Because if there was one person in town I didn’t want witnessing a scene involving me, it was him.
Six months earlier, I had buried my mother on a gray afternoon that felt too quiet for grief. No thunder, no dramatic rain, just a low ceiling of clouds and the kind of cold that settles into your bones and stays there. They said her car skidded off the road during a late storm, hit the guardrail wrong, and flipped into the shallow ditch by Route 9. An accident. That’s what everyone called it. Clean, simple, final.
Except nothing about it had ever felt clean.
Not the way the sheriff avoided eye contact when he handed me her belongings. Not the way her phone had been wiped—completely empty, like it had never existed. Not the way unfamiliar men began showing up within weeks, asking questions about her house, about unpaid taxes I had never heard of, about paperwork that somehow needed my signature immediately.
Victor Dane had been the most persistent of them.
And now he was standing five feet away, watching a stranger hold my hand and call me his wife.
“Sweetheart,” the man said louder this time, his tone shifting seamlessly into something warm and familiar, as if we had rehearsed it a hundred times. “I’ve been trying to reach you. Everything okay?”
