“Are you testing out a law enforcement workshop on me?”
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m a little off balance without my emotional scaffolding to hold me up.”
She looked at his face for the first time since he’d walked through the door. “How are your lungs? Did the doctor give you breathing exercises?”
“Three times a day.” Jeffrey made a mental note to start doing them. “My nose hurts more than anything else.”
“It looks broken.”
“You should see the other girl.”
Sara didn’t smile this time. She took off her glasses and cleaned the lenses with the tail of her shirt. She didn’t look back up at him until she was finished. “Was that really why you cheated? Because I was spending too much time with my family?”
Jeffrey tried to recalibrate.
“That’s what you said in my office last week. One of the many things you said.” Sara reminded him, “That I should’ve spent more time with you instead of being with my family.”
Jeffrey took a cough drop out of his pocket. He carefully opened the wrapper.
“You’ve forgotten the sequence of events,” Sara said. “I didn’t waltz into town the next morning and file for a divorce without talking to you. I called you at the motel the night it happened. I was willing to hear you out.”
Jeffrey remembered his first drunken evening at the Kudzu Arms. He’d had a woman in the shower and his furious, very-soon-to-be ex-wife on the phone.
She said, “I asked you to go to couple’s therapy with me.”
He stuck the cough drop in his mouth. “I didn’t want to pay for another woman to tell me I’m an asshole.”
Sara tucked her chin into her chest. They both knew that she would’ve been the one writing the checks.
She said, “You could’ve told me. About my family. That it was bothering you.”
“We weren’t talking that much by then.” Jeffrey saw an opening. “Before we were married, we used to talk all the time. Do you remember that?”
She stared at him, her expression inscrutable.
“I loved talking to you, Sara. I love the way your brain works. You see things in a way that I can’t.”
Her chin tucked down into her chest again.
“I felt like your life turned into a secret that only your family could know.”
“They’re my family.”
“They’re a Jericho wall around you, which is fine. I knew that when I married you.” He told her the truth. “But you asked me what happened. You stopped talking to me. That was a big part of it.”
The heartfelt confession earned him a quick laugh. “I’ve never been accused of not talking enough.”
“I mean about the important things. How you feel. What’s bothering you. Problems at work. I used to be your confidant. You could tell me anything.” He laid out all of his cards on the table. “I thought I was marrying my lover. I ended up with a silent wife.”
He saw the change in her body, a familiar tension that she always held onto when she was hurting.
“This,” he said, trying to keep his voice gentle. “This is what you do when I try to talk to you.”
“What do you want me to say?” Her voice was little more than a whisper, another indication that she was hurt. “What did you want me to say?”
He shook his head. He couldn’t do this when she was upset.
“Tell me what I did wrong,” she said. “Tell me, because I’m going to eventually meet someone new, and I don’t want to make the same mistake again.”
The thought of her meeting someone new made Jeffrey want to tear down the building. “I told you before, I was okay with you choosing your family. But sometimes, I wanted you to choose me.”
“Would it have changed anything?” Sara asked. “You would’ve found another reason. You’ve cheated on every woman you’ve ever been with. You’re not happy unless you’re in a constant state of limerence.”
“Limerence.” He tried to take some of the heat out of her tone. “Is this like when you said you wished that I was semelparous, and I was humiliated a second time because I had to look up the word?”
She gave a begrudging smile. “It’s a state of infatuation. It’s how you feel when you first fall in love with someone. You’re obsessed with them. Euphoric. They’re all you can think about.”
“Sounds great.”
“It is, but then you have to take out the garbage and pay the bills and pretend you like your in-laws and that’s a relationship. Limerence gets you into it, but there’s got to be something else that keeps you there.”
“I know you’re not accusing me of not loving you.”
“Jeffrey—”
“What can I do to win you back?”
The question earned him a genuine laugh. “I’m not a trophy.”
She had no idea.
Jeffrey got out the words before common sense stopped him. “I still love you.”
Her body held itself in tension again. He thought about her skin. The soft curves and crevices. They’d had sex just once since the divorce. Sara had knocked on his door in the middle of the night. She hadn’t given him time to ask why she was there. She was kissing him, then they were in bed. They had both had tears in their eyes. Jeffrey hadn’t realized at the time that Sara was mourning something she had lost while he was thinking that he’d gotten something precious back.
“Sara, I still love you.” The more he said it, the more he knew it was true. “I’m not going to give up. I’ll keep pushing that boulder up the hill until it goes over.”
She shook her head, asking, “How did that work out for Sisyphus?”
“I dunno. He’s been dead for two thousand years and we’re still talking about him.”
Sara’s smile was still begrudging. But it was still a smile.
She asked, “Be honest with me. It won’t heal things, but it’ll help them scab over.”
He knew what she wanted, but he said, “Be honest about what?”
“The women. If you want to make this right, be honest. I know it wasn’t just Jolene.”
She didn’t know anything. “I told you, Sara. It was only Jolene, only a few times. And none of it meant a damn thing.”
She nodded her head once, like that settled it. “I’m leaving.”
“Sara—”
“My parents are expecting me for lunch.”
Jeffrey watched her gather her purse, her car keys.
He said, “This isn’t over, Sara. I’m not going to lose you.”
She walked toward him. She rested her hands on his shoulders. She raised herself onto her tiptoes so she could look him in the eye.
They stayed like that for a moment, locked into each other. She chewed her bottom lip, drawing his attention to her exquisite mouth.
Jeffrey started to move toward her.
Her hands patted his shoulders. “Turn off the lights when you leave.”
Jeffrey watched her until the door closed off his view. Her shadow didn’t linger in the frosted glass. On the other side of the masking tape, he could still see the TOLLIVER.
He took as deep a breath as his smoke-damaged lungs would allow. He looked around the ancient morgue. Sara’s office was in the back. He could see she’d brought in cardboard boxes to store her new files. A bulk pack of pens. An unopened stack of legal pads. The ancient compressor on the walk-in freezer started to whine as the motor ramped up.
Other than buying a ridiculously expensive sports car, Sara had made two life-altering decisions the day after she’d kicked Jeffrey out. She’d filed divorce papers down at the courthouse. She’d left her letter of resignation from the coroner’s position with the mayor. Here they were one short year later and only one of those things was still in effect.
Jeffrey liked those odds.
He took out his BlackBerry. He clicked the scroll wheel to access the notes section.
Jeffrey was old school in every aspect of his life but one. He still had a Rolodex. All of his case notes and reminders were written down. He kept a paper calendar. His spiral-bound notebooks were stacked in boxes in his attic and would probably end up in the attic of whatever house he was living in when he retired.
Sara was going to be living in that house with him if it was the last thing he did.
Jeffrey looked at the secret list of names and phone numbers on his screen.
Heidi. Lillie. Kathy. Kaitlin. Emmie. Jolene.
One by one, he went through the list and deleted them.
Atlanta
28
Sara’s shirt was off. She stood with her arms out while Faith taped a small microphone to her bare chest. They were in the GBI’s crime scene investigation bus. The monitors on the wall showed a live image of the closed back doors. The camera was concealed inside Sara’s purse. The tiny hole piercing the leather was no larger than the circumference of her pinky finger.
Faith tore another piece of tape off the roll.
Sara looked up at the ceiling. She had to keep her eyes dry, but thinking about what she had missed, what had been right in front of her eight years ago, made her feel like she was tumbling inside of an avalanche.
The latex in Shay Van Dorne’s teeth had set off the first tremor. Sara had been mentally walking herself through the sequence—the latex had not been in the teeth before Shay was embalmed, yet it was there afterward—when Tommi Humphrey had called.