“I’m not a whore but you’re a psycho, and I’m done. I’m filing a restraining order.”
I move as quick as I can without running through the kitchen and into the restaurant. Chloe is standing, her back to me, facing the table we ate at, head tipped down, staring at the phone in her shaking hands.
“Chloe?”
The sound of her name startles her, and she jumps. With lightning speed, she wipes at her eyes with the back of her hand and drops her phone back on the table and turns to me. The smile on her face is forced and devoid of any mirth. “Hey. Sorry.”
I walk right up to her, and she lets me pull her into a hug. I rub her back. “I didn’t mean to invade your privacy, but you sounded really upset. Who is calling you a whore?”
A deep breath shudders through her. “My ex brother-in-law. Again.”
“Jesus. What is wrong with this guy?” I kiss the top of her head. She still feels so tense in my arms.
“Someone told him I was dating you,” Chloe explains. “Well, not you by name, but the man living in the apartment. Paul says that…that fucking a man in his brother’s home makes me a whore.”
“First of all, fuck him,” I snarl and squeeze her tighter. “And second of all, why can’t your ex rein this asshole in? I mean surely he doesn’t want you to suffer like this? He gave you the house in the divorce after all, so why can’t his brother be angry at him instead of you?”
She pulls out of my embrace and sighs again, running her fingers through her hair. Her gray eyes blink rapidly and her expression changes to something less angry and more remorseful.
“I never said we were divorced.” Her eyes begin to water, and my heart pounds with uncertainty. Something is going on here, and I don’t know what it is, but I know I won’t like it. She turns away from me and walks over to the window. “Jackson can’t speak to Paul because he died.”
I wasn’t expecting that. “I’m confused. When? After you broke up? Why did you never tell me that?”
“No. He died when we were married. I knew you were assuming divorce. I’m sorry I didn’t just tell you the truth,” she says, turning away from the dark sea views and back to face me. She looks as broken as she sounds, and my heart starts to ache, but I’m also beginning to feel a twinge of anxiety. I feel like there’s a shoe that hasn’t dropped. “I’ve only been on a handful of dates since I’ve been widowed and learned early on telling men you were widowed at twenty-seven isn’t a great idea. Everyone wants to know how it happened and then they look at me like I’m this helpless, broken victim. And I didn’t want you to do that. So I stretched the truth at first.”
I don’t care that she dodged the truth. I’ve got bigger secrets than that. “It’s fine, Chloe. Honestly.”
She stares at me with disbelief. I take her in my arms and hold her tightly. “I’ve talked around the truth in my life too.”
“We shouldn’t do that. Not with each other,” she replies, her head resting against my shoulder. “Not anymore.”
“I agree,” I reply.
“That’s why Jackson’s brother Paul is so angry I have the house,” Chloe explains. “He wanted to keep it in his family, and he doesn’t consider me part of that family now that Jackson is dead.”
“How did he die?” I can’t help but ask. Do I want to know? Does it matter? Just asking the question somehow raises the hair on the back of my neck. I don’t know why. I don’t understand why my body is nearly vibrating with anxiety right now.
“Car crash,” she says so softly I almost don’t hear it. She steps out of my embrace and I let her, my arms sagging at my side. “I told you I was in a car crash, well he was in the car with me. Driving. I use the word crash and not accident deliberately. Because what happened was no accident. A person made the decision to get behind the wheel with a blood alcohol level almost double the legal limit and drive into our car.”
That shoe just dropped, only it’s not a shoe, it’s an anvil and it’s smashing my world to oblivion. I stand motionless, expressionless, helpless, listening to her. She turns back to the window for a moment and then back to me. “We’d spent the weekend in New Hampshire visiting Jackson’s other brother Denny and looking for furniture to fill the house with. We should have been on the turnpike. It would have been faster, but I wanted to take the long route because it was fall and the leaves were turning.”
Fall. No. Oh God no.
“It was early, too. I mean you don’t expect to be hit by a drunk driver at four in the afternoon. At least I didn’t,” she says in a trembling voice. “He was having some kind of bender I guess. The police told Paul and Denny later that the driver had been drinking with friends since he woke up that day.”
We started with Bloody Marys at ten in the morning.
“We were almost home,” she says and closes her eyes to the memory. “I remember seeing the sign for the town of Wells and told Jackson we should probably pull in somewhere and grab a bite because I was starving and…”
At noon I decided we should head to a small hole-in-the-wall pub in Wells Beach. They never cut us off, and a lot of the local bars were sick of our shit and did. I drove Bryan’s truck the thirty minutes there, with three very strong Bloody Marys in my system, but it seemed like the better choice, because Bryan had four in his. We played darts and drank beers for a couple of hours until we graduated to tequila shots.
“That’s the last thing I remember,” she continues, pulling me back from that nightmare from my past to the one I am currently living. “I woke up in the hospital in Augusta two days later. They had airlifted me there because they had the best trauma surgeon in the state. It was there I found out Jackson had died on impact. The driver did too.”
I puked at the bar around three in the afternoon and got kicked out. Bryan was in the middle of a beer, so he told me to wait for him outside. I was barely able to stand up. I still had his keys, so I climbed into his truck…I remember nothing after that. I woke up four hours later in the hospital in Wells. My dad told me what happened. Everyone, including the cop who stared at me with disdain, said Bryan was the one who was driving. And the guy we hit was dead too. No one mentioned a passenger, a wife, though…. so it can’t be the same crash. It can’t. Oh God, it can’t.
“What day did this happen?” My voice sounds foreign. Too thick. Too strained.
“October tenth. Five years ago.” She stares at me, finally seeing what must be anguish on my face. “Are you okay?”
