Page 40 of The Meaning Of You

One thing we’d done right was making sure we both had full power of attorney over the other if either of us was incapacitated. It had made everything that much easier, and I’d been able to instruct Davis’s literary agent and personal assistant to keep things turning over until things resolved in whatever way they did. With only one book in the pipeline when he was hospitalised, already edited and ready to go, they needed little input from me. His publisher released it as planned and it had done well. But with Davis’s death, there were now a ton ofconversations to be had, contracts to cancel, and decisions to be made.

I continued to stare at the envelope, knowing that time had come. For some reason, this felt more final than anything else so far. Other than me, his writing was his life, and it was hard to think about a world where that would never happen again. And although I knew Davis’s finances and taxes since I did his annual returns, the publishing side of his business was a complete nightmare to even think about. But the guilt had begun to needle, and I owed it to Davis to man up and get on with sorting out his precious work.

I opened a window to encourage a little sea breeze into the stuffy room and stared through the glass. Welcome to the sub-tropical paradise that was Auckland in summer. A place where palms thrived and people and animals wilted. Outside, a sweltering thirty-three degrees Celsius baked the gardens, unusually hot for Auckland, and humid as shit. Inside was even worse but I hated air conditioning with an irrational passion that had been the cause of many an argument between Davis and me over the years, none of which he’d won.

Something I found myself regretting time and again. Would it have hurt to let him be cool when he wanted? I really was an arsehole.

Across the road, a man in his seventies tugged at the lead of a reluctant cockerpoo who was sheltering in the shade of a mature magnolia. The man stopped and wiped his brow, said something to the poor animal, then scooped it into his arms and headed back the way he’d come, presumably home. Point scored to the dog who clearly had more common sense than his owner going out at noon on one of the hottest days Auckland had seen in a long while.

Shelby jumped on the table and went up on her back legs to smooch my shoulder, a startling mark of affection that hadstarted around Christmas when she’d clearly decided Davis wasn’t coming back and it was me or nothing. How did they know?

I leaned my head against hers and she gave a rumbling purr. “What’s up, girl?” I scooped her into my arms and she tolerated a short cuddle before wriggling to be set free. I placed her on the table, something I would never have tolerated when Davis was alive.

“Too hot for you as well, huh?” I ran a hand down her back, and she yawned and stretched lengthways on the polished wood, batting my fingers away with her barely sheathed paw.

“Fine.” I raised both hands. “No need to get pissy with me.”

I opened a second window and then a third until an elusive warm breeze blew sluggishly past my face. Shelby repositioned her sleek body to catch some of the draft and settled down to sleep. I watched her for a moment, then retook my seat and reached for the envelope.

An hour later I’d re-read and sorted the envelope’s contents into six plastic folders. The first held anything to do with royalty sources, taxes, and finances. The second covered contracts, documents for his company of which I was a shareholder, copyright information, and other legal administrative stuff. The third was to do with promotion, cover artists, advertising, graphics, and social media. The fourth was a hellishly long list of information regarding websites, accounts, author and publishing tools, and the fifth consisted of anything that didn’t fit into the other four.

That done, I fell back in my chair and sighed, my worst fears confirmed. It was going to be a much bigger job than I’d imagined, and I’d imagined quite a bit. None of the tasks in isolation presented a problem, but the sum of the parts was going to take a lot more time than I’d originally planned.

“Wanna job?” I asked Shelby, who was watching me with one eye open. The eyelid closed and I sighed. “You and me both, kiddo.”

On the plus side, the majority of Davis’s books and everything related to them, could continue to be handled by his publishing company who held the contracts. On the downside, he had two self-published books that would need some personal monitoring, and there was the complex job of ensuring company and copyright legalities were secured correctly under my name. I saw many, many lists in my future, but that was fine. Lists I could do. Order and clarity. Forensic accountant in the house, folks.

Whatdidn’tmake me happy was the small sheaf of papers in the sixth and final plastic folio sitting off to my right. Davis’s instructions had mentioned a folder of copyright documents kept on a shelf in the wardrobe of his study, but when I went to retrieve it, I found a receipt and warranty tucked/hidden underneath along with a credit card statement from a bank we didn’t use. The statement and receipt itemised the purchase of a laptop bought about two months before the accident, along with a few other purchases, one of which was a cheap phone that I’d never seen.

I pulled the pile closer and tried to think of any fucking reason Davis wouldn’t have told me about these. He’d been obsessive about his laptop—most authors were. If he needed to update it for some reason, he’d angst for months over the decision, the whole excruciating process driving me crazy. So, the idea that he’d bought a second laptop without me even knowing boggled belief and bubbled unhappily in my belly, along with the question of where the fuck the thing was. I hadn’t stumbled on it in almost two years.

Davis had left his original laptop on his desk that day. Since then, I’d been using it to keep up with his emails andstuff. There’d been no laptop found in or around his wrecked car, which meant the second one had to be somewhere in the townhouse, except I’d pretty much cleaned it top to bottom, apart from his side of our walk-in wardrobe, where his clothes hung exactly as he’d left them, a chaotic mix of colour and design.

Just glancing at them used to make me want to stab my eyes out with a blunt fork. His wardrobe reflected his mind—creative, startling, unpredictable, hard to evaluate, mismatched, and impossible to find anything you were looking for without conducting a grid search. It was in stark contrast to my side where obsession ruled with clothes strictly organised by type and colour, easy to find and ridiculously soothing to my brain. After the accident, I’d found the chaos reassuring. Like a whisper of hope. The one time I had tried to sort through them, I’d ended up in a pile on the floor. It had not been a good day.

But that was then.

I pushed back my chair and headed to the bedroom. I had a laptop to find.

Thirty minutes later I was sitting on the wardrobe floor surrounded by piles of clothes, but still no laptop. Shelby watched me from the doorway with a look on her face that said everything you needed to know about what she thought of stupid humans.

I tried to think of anywhere else it could be while at the same time trying not to think of why Davis might have kept it hidden. I even knocked on the wardrobe walls looking for any hidey holes, emptied his drawers, and upended the large box he kept for all his old shoes just in case he needed them again. The man was an enigma.

At the end of it all, the search had turned up nothing. Which only begged the question of where in the hell the damn thing was? I headed back to Davis’s study for another look, using astepladder to make sure I’d checked right to the back of the wardrobe shelves.

Nothing.

I stood in the door and scanned the room again, lingering over his desk, realisation dawning that there was something else I hadn’t seen since the accident, something I’d missed in the shock of the moment and the drawn-out aftermath. Something I’d barely even thought about until then. Davis’s research folder for his next book.

There were only two places that folder lived when Davis was planning as he’d been for two months before the accident. On his desk or on his person. He bought a new one for every book, and his last had sported the disturbing cover of Edvard Munch’s paintingThe Scream. Fitting for a thriller writer, I’d supposed at the time.

Davis was very secretive about the plot lines of his new books, rarely sharing anything, worried he might start second-guessing himself. To that end, he kept his research folder closely guarded. But his latest wasn’t on his desk or anywhere in the house, and I was pretty sure it hadn’t been in the car with him that day either. If it had been, the police would’ve returned it along with the rest of his stuff, in pieces or otherwise. Then again, I was so overwhelmed at the time. Had I just not seen it?

I stared out his study window and tried to recall exactly whatwasin that box. Davis’s car keys—I remembered that much along with unrecognisable items of clothing, which I’d immediately thrown away. There were takeout bags, including a half-eaten order of french fries. I remembered that in particular because it had been a surreal moment thinking of Davis eating something as mundane as french fries as he drove to his demise, and why in the hell the police had thought I’d want those back. Davis’s satchel had been there too, along with his wallet, hisphone in a million bits, and his Mickey Mouse keyring. But no laptop and no research folder.

I was still staring out the window when it hit me.

The Mickey Mouse keyring.

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