Page 41 of A Deeper Darkness
Georgetown hadn’t changed much since she’d haunted its streets fifteen years earlier. Still full of high-end fashion stores and fabulous restaurants, there were a few concessions to consumer-driven modernity—a cupcake store that had been featured on a reality TV show always had a line forty people deep, for instance—but for the most part, the staples, the meat of the hamlet, were still there. Clyde’s. Chadwicks. Filomena’s. Paolo’s. F. Scott’s.
Her very existence in Georgetown had revolved around food.
God, it made her sad. Life just continued to flow around her, never stopping. You excuse yourself from the world, and so long as your heart continues to beat, after a time, no one even notices. It’s only when you die that you take a place in people’s mythologies. She had friends here once. Girls who called three times a day wanting to get together, who showed up at her apartment door unannounced with sangria and tequila, who cried on her shoulder, and on whose shoulders she cried in return. She couldn’t remember half their names now. She’d gotten so caught up in her own life, her work, her family, herself, that they were fleeting images: a flash of blond here, a brown eye there, a laugh. Ghosts.
It was her fault. D.C. was so very different from Nashville. Though she’d loved her time here, she’d been desperate to get back home. Especially once she and Donovan were over. Nashville fit her like a glove. Where life was slower, and less complicated. Where, waiting patiently, there was a man who loved her, and would never leave.
At least that’s what she’d always believed about him. She’d been wrong.
Simon.
She allowed her mind to say the name. Just once. A breeze through her cerebral cortex. Those two simple syllables were like the first rush after the needle prick—all-consuming, warm, happy. His face floated before her eyes: the untamable cowlick, the glasses, the crooked front tooth that gave his smile such boyish charm.
“Hi,” she whispered.
Even a whisper is enough to scare away a spirit. His face started to fade, and Sam bit her lip to keep from crying out after him. The rush was gone as quickly as it came, and pain was all that followed. The vision was gone. The massive, gaping hole in her heart began to ache.
For with Simon, and thoughts of home, came the sweetly cherubic voices of the twins.
She couldn’t believe they were all gone. If only she hadn’t—
“That’ll be $6.70, ma’am.”
Sam started. The cabbie was looking at her strangely.
“You okay? This the right place?”
She glanced out the window, surprised to see a familiar red house and black shutters. Eleanor’s. Where she was meant to be. At least temporarily.
“Oh. Yes. Yes, of course it is. Thank you.”
She fished a ten out of her wallet and passed it through the plastic window. The door handle stuck, she had to give it a shove.
She couldn’t get enough air.
One Mississippi. Two Mississippi.
She fumbled with the keys, the cheerful vermilion door mocking her.
Three Mississippi. Four Mississippi.
“God damn it,” she yelled, giving it another try. The door swung open freely, and she rushed straight to the kitchen and turned the water on full.
Her breath came in little panicked grunts. She scrubbed her hands together so violently that her nails scratched the beat-up skin and blood dripped into the sink.
Simon. Matthew. Madeline.
Simon. Matthew. Madeline.
One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three.
If she could just allow herself the pent-up tears that stayed stubbornly stuck in her eyes. She understood the psychology of letting go. She just wasn’t ready to let them out of her heart. Something told her that if she cried, her loves would escape down her cheeks, drip into a tissue, and the memories of them would vanish forever.
Reality slowly seeped back in. The water was burning hot, her skin fire red. Shaking, she reached for the tap and turned it off with a twist. She’d wrecked her hands. Wrecked them completely. They were cracked and torn, bright as a well-boiled lobster, blood oozing from barely healed fissures. She wouldn’t be able to hold a scalpel properly for days.
Is that what this was all about? Punishment? That she’d been doing an autopsy while they died?
Sam sighed and carefully dried her hands. Eleanor had some grapefruit lotion from Williams-Sonoma on the countertop next to the sink. Sam carefully got some in her palms and spread a thin layer over the torn skin. It stung sharply for a moment, then calmed.
