I look up through my hair at Ted, at his concerned brow under those canine curls, and I weep with relief. Ted is a fixer. He’ll know what to do. He’ll call somebody who will tell him it was the wrong Will, the wrong plane, I’m the wrong wife.
I try to pull myself together, but I can’t, and it’s then I notice that my office is crawling with high-schoolers. I already heard them gathering in the hall outside my doorway, low tones and whispered words I wasn’t supposed to hear. Words like husband, plane, dead, and I know they’ve heard the news.
No. Just this morning, while I was filling our travel mugs with coffee, Will checked the weather in Orlando on his phone. “High of eighty-seven today,” he said with a shake of his head. “And it’s not even summer. This is why we will never live in Florida.”
Ava watches me with tears in her eyes. “Will is in Orlando,” I say to her, and her face flashes pity.
I’m embarrassed to have her see me like this, to have any of them see me like this, a crumpled, snotty mess on the floor. I cover my face with my hands and wish they’d go away. I wish all of them would just leave me alone. My open-door policy can suck it.
“Here, let me help you up.” Ted hauls me off the floor and deposits me on my chair.
“Where’s my phone? I want to try Will again.”
He leans down, picks up my phone from the floor, passes it to me. Nine missed calls. I taste bile when I see they’re all from my mother. None, not even one, from Will.
“Guys, give us a little privacy, will you?” Ted glances over his shoulder. “Shut the door on your way out.”
One by one, the kids file out, mumbling their condolences. Ava runs a light finger down my arm on her way past, and I flinch. I don’t want her sympathy. I don’t want anyone’s sympathy. Sympathy would mean what that woman told me is true. Sympathy would mean my Will is dead.
Once everyone is gone and we’re alone, Ted drapes a palm over my shoulder. “Is there someone I can call?”
Call! I was about to call the hotel. My gaze lands on the conference flyer, and I snatch it from my printer, wave it in Ted’s face. “This! This right here proves Will is in Orlando. He’s tomorrow’s keynote. He wasn’t on the plane to Seattle. He was on one to Orlando.” Hope blooms in my chest.
“Did he check into the hotel?” Ted says, but in a tone that says he’s humoring me.
With shaking fingers, I find the Post-it where I scribbled the number and punch it into my phone. I can tell that Ted’s holding out little hope, that he thinks this exercise is a futile waste of time, and the blatant mollification that lines his face is too much for me to bear. I stare down at my desk instead, concentrating instead on the marks and scratches that crisscross its surface. The phone rings, then rings again.
After an eternity, a perky female voice answers. “Good afternoon, Westin Universal Boulevard. How may I be of service?”
“Will Griffith’s room, please.” The words tumble out of me, jagged and raw and way too fast, like an auctioneer hyped on crack.
“My pleasure,” the receptionist chirps in my ear. I’m sure she gets crazed spouses on the line all the time, women hunting down their wayward boyfriends or philandering husbands. Westin probably has an entire training manual on how to deal with callers like me. “Griffith, you said?”
“Yes, Will. Or it could be under William, middle initial M.” I drag a deep breath and try to calm myself, but my leg is bouncing, and I can’t stop shivering.
Ted shrugs out of his jacket and drapes it over my shoulders. I know he means well, but the gesture feels far too personal, and the fabric smells like Ted, fragrant and foreign. I want to rip the jacket off and chuck it out the window. I don’t want any man’s clothing touching my body but Will’s.
The woman clicks around a keyboard for a few seconds. “Hmm. Sorry, but I’m not finding a reservation for Mr. Griffith.”
I choke on a sob. “Check again. Please.”
There’s a long pause filled with more clicking, more humoring. Dread begins to burrow under my skin like a parasite, slow and steady, eating away at my certainty.
“Are you positive it’s this Westin property? We have one in Lake Mary, just north of the city. I can get you the number, if you’d like.”
I shake my head, blinking away fresh tears in order to read the hotel information at the bottom of the flyer. “I’m looking at the conference flyer right now. It says Universal Boulevard.”
Her voice brightens. “Oh, well, if he’s here for a conference, then perhaps I can get a message to the organizer’s point of contact. Which conference?”
“Cyber Security for Critical Assets: An Intelligence Summit.”
She hesitates only a second or two, but long enough that bile builds in my throat. “I’m very sorry, ma’am, but there’s no conference by that name at this hotel.”
I drop the phone and throw up into my wastebasket.
*
Claire Masters, a colleague from the admissions office across the hall, drives me home. Claire and I are friendly enough, but we’re not friends, though I don’t have to ask why I’m here, buckled into the passenger’s seat of her Ford Explorer instead of someone else’s car. Early last year, Claire lost her husband to Hodgkin’s, and now, whether she volunteered to drive me home or Ted asked her to, the reason is clear. If anyone will understand what I’m going through, it’s another widow.
Widow. I’d throw up again, but my stomach is empty.
I turn and stare out the window, watching the familiar Buckhead strip malls fly by. Claire drives slowly, her hands at ten and two, and she doesn’t say a word. She keeps her mouth shut and her gaze on the traffic in front of her, and as much as I detest being lumped into her tragic category, at least she knows that the only thing I want is to be left alone.
My phone buzzes on my lap. My mother, calling for what must be the hundredth time. Guilt pricks at my insides. I know it’s not fair to keep avoiding her, but I can’t talk to her right now. I can’t talk to anybody.
“Don’t you want to get that?” Claire’s voice is high and girlish, and it slices through the silence like a serrated knife.
“No.” It takes all my energy to speak around the boulder on my chest.
Her gaze bounces between me, my phone and the traffic before us. “Take it from me, your mother is losing her mind right now.”
I wince at her knowing tone, at the way she’s putting the two of us on the worst kind of team. “I can’t.” My voice cracks the last word in two, because talking to Mom would mean saying those awful words out loud. Will is gone. Will is dead. Saying the words would make this thing real.
The phone stops, then two seconds later, starts again.