new “find,” calling her treasures kitschy dust collectors. Well, she no longer had to justify or make excuses for what she wanted. This was her home now.
A knock on the front door broke through the silence. She started, nearly dropping her wineglass.
Jackson?
She’d changed the locks yesterday and had told the doorman to let Jackson in when he came by for his things. Had he forgotten something? The thought of seeing him made her stomach churn.
Another knock, more urgent.
Aubrey took a fortifying gulp of wine, then went to check the peephole. Instead of a wiry man with a salt-and-pepper beard, her good friend and neighbor, Trish, stood in the doorway, swaddled in her heavy down coat, her round cheeks afire from the cold.
Aubrey opened the door.
“What the hell is going on?” Trish barreled past her into the apartment. She glanced around the foyer, then studied Aubrey’s face. Trish was a few years older than Aubrey and an associate professor in the psych department at Brown. She noticed things.
“Everything’s fine,” Aubrey said, hoping Trish didn’t observe that her eyes were still red from yesterday’s crying bout.
“Bullshit.” Trish picked at her spiked black hair, as though she were angry at it. “I saw Jackson going in and out of the building all afternoon, loading cartons into a U-Haul. What happened?”
“I kicked him out.” Aubrey tried to sound matter-of-fact.
“Shit,” Trish said softly, then glanced at the glass Aubrey held. “Got any more of that?”
They went into the kitchen. Trish unzipped her coat and climbed onto a counter stool.
Jackson had sat there a few days before, drinking his morning coffee, the newspaper spread out on the counter, acting as though everything were perfectly normal. His royal-blue bathrobe had hung open, revealing dark chest hair sprinkled with silver.
Where were you last night, Jackson?
Out with the guys. I crashed on the sofa.
Why didn’t you answer your phone?
Sorry. Must have left it on silent by mistake.
But there was no such thing as a mistake. Everything was a choice, even the one she had made to ignore what was happening around her.
Trish took a sip of wine from the glass Aubrey handed her. “So what did The Great Poet do?”
The Great Poet. It had been a nickname Jackson seemed to enjoy, but The Great Pretender would have been more apt. “He was cheating on me.”
Trish raised an eyebrow.
“You seem surprised,” Aubrey said. “So was I.”
“Nope. Not surprised at all. I always thought he was a little too smooth.”
Her friend had suspected but never said anything. A spark of anger flared, then went out. Trish would have known Aubrey wouldn’t have listened, that she hid in her little world of denial, rejecting any information that conflicted with what she wanted to believe.