The Wife (34 page)

“Just don’t milk it too long,” Lee jokes through her tears.

“We love you, sweetheart. We’re just so glad to have you home,” my dad says through his stifled tears.

“I’m glad to be home,” I say, although the more I sit back here, the less at home I feel. I didn’t think about how being here would be such a powerful reminder of the tragic turn my life has taken.

I may be alive and home, but my life will never be the same. I’m a single mom, with two boys to support and take care of. I have no job and am not sure when or if I’ll be able to work again, and I have a mangled face that would make it hard for anyone to love. No, my life wasn’t the same at all, but somehow it feels better than ever before.

The one thing that keeps nagging at my mind is Jamie. Since my emotional breakdown when I came out of the coma, my visitors were limited to my dad and boys only. Lee told me that Jamie was at the hospital every day when I was in a coma, but I still haven’t heard from him and am a little afraid to ask why. The last time I saw him, it didn’t go well. But it was his voice, his words, real or not, that comforted me in my dreams and I want to thank him for that. I owe it to him after the way I treated him.

When things happen in life like they happened to me, it puts things in perspective. I’ve had a lot of time to sit and think, and I realize now that I need to forgive Jamie and let him get off his chest everything he’s been trying to get me to listen to. I owe him that.

“Lex.” His voice startles me from my daydream.

I open my eyes to see Lee and my dad get up and walk away. Jamie’s body is illuminated like an angel as he approaches me with a hesitant smile. I laugh when I see him carrying a large bouquet of flowers with several balloons fluttering around his head.

My laugh puts him at ease and he comes to my side, placing everything down next to me. “Wow, that’s some setup you’ve brought me.” I place my hand on his, making his eyes tear up.

He clears his throat. “When I asked the boys which you’d like best, they said everything.” He smiles a little. “I brought a box of candy, too, but they’ve already confiscated it.”

“I think you’ve been duped.” I try to lighten his mood.

He moves to touch me and pulls his hand back, unable to hide his emotions behind our usual banter. “I’ve been so worried about you.”

His eyes trace over me, and I’m reminded of the way I look. I immediately shuffle my position and try to cover the mangled side of my face with my hand. “I’ll be okay.” I smile and try to shrug off my insecurity. “Besides looking a little more like the monster from the black lagoon,” I say jokingly, referencing the silly movie we used to watch together in college.

He doesn’t hesitate to touch me this time and takes my hand, removing it from my face. “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever laid eyes on, Lex.”

No touch has ever felt so intimate and no words he could have ever said would’ve meant more than they did right then. “Jamie,” I say in a whisper when tears begin to fall.

He looks around frantically. “No, I don’t want to make you cry. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have…”

“Shut up.” I laugh at his reaction.

“What?” he asks, not sure he heard me correctly.

I take his hand and pull him over to my chair. “I said shut up.” I’m switching between laughs and tears when his face contorts in confusion. I turn over his wrist and trace the tattoo he has written there. “What you said was perfect.”

He smiles down at me and presses his head to mine like he used to. “I was so afraid to lose you again.” He squeezes my hand that is holding on to his. “I never want to lose you again.”

I smile up at him and feel the dead piece of my heart beat again. He pulls me in his arms and holds me as we sit quietly together, my soul beginning to heal at a pace that I wish my body could match.

I
t’s been six months since my shooting and there’s been little progress in figuring out who is responsible up until now. Much to my surprise, I received a call to come down to the police station, and I can only assume it is to discuss something about the case.

Mike was cleared of all suspicion shortly after my release from the hospital, and that brought me some sense of peace. With all that he put me through, it was a comfort to know that the man I shared my life and children with wasn’t responsible for trying to kill me. So I had that going for me.

Mike’s company was able to finish the work on Jamie’s restaurants, and he’s been working to get his business back on the straight and narrow. I know Jamie could’ve fired him, but he didn’t, and I know it was for me. I know he did it because Mike would’ve lost everything if he lost Jamie’s project, which in turn, would have also taken from the kids and me. Jamie believed in second chances and knew that giving Mike that second chance would assure he was able to also move on with a life where he can be there for our boys. They deserve that.

Jamie offered to drive me to the meeting this morning, but I refused. He needs to be at the restaurant tonight for the opening. It’s a bittersweet time, because although the Rising Moon is the place that brought us together again, it will also always be a reminder of the worst time of my life.

I have to say that Rising Moon has become a perfect name not just for the restaurant, but for this time of my life. The moon is light in the darkness. I fought through a lot of darkness in my life: my mom’s death, the loss of Jamie, the disintegration of my marriage,
being shot in the head
(that one still gets me). But I’ve risen out of it all. I made it through times that I never thought I could survive, and I’ve come out on the other side happier than ever.

When I got home from the hospital, I needed to take the time to mourn my marriage and mourn my accident without the distractions and emotions that I knew would come with starting a relationship with Jamie that was anything but friendship. I wasn’t doing it to be difficult or to test him, and he understood. I needed to find myself again. I needed to focus on my boys and help them through the confusion and fear they have from what happened to my marriage and what happened to me. They needed to know that they came before anyone else.

I needed to learn how to live my life again with the constraints of my new disabilities, and I needed to gain my sense of self and independence again. As much as I had no doubt my heart belonged to Jamie, I still asked him to wait for me.

And he has.

Every day, he’s made sure I wasn’t worrying that his love was wavering and showered me with his daily assurances of undying devotion. There hasn’t been a day since I returned home that he hasn’t made some gesture of affection—whether it be a handwritten letter or a song—and with each one, I fell more and more back in love with him. He’s stuck with me through my surgeries to try to repair some of the damage to my face and the scarring; he’s stood by and been at my side for every doctor’s appointment. Tonight, I want to stand at his side and let him know I’m ready to accept the love he’s offering.

A siren from one of the police cars startles me and brings my thoughts back to the present as I pull up to the police station. I’m careful when I’m parking, still adjusting to having vision in one eye, and turn off the car. I’m ready to put this all behind me and start my life over, whether or not they ever find out who did this to me. I’ve come to accept that it could have been someone trying to carjack me or someone just wanting to cause harm. The dramatic idea of it being Mike or Stephanie was dismissed long ago. When the police interviewed Rita the night of my shooting, she told them about Mike’s affair and Jamie filled in the blanks that his affair was with my therapist. That immediately made them the top two suspects.

When authorities learned that Stephanie was at his office the night of the shooting from reviewing surveillance footage from earlier in the night, they both folded and confessed to being together that night. They told police I seemed surprised to see them there, but was not surprised that they were having an affair. They said I told him that all I wanted was the kids, and walked away, putting back on one of Mike’s jackets I had arrived in and stormed out into the rain. They made no attempt to follow me or argue any further.

They confessed that while I lay fifty feet away with a gunshot in my head—unknown to them—they had sex for the second time that night, and he only found my body when he ran out to her car to get another condom. It made me sick to hear these details, but it wasn’t surprising. I’m only glad that I don’t have to listen to evidence like that anymore.

The only other suspects they were looking at were men that Jamie suggested they check out. He said he knew Mike was in some sort of trouble with them and had personally seen them threaten him at a business party. I knew the Paulsons and didn’t doubt they’d be capable of something this horrible, but why me? The evidence didn’t fit the crime. There was no way they could’ve known I was going to his office that time of night on that day. I rarely ever went to his office and never at night. The surveillance equipment was also tampered with at least an hour before I even arrived. I hadn’t even landed yet.

That left a random act as the only option left, and I didn’t know which was worse to imagine. Either way, closure was my wish and my hope for today.

I open the door to the station that’s become far too familiar. The noise in the bustling office was startling for those who didn’t expect it. I expected it. Phones are ringing and people are yelling; it’s organized chaos at its best.

I walk directly back to Detective James’s office and lightly knock on the door, noticing he’s talking on his phone and wanting to give him privacy before I walk in. He smiles up at me and waves me in, quickly ending the call, and gets up to shake my hand.

“Thanks for coming down, Mrs. Brock. Can I get you anything? Coffee? Water?”

I smile politely, wanting to get straight down to the reason I’m here. “No, thank you. I’m just eager to hear why you asked me down today.”

“Right, right.” He shuffles the papers in front of him and places his glasses on as he examines the papers in front of him. “As you know, in our last meeting we said we’d exhausted our last lead and didn’t have much else to go on.”

My heart sinks. I know what’s going to come next: they’re going to put the investigation on the back burner. “I understand.” I swallow hard, trying to hold back my disappointment.

He shifts in his seat and hands me a grainy picture. I look at it, unsure of what I’m supposed to be seeing. Detective James leans forward, pointing at a car that’s parked in front of a 7-Eleven. “I still kept going back to that surveillance video and trying to recover anything I could from all angles of the building, but there was nothing. I didn’t even see your car enter the parking lot.” He taps at the picture again. “Then I decided to go back over the surveillance video of surrounding businesses again and found this.” He sits back in his seat as if he’s just explained everything.