Page 23 of Over Her Dead Body

“About what?”

“You’re exhausted. You’ve been drinking. You crossed an ocean because a stranger reminded you of someone you lost. Whatever you think happens next will look different in the morning.”

I move past him. My hip hits the corner of the desk, and I don’t feel it the way I should.

The books are everywhere. Desk. Floor. Sill. Spines cracked. Pages bent. Margins marked in pencil.

Reid reads now.

That, more than it should, feels personal.

The paperback from the plane sits on top of the nearest stack. I pick it up. The pages fall open where the spine has been broken. Three lines are underlined. A note runs along the margin in small, controlled script.

I stare at it.

I know Reid’s handwriting. I addressed our wedding invitations because his was nearly illegible. I signed birthday cards from both of us because his capital letters looked like a ransom demand. I spent seven years deciphering notes he left on the refrigerator.

This handwriting is neat. Upright. Precise.

Not the handwriting I remember.

I ask myself what the hell I’m doing here.

Unfortunately, I know exactly what I’m doing.

CHAPTER 10

ANONYMOUS

Another text from Lisbon.

Calloway went inside an apartment with the man from the bar. We still do not have his name.

Here in Austin, a damaged Vance hangs on my wall and Sean Merrick is crying beneath it.

Somehow, this is the more orderly side of the Atlantic.

“Please,” he says.

I decline to mention the tears. One indignity at a time.

“Sean. The word please is spoken by two kinds of people. The first has never been in serious trouble before and does not know what else to say. The second has been in serious trouble before and has learned that please sometimes works. Both are wasting their breath. It has never worked on me and it is not going to start working now.”

He stops crying. They always stop crying when they understand crying isn’t the thing.

“You have a sister in Manchester,” I say. “She has two children. A boy and a girl. The boy is nine.”

“Please—”

“I am not going to hurt your sister. I am not going to hurt the children. I am telling you about them because I want you to understand that I could, and that I have not, and that the reason I have not is because I am giving you one opportunity—one—to be useful to me in a way that balances the ledger. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

I ask him what I need to know. It takes two minutes. He answers at the right places.

When I finish, he is briefly relieved.