Winston missed Josh. Sometimes Aubrey called and he didn’t come, and she knew where she’d find him: in the laundry room, curled on a ratty old ragbag sweater of Josh’s, inconsolable.
She didn’t blame him. If she had the choice, she’d have gone to sleep on Josh’s sweater, too, and never woken up.
She let Winston out into the backyard, climbed the short staircase to her bedroom, changed and tied on her sneakers. A run might help clear her head.
She went back downstairs and opened the sliding door. “Winston, wanna run?”
Sometimes Winston came along, sometimes he didn’t. She always left it up to him.
The dog was having a tussle fight with one of his chew toys. He glanced up at her, and she could swear she saw him shrug. Today he chose to stay in the backyard.
She locked the door behind her and tied her key to her shoelace. Always-careful Aubrey. She set a brisk pace, let the soothing motion of her feet carry her toward oblivion.
For the first couple of years after Josh was gone, after the investigation was finished, after she was exonerated, she’d come home to the shabby little house, let Winston out, and open a bottle of wine. When she started opening a second bottle before she went to bed, when she’d withdrawn so far that she started missing work because she was still passed out from the night before, and had her little accident, she was forced into a moment of clarity and stood back to examine her life.
The consensus? She was trying to dull the pain.
It was a big pain, one that needed to be dulled. But nothing was working. The therapy, the drinking, work, her friends, the dog, the occasional suicidal ideation, none of that was taking enough of the edge off so she could sleep at night. So she could function. So she could stop missing him so very badly.
An escape was a necessity. She had to have something to do. Drowning in her sorrows, literally, wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t helping, and Josh would be embarrassed by it. In all things, his approval mattered the most to her. Even dead, she sought his admiration.
So she turned to running.
The first mile was behind her now, and she hit her stride. She never planned her route beforehand, changed it up depending on her energy level that day and her level of paranoia. After her brief stints in jail, the horror stories she’d heard, she knew enough to vary her routines.
Today, breath was her friend, her salvation. It gave her purpose, renewed her spirit. Cleansed her worries. She let the air flow into her lungs as she pushed harder, up the rolling hills of her neighborhood, legs pumping, sweat drying in the cool air, skimming past the school, the new construction, monstrous houses replacing the small cottages, onto the grounds of Vanderbilt University. She circled the campus. Five miles in now, and the sky was purpling with the impending sunset. She needed to turn back but pushed for another ten minutes, then swerved across Blakemore and dashed into Dragon Park, until she hit the tree.
Their tree.
She pulled up short, caught by surprise. She hadn’t intended to come here. She was trying to escape, and instead, she’d run headlong into her past.
The tree was a century-old oak, a witness to most love affairs in town. The gnarled bark had been stripped clean, replaced with a full-sleeve tattoo of carvings. There wasn’t a square inch untouched from the ground six feet up the tree’s height.
Aubrey turned to go. She didn’t need to see it. Didn’t want to see it. But a gossamer thread of desire pulled her back, to the north-facing side of the tree.
There, carved in the hard oak flesh, intertwined inside a crooked heart, were the letters JDH + AMT = TLA.
Josh David Hamilton plus Aubrey Marie Trenton equals True Love Always.
He’d carved it for the first time when they were thirteen and eleven, respectively. Each year, on their anniversary, they came back and he carved it again, deeper and deeper into the tree. For some reason, other lovers seemed to respect their mark and didn’t try to carve over it.
She ran her fingers over the letters and allowed herself a moment. A capital-M moment. No one needed to know. She didn’t have to report in to her therapist. She could have this for herself, this last wallow in her past, ignore the knife stroke against her heart.
There were no tears. She couldn’t allow that. But she could allow herself to think back to that night, the longest night of her life, the night Josh disappeared.
CHAPTER 3
Aubrey
Five Years Ago
The accident.