The Wife Before

None of the boxes were labeled, which meant I was most likely going to have to sort everything out before making do with it.

I opened the box closest to me and inside it were dresses, skirts, and a few silk blouses. The box beneath contained the same thing. I checked the smaller boxes beside those and they also had clothes in them. A smaller box had jewelry, scarves, and purses. All of the boxes on the left were filled with clothes and jewelry. That was good to know, and clothes were easy to deal with and pretty simple to sell or donate.

I walked across the shed, checking one of the boxes to the right, and it was full of ivory shirts. I took one of the shirts out and there was a green dove on it. The dove drawing looked just like the earring I’d found in the bathroom drawer.

The tag inside the shirt said Lovey Dovey Raine Company. That was the name of Melanie’s clothing line. I checked more of the shirts and they were all ivory with doves in a variety of colors. Jackets were in the next box with the dove logo on the heart of them.

I moved on to the boxes in front of the bookshelf. Books. Office supplies. Papers and documents were in a tan bin. I huffed a breath. This woman hadn’t given me much to work with at all. This would be easy. Most, if not all of it could be donated or trashed. Auctioning it would cause too much trouble. Sure, I could have hired someone to take it all away and sell it, but what was the point when I could just drop it off at the nearest Goodwill or Salvation Army and be done with it? Roland clearly wasn’t going to make use of any of it, and if Melanie’s sister hadn’t come by now, she clearly didn’t want anything to do with it either.

I browsed the names of the books on the shelves. A lot of them were romance novels—mostly historical. There were some contemporary, and a handful of paranormal, but her taste was definitely in the historical. I guess we didn’t have much in common in the reading department. I was more a contemporary romance reader.

The bottom shelf was blocked by boxes and I moved them out of the way, only to discover two rectangular green bins. I took one out, wiped off some of the dust, removed the lid, and then a gasp fell through my lips.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

This bin was full of photos. A large stack. I took a handful out, placed the bin on top of a box, and shuffled through the pictures. All of them were of Melanie.

She smiled in a lot of the pictures. Some were taken of her eating dinner. Of her reading. Of her drinking. She wasn’t doing much of anything in these photos. Sometimes she’d look at the camera and give a subtle smile. Sometimes she’d be looking away, focused on something else.

I switched out the stack in my hand for a new stack and shuffled through them. Melanie in the snow. Melanie sitting next to a fireplace. Melanie holding a glass of wine. Melanie eating a hotdog. Weird.

I kept flipping through, but the images had slowly stopped being so simple. Suddenly, Melanie was on a bed, dressed in only a bra and panties. Then Melanie had a shot glass in hand. The next photo she was drinking from the shot glass. Next, she was laughing as she refilled her glass.

In the following photo Melanie stood on a terrace with no bra, only lacy green panties, with her arms thrown in the air, as if she was screaming “Hey, world! Look at me!” The next, she was facing the camera, shirtless, biting into her bottom lip, her eyes lazy and seductive as she cupped her full breasts in hand. A necklace hung around her neck with a dove on the end—the same dove as the earring and the one on her designer shirts.

I stared at that image the longest. The way she bit her lip, the way she stared into the camera. For the longest time, I had this image of her in my head of being this quiet, shy housewife who may have been looking for a good time but got caught up with the wrong crowd, but I was wrong about her.

There was more to her—more to this. Roland said she drank, but did she drink all the time, or was it occasional? She seemed awfully comfortable being drunk in front of the camera, as if she’d done this sort of thing many times before. She had to be taking these pictures with Roland and he was her husband then, so that was fine, but why was my heart racing again? Why did these photos suddenly concern me? Was it because I didn’t know my husband had this side to him? Or was it because ever since being with him, not once had I seen Roland pick up or use a camera? Not even on his phone.