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Kellan: I was joking
Kellan: Meet me
Me: No
Kellan: Where are you?
Kellan: Ro. What’s going on?
Kellan: Damn you Rowan
A tidal wave of emotion rolls over me. I turn off my phone and throw it in the cup holder.
Just then, a Jeep pulls into the parking lot—far too fast—and parks next to my husband’s truck.
I sit up.
A woman—another blonde—climbs out of the Jeep. There’s something familiar about her. Squinting, I lean forward, and watch as she settles a beaded purse over her shoulder. She reminds me of a fairy, tall, lithe, with a pixie face.
Then it hits me—Emma something. I recognize her from a picture Amber has in her clinic office. The picture stood out to me because it surprised me that Amber would be so reckless as to have personal photographs in an office where mentally unstable—let’s just call it what it is—clients spend hours every day.
My instinct piques as I watch the beautiful woman breeze across the parking lot and step into the bar.
I wait, staring at the door, looking in the rearview mirror every few seconds, waiting—hoping—for a car of her teacher friends to pull up. It doesn’t happen.
Emma is meeting someone at the bar. I wonder if that someone is my husband.
My stomach swirls and my eyes never leave the door.
Couples come and go, drunk, high, happy, laughing. None of whom are my husband, or Emma.
I grab my phone, and ignoring the texts from Kellan, run the license plate of the Jeep and learn Emma’s last name is Thompson. Then, I click into social media and search until I find her page. I scroll through.
Emma in a beautiful pink dress.
Emma reading in bed.
Emma cooking in the kitchen.
Emma at the beach.
Emma in an airplane.
Emma in a bathing suit.
Emma: beautiful, young, fertile, skinny, happy.
“Fucking bitch,” my voice shakes.
Tears well in my eyes.
With a guttural scream, I throw the phone against the windshield, drop my head into my hands, and begin to cry.
THIRTY-SIX
ROWAN
Thirteen years earlier
