He sighed into the telephone. “Don’t do anything. I’ll be home by”—he checked his watch—“six tomorrow morning, your time.”
When he spoke again his voice broke. “I’ve got to be the first one she sees,” he said.
He hung up on his agent without saying goodbye and started barking instructions to Jennifer. He called over her shoulder to his coproducer. “Joe, we’ve got to stop filming for at least a week.”
“But—”
“Fuck the budget.” He started toward his trailer, but then turned and touched Jennifer’s shoulder. She was already bent over the telephone making plane reservations, her hair falling around her like a curtain.
When she looked up he held her gaze, and she saw something in his striking eyes that very few people ever had: a quiet desperation.
“Please,” he murmured. “If you have to, move heaven and earth.”
It took Jennifer a moment to shake herself back to reality, and even after he’d been gone for several seconds she could still feel the heat where his hand had held her shoulder; the weight of his plea. She picked up the phone again and began to dial. What Alex Rivers needed, Alex Rivers would get.
AT SEVEN A.M. ON WEDNESDAY, THE TELEPHONE BEGAN TO RING.
Will ran from the bathroom into the kitchen, wrapping a towel around his waist. “Yeah?”
“It’s Watkins. I just got a call from the station. Three guesses who’s showed up.”
Will sank down to the kitchen floor and let the bottom drop out of his world. “We’ll be there in a half hour,” he said.
“Will?” He heard Watkins’s voice as if from a long distance. “You really know how to pick ’em.”
He knew he had to wake Jane and tell her that her husband had come to claim her; he knew he had to say the reassuring things that she’d expect him to say during the ride to the Academy, but he didn’t think he could do it. The feelings Jane brought out in him went deeper than a matter of a fateful coincidence. He liked knowing that she tried to cover her freckles with baby powder. He liked the way she had of talking with her hands. He loved seeing her in his bed. He told himself that he would simply put on the mask of indifference he’d worn for the past twenty years, and that within a week his life would be back to normal. He told himself that this was what was meant to be all along.
And at the same time, he saw Jane running from the cemetery gate beneath the owl’s cry, and he knew that even when she was gone she would be his responsibility.
She was sleeping on her side, her arm curled over her stomach. “Jane,”
he said, touching her shoulder. He leaned closer and shook her lightly, shocked to notice that the pillow and blanket no longer smelled like him, but like her. “Jane, get up.”
She blinked at him and rolled over. “Is it time?” she asked, and he nodded.
He made coffee while she was showering, in case she wanted something in her stomach before they left, but she wanted to go right away. He sat beside her in the pickup and drove in silence, letting all the words he should have been saying clutter the space around him.I’ll miss you, he had planned to tell her.Call if you get a chance. If anything happens, well, you know where I am.
Jane stared glassy-eyed at the freeway, her hands clenched in her lap.
She did not speak until they turned into the parking lot of the police station. At first, her voice was so quiet that Will thought he had heard her incorrectly. “Do you think he’ll like me?”
Will had expected her to wonder aloud about whether she’d remember her husband the minute she laid eyes on him, or to speculate about where her home was. He had not expected this.
He didn’t have a chance to answer. A flock of reporters pushed their way toward the truck, snapping flash cameras and calling out questions that tangled with each other in a knot of noise. Jane shrank back against the seat. “Come on,” Will said, sliding his arm around her shoulders.
He pulled her toward the driver’s-side door. “Just stick close to me.”
Who the hell was she? Even if she was this Barrett person, this anthropologist, and even if she’d discovered that hand, this kind of press coverage seemed to be a little overboard. Will guided Jane up the steps and into the main lobby of the station, feeling her warm breath make a circle against his collarbone.
Standing beside Captain Watkins was Alex Rivers.
Will dropped his arm from Jane’s shoulders. AlexgoddamnRivers.
All these reporters, all these cameras had nothing to do with Jane at all.
The corner of Will’s mouth tipped up. Jane was married to the number-one movie star in America. And she’d completely forgotten.
THE FIRST THING SHE NOTICED WAS THAT WILL HAD STEPPED AWAY from her. For a moment she was certain she wouldn’t be able to stand on her own. She was afraid to look up and face all those people, but something was keeping her on her feet and she needed to see what it was.
