She looked like a confident woman bent on accomplishing her goal. Apparently, in these photos, her goal had been to sleep with another man. She did not look, at all, like a woman about to throw herself off a cliff.
Near the bottom of the stack they found a desk calendar with the year of Alexis’s death embossed on the front. Jeremiah flipped it open, revealing feminine handwriting in different colors of ink. She’d written in appointments. Restaurant reservations. Parties. Lunch dates with friends. Workouts with her trainer. Tennis matches and more.
He turned to the page that showed the week of her death. “She died on this day.” He tapped it.
“It’s eerie to see the days leading up to it. It looks as if she was living a full life with no knowledge of what was coming for her.”
He flipped ahead. Alexis’s appointments continued.
“And it’s even eerier,” Remy continued, “to see the plans she’d made for the days following her death.”
Her life had stopped midstream.
Beneath her calendar, he found pages of notes in his own handwriting. He’d clearly been trying to construct a timeline of the last two weeks of Alexis’s life. Under a heading for each day, he’d scribbled names and places. Occasionally, he’d added questions. Some things were crossed out, some underlined twice. At the bottom of the final page, he’d written the nameDetective Phillip Hollandand a phone number.
“Even if your marriage was troubled . . .” Remy said softly.
“Understatement.”
“You went to a lot of effort to try to figure out how she died. Which suggests to me that you really did love her.”
“Remy, it’s time to set aside the idea that I loved Alexis. I might not have at the end. That would explain why I have no pictures of her displayed in this house.”
“You didn’t file divorce proceedings.”
“I didn’t have time to. I would have received this second report from the PI right after her death.”
“You were still wearing your wedding ring when I found you. And you’re still wearing it now.”
He hadn’t taken off the ring because doing so had seemed disrespectful toward Alexis and like he was going against what 1.0 would have wanted. But now? In light of Alexis’s affairs, he had no problem pulling it off his hand. He walked to the nearest drawer, dropped it in, and shut it out of sight.
“Jeremiah.” Remy spoke in a scandalized tone.
“Good riddance.”
They gazed at each other across several feet of charged silence. “Let’s think about why I left this evidence”—he nodded toward the items on the island—“locked in a secret room before leaving on a boat trip.”
“In order to protect it while you were gone.”
“Which makes me think I had reason to worry that someone would try to take it from me.”
“True. Someone might still try to take it from you. May be best to continue to keep it in the secret room when you’re not at home.” She consulted one of the papers. “Who is Detective Holland?”
“Good question.” He pulled out his phone and dialed the number he’d listed for the man.
As it rang, she murmured, “It’s Sunday. He might be off.”
No answer, so he left a voice mail, then added the detective to his phone contacts.
“Well.” She slipped from the barstool and crossed toward the entry where she’d left the wooden box. “That was exciting. And then dismaying.”
“You don’t have to go.”
“I do, though.”
“Please stay.” The words were an echo of what he’d said to her in Islehaven when he’d felt awful and needed to know she’d be close through the night. They were also an echo of what he’d said to her in the hospital in Rockland.
Her nearness had become the thing he prized most in his life.
