“Will fighting make you feel better?” He flung an arm out. “Fine. Let’s fight. I want to go one goddamn day without being told I put the silverware away wrong. I want to buy a new T-shirt and not walk into the closet an hour later and find it hanging up, ironed, with a fuckinglabelin it like I’m a goddamn toddler. I want to break every single goddamn label maker you’ve ever bought with my money so I don’t have to sleep with one eye open for fear you’re going to label my dick while I’m sleeping. Feel better now?”
She blinked. Then she had to blink again. Because her eyes were dripping and the pressure in her sinuses was the size of Lake Superior, and if she couldn’t dam it with her eyelids, she would disintegrate into nothingness.
“You love me.”
His pained expression came back. “I’ll stay here tonight. Movers come Friday. If you don’t want it packed up, get it marked. You’re good at that.”
This time when he turned away, she didn’t try to follow him.
She was too afraid of falling into the vast chasm of oblivion that had splintered the earth between them.
CHAPTER TWO
Her world had been colored in blues and yellows and greens, until it was plunged into shades of gray.
—The Temptress of Pecan Lane, by Mae Daniels
Monday morning, Anna drove to Rockwood Mineral Corporation headquarters because it was what she always did on Monday mornings. Except she wasn’t sure it was Monday, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that all the clocks in her house were set to military time, she wouldn’t have been sure it was morning either.
Logically she knew it had to be Monday, because she’d survived Sunday, counting minutes, then hours, baking pies and labeling them and waiting for Neil to come home or answer his phone. But this Monday didn’t feel like any other Monday she’d ever met.
And when she pulled into the RMC headquarters parking lot and looked at the two-story brown building and the parking lots around it, the clusters of smaller buildings and giant fuel storage tanks in the distance, she wasn’t sure she was in the right spot, because Friday, the building’s brown walls had been warm and comforting, the windows had had souls, and the parking lots had been solid ground instead of a sheet of glass that could give at any moment, letting the earthswallow her whole.
Anna wasn’t just a thousand miles from home.
She was in a completely different life.
But going to work had been normal Friday, so she’d make it normal today. And then maybe Neil would be normal again, then their marriage could be normal again, and they could get back to their regularly scheduled life.
She snagged her pie carrier and made her way into the lab. She couldn’t have told anyone her passcode for the door if they’d held a gun to her favorite label maker, but her fingers punched in the right numbers in the right order anyway. Her shoes echoed in the eerily quiet room. Once the pies were safe on the clean surface of a seventies-issue metal desk inside a cubicle clearly labeledAnna Martin, she hit the button on a nineties-issue desktop computer.
And found one more bit of normal. Her voice was froggy, but her Monday companion wouldn’t care. “Morning, Rex.”
The computer sputtered and whirred a response.
She unhooked her white cardigan from its perch on the cube wall and wrapped it around herself, buffering her skin from the meat locker setting on the air conditioner, then took the pies to the office snack kitchen around the corner while she waited for Rex to finish his Monday morning grumblings.
Like normal.
Except for the ring choking her left finger.
In the kitchen, she found Shirley, her program manager, sipping from a “World’s Best Mom” mug and listening to Todd, RMC’s contracts guy, talk about something that was probably normal too.
Anna forced anothing-wrong-heresmile and a spring in her step.
Because that was normal. “Good morning.”
Todd’s eyes zeroed in on the pies. “Aw, Anna, you know how to make a guy happy on a Monday morning.”
Her eyelids stung, but she held on to her fake happy and slid the pies onto the counter. “I do my best.” Todd,obviously, hadn’t been to Jules’s wedding.
“Man, I wish Mindy’s best was half this good.” He snagged a plate out of a cabinet. “But don’t tell her I said that.”
“Of course not.” Even if Anna had wanted to use her pies to poison other people’s healthy relationships, she couldn’t remember what Mindy looked like or if she actually existed.
Shirley surveyed first Anna, then the pies. On a real Monday morning, Anna would’ve expected the obligatoryHow was your weekend?Today, she hoped that glittery angel pin on Shirley’s blazer would work a small miracle and keep either of them from unconsciously uttering the words.
“You okay, kid?” Shirley asked.
