Every single thing exactly right.
There was a note propped against the coffee cup, Jason’s handwriting on the outside.
I unfolded it.
Happy third anniversary, Camila. Three years ago I walked into an animal shelter looking for a dog and walked out having found the best thing that has ever happened to me. I don’t know what I did to deserve you, but I intend to spend the rest of my life making sure you never regret choosing me. I’ve gone to sort a few things with the staff for today — we dock in two hours and I have plans for us on the island. Don’t eat too much. I love you. — J.
I read it twice, then set it down carefully on the tray.
Don’t eat too much. I immediately reached for the oatmeal.
I took my coffee to the open deck doors and stood in the breeze, the sheer nightgown doing essentially nothing against the warmth of the morning sun. It was the skimpy one — pink, almost transparent, with thin spaghetti straps — and in the privacy of our stateroom with the Atlantic stretching endlessly ahead, I felt no particular need to change it. I felt, actually, quite beautiful and sexy. Sunlit and content and slightly smug in the way you felt on a morning when everything was good.
Three years.
I tried to line it up in my mind — the person I had been before, and the person I was now — and found the distance between them almost too large to measure.
Three years ago I had been twenty-seven and quiet and entirely settled into my smallness. I had my library, my shelter shifts on weekends, my small apartment with the good reading lamp and the plants I was just keeping alive. I had Elena and two or three other friends I trusted completely.
And then a Tuesday afternoon in October.
I had been reorganizing the puppy enclosures when I heard the shelter door open and looked up to see Jason Riley — all six-foot-two of him, in a suit that probably cost more than my monthly rent — lower himself to the floor of the puppy pen with focused intensity.
I had watched him for a full minute before he noticed me.
The puppies were immediately in love with him. He let them climb on him without any apparent concern for the suit. He made sounds at them that I can only describe as extremely undignified for a man of his general bearing. One of the golden retriever pups climbed directly onto his face and he laughed — a real laugh, unguarded and easy — and I remember thinking:oh. His laughter is so pure.
By the end of his visit he had adopted the golden retriever, the one who’d climbed his face, and had asked me for a coffee date with the same calm confidence he probably brought to closing real estate deals.
We named the puppy Brownie because we’d ordered a brownie to share on our first date and Jason had watched me eat most of it with a shy, content smile.
Three months later he had proposed, on a Tuesday, in the same coffee shop, with a ring he’d clearly put significant thought into. Six months after that we were married.
I was smiling at the ocean when I heard something behind me.
A soft sound. A papery whisper.
I turned.
A folded note was sliding through the crack at the bottom of the stateroom door.
I crossed the room quickly and pulled the door open. The corridor stretched in both directions — empty, except for the retreating edge of a shadow disappearing around the far corner. I stepped out and looked. Whoever it was, they were gone.
I looked down at the note in my hand.
Plain paper. Folded once. My name written on the outside in a handwriting I didn’t recognize.
I unfolded it.
Want to know what your dear husband has been up to? Go to room 546 and open the door. NOW.
I stood in the doorway of our anniversary stateroom and read it twice.
Behind me, my coffee was going cold.
I stood there for a long moment, the note in my hand, and did not move.
CHAPTER 6
