Corban moves farther into the room, and I slide down to the next window, tracking his movements. He’s hunched over a cell phone, his thumb swiping at the screen. Whatever he sees there freezes his shoes to the hardwoods, and a frown pushes down on his forehead.
Something inside me goes on high alert, like Ava’s fancy sports car that beeps whenever her back bumper gets too close to something solid. The alarm in my head is screaming, telling me I’m backing up to something dangerous. A ravine, maybe, or the edge of a cliff.
Without warning, his head swings up, his gaze whipping to the window.
My window.
As if he knew exactly where to look.
I drop to the dirt, holding my breath and listening for a sign, but I can barely hear above my pounding heart. Did he see me? Is he on his way outside right now? I don’t wait to find out. I dig my limbs into the dirt and start scrambling, my heart lodged behind my teeth. Pine straw pricks my hands and skin, and cloth rips in the brambles—my skirt or my blouse or both—but I don’t stop. I duck my head and keep going. Twenty feet through the bushes to the end of the house, and then what? As soon as I hit the yard, I’ll be seen.
It’s either that or pray he doesn’t come outside.
A door slams, a dog barks, and that’s all I need to know. I burst from the branches, lunge into a sprint and tear across the yard for the car.
I tumble onto my driver’s seat and stab my keys in the ignition with shaky, dirt-caked fingers. I chance a peek up the yard as I’m peeling away, and there’s Corban standing in the doorway, one hand shading his eyes from the sun.
And smiling.
*
A few minutes later, I swerve my car between two SUVs in a nearby Home Depot lot and try not to hyperventilate. I’m no longer winded from my sprint across Corban’s yard, but my breath still comes in short spurts, and the air feels stuck in my lungs. I puff my cheeks and hold my breath like Corban taught me at the memorial—oh, the irony—and it helps. When I release it, my lungs unknot somewhat.
Corban saw me. Not only did he see me, he could have easily caught up with me. I’m not an athlete, and high heels and a pencil skirt aren’t exactly the best gear for a hundred-meter dash. In the time it took me to make it across his yard and into my car, a jock like Corban could have lapped me, twice.
But he didn’t even try.
He also didn’t look surprised. And he was smiling.
My cell stabs me in the pubic bone, and I dig it from my skirt pocket. I stare at the dark screen, and I recall an information evening Ted and I held for parents a few months ago. The subject was cyberbullying, and we were barely a half hour in when the meeting was hijacked by a couple of helicopter parents who had, unbeknownst to their kids, installed GPS trackers on their teenagers’ cell phones. They told us this proudly, as if spying on their kids was a God-given parental right, and I made the mistake of wondering out loud if that was crossing some sort of line. Ted spent the rest of the evening trying to calm everyone down.
But the point is, I know the technology exists.
The trackers these parents talked about were invisible, working undetected in the background. All you have to do is get a hold of the other person’s phone long enough to install it, and bingo, you know where they are at all times. The realization rises slowly, repellently, to the surface of my mind, and if it weren’t for all those texts from Will, I’d chuck my phone out the window.
And then another realization tightens the breath in my lungs.
The blocked number led me to Corban, not Will.
With shaking fingers, I wake up my phone and scroll through the texts—a whopping eighty-seven in all.
Heartfelt apologies. Detailed explanations and tearful regrets. He says everything right, except for one.
Seventeen times, he tells me he loves me. But not once does he say the words I want to hear. Our words. Not once does he tell me I’m his very favorite person, which means the person on the other end of this number also isn’t mine.
Which means...what? Will is dead? As furious as I am at the idea he’d choose money over me, I don’t want to believe it. What about the notes, the ones apologizing and warning me to stop snooping into his past? If Corban is behind the texts, is he behind the notes, too?
I slump my shoulder against the window, the day crashing over me all over again in a sickening wave. I feel it coming. The familiar little tickle in my lungs, a burning at the edges of my eyes, that tightening deep in my throat. All signals I’m on the knife-edge of an impending meltdown.
When the notes and the texts began, I chose to believe Will was on the other end. I needed to believe it. When faced with the reality of a plane and a charred cornfield, I chose to look the other way, just like I did in our marriage. So Will didn’t like to talk about his past. So there were some holes in his stories. Whenever an incongruity would arise, I convinced myself it was a silly mistake, told myself to overlook it. What mattered, I always thought, was our present.
Only, how can you love a person you don’t really know?
The answer breeds and multiplies in my gut, chomping away at the grief, eating it whole and belching it back up in a spiky ball of anger—not just at Will’s betrayal but more at myself for falling for it.
Love and sacrifice. Honesty. Trust. We see what we want to see. We gather information, use it or ignore it to shape our own beliefs, to make our own choices, to withhold love or to give it freely.
I toss the phone onto the passenger’s seat and shove my car into gear, pointing it back toward the highway.
My husband is dead.
My heart is broken.
My eyes are wide-open now.
*
Despite rush-hour traffic, I make it back to Little Five Points in under an hour. By now it’s closing in on seven, and the sky has faded to a pinkish purple.
Inside, the record store is empty, save for the pretty girl behind the counter. She’s counting out money and, when she hears the bell jangle on the door, holds up a finger. I don’t wait, shoving through the bright yellow door before she can look up from her pile.
I find Zeke exactly where I left him, still clacking away on his keyboard in the cluttered back room.
“You’re back,” he says without looking away from his monitor.
I drop my cell onto his desk. “You missed the tracker.”
“No, I saw it.” He looks up, then rears his head back at my tousled hair and disheveled blouse, my right sleeve ripped in two places. “What the hell happened to you?”
“The tracker happened to me. It would have been helpful if you’d told me it was there.”
“You didn’t ask.”
I can’t swallow the sigh that sneaks up my throat. “Can you take it off now, please? And I have another number I need you to trace. It’s the 678 number at the top of my text app.”
Zeke swipes a finger over the screen, pulls up the messages. There have been four more since the first two, sinister texts promising pain and death if I don’t cough up the money. “That’s seriously messed up.”
“Tell me about it. I was hoping you could tell me who sent them.”