Page 123 of Unexpected

Even with the tequila blazing through my system, my acting skills seemed to be on par because Amanda didn’t notice the quickening of my breath nor the tensing in every part of my body.

“Yeah, right.”

Amanda nodded with her mouth full. “Luke told me before that he thinks about it every day, which is no surprise when you find your parents dead. In college, we had all fallen asleep in the living room after a night out. Luke and I had called dibs on the sectional, and I woke up in the middle of the night to him kicking the shit out of my shoulder. He was having a nightmare and ended up telling me the next day that he still has them every once in a while. It broke my heart. Does he still have nightmares?”

“I’m not sure. I haven’t noticed them if he does,” I said honestly. My brain was working overtime trying to comprehend the new information and hearing that his parents died in their house—and that he was the one to find them—did wonders to sober me up completely.

“That’s good. And God, do I ever hope that this is the end for Valerie. She’s been a fucking leech in his life for too damn long.”

My head was spinning, but I managed to say, “Yeah, me too.”

“I’m glad he has you, though. And for what it’s worth, I don’t agree with Blakely even if she is my best friend. Valerie won’t stop even if you break up, so you might as well live your lives.”

I nodded again because I was well and truly incapable of forming a single syllable of a single word. Luke’s mom had been a victim of abuse and then he had as well. It was amazing that he trusted anyone at all. It also well explained his need to fight and release the likely onslaught of emotions it brought on, especially as a teenager with no other outlet.The grief was probably debilitating.

My heart broke for him over and over, and I felt the tears pricking the back of my eyes as I thought of a heartbroken teenage Luke.

“Thanks. Anyway, what are your plans for tomorrow?” I asked, trying to change the subject with as much grace as I could muster.

Amanda easily transitioned into an account of her and her family’s plans for the following day. Luke was right, though, I not only got to know Amanda over margs, I felt like I got to know him, too.

FORTY-FOUR

Luke

The small,folded piece of white paper that was in the mailbox of the vet clinic was unfolded and lay on my desk when I felt the urge to fucking pummel something.

It was the third time in the past few days that I’d received a letter from Valerie at the clinic. Besides the contents of each letter, the only way of identifying they were each from Valerie was her nickname for me, written precisely in a basic typeface on the front of each.

“Bear.”

The first one was a standard letter claiming that she missed me and was still in love with me. She said she was more than happy waiting as long as I needed to go back to her. Then she went into detail about our first date. She described every feeling she had that night and how the tension of our years-long friendship made that first date all the better. Shewent into graphic detail about the things we did together in the alley behind the place.

The second letter was less sexually graphic but was her recap of the day I asked her to marry me. Like she was writing the next great American novel, she described in perfect detail the night I took her to hear one of my favorite bands play live and asked her to be my wife during my favorite song. They were playing a surprise show in a run-down converted warehouse outside of the city.The song described an imperfect love with the best intentions, and it was a song I played over and over and over again, annoying everyone around me except for her.

I never listened to that fucking song again.

The third was a letter reminiscing on another old memory—we’d gone to Murphy’s, and after too many shots of whiskey, I almost fought a guy just for bumping into Valerie in the middle of the dance floor. It took both Devon and Reed pulling me away from the encounter and shoving me out the back door to calm me down.

Rhonda, the owner, threatened to never let me enter the bar again if I didn’t calm down. It was the second time that month that I almost got into a fight, and she wasn’t having it any longer.

It was embarrassing to know that I couldn’t control my anger even over the simplest accident. But that’s not the way Valerie remembered it. She remembered it as I was her knight in shining armor fucking saving her from the rest of the men in the world. That’s also the way I saw it back then, which is how we ended up escaping to the upper levels of the bar, which were only used for storage and fucking against cases of beer and liquor.

The third letter was a detailed recap of that night and how she’d felt when I got kicked out and when we snuck back in.

I read about a quarter of it before I realized where she was going with the extra emotional and distorted details. There was something more in the words of the third letter that there hadn’t been in the others. My stomach lurched when I read the words “beautifully explosive rage.” It was a night that I too often thought of when I second-guessed if I’d turn into my own father. Apparently, it had also been memorable for her but in radically different ways.

I skimmed the rest of the letter, but she also included a message to let me know that my happiness meant more than anything to her. That my happiness was the key to her own and that’s all she cared about. I gagged, threw up a little in my mouth and then promptly texted Detective Bell.

I was beginning to lose hope in him and the police in general. In the weeks since the phone call with Valerie, nothing had changed. Even after Blakely’s confession, she had yet to speak to any of the officers that contacted her, and when I confronted her, she said it was for our own safety.

I called her twice a day and she explained each time that she’d told me so that I knew what to expect when Valerie went after Hazel. She still believed talking to the police would mean Valerie would find her or pursue me harder.

Without Blakely’s statement, the police claimed there wasn’t enough evidence to support a new restraining order—like it would do any good anyway—and they were unable to arrest her for letters and a phone call.

According to Detective Bell, they’d even so much as gone to Valerie’s house—our old house—and spoken with her in person. She, of course, told them exactly what they wanted to hear, including that the phone call was not supposed to be threatening and that she merely missed me. The woman wasn’t capable of such intense emotion.

Like she had so often done before, she was walking the line of legal and illegal, annoying, and obsessive stalking. But I wouldn’t let her cross the line when it came to Hazel.

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