Page 5 of Whenever You Call

I wasdrowning in the stuff, and I didn’t know how the hell to come up for air.

Chapter3

HANNAH

Bella sang to herself in the backseat of the brand-new Range Rover Cole had insisted on buying only weeks before he… left us.

Before hedied.

He’d been gone over a month now, and I still tripped over that word when thinking of him, even though I thought it often. All the time, in fact. Most nights, I lay on the bathroom floor, staring up at the ceiling while the bathtub filled beside me, trying to wrap my mind around the truth of just two tiny words:

He’s dead.

My husband no longer existed—a man who shone so brightly that the idea of him having faded away to nothing seemed almost impossible somehow. Like death shouldn’t ever have touched him. He’d been too much of a star to turn to nothing like that.

He’s dead, Hannah. Gone.

I was navigating waters I didn’t know how to swim, and I’d been struggling to stay afloat for the past five weeks—the last words I ever spoke to him stuck on an endless loop in my mind; the guilt, a noose around my neck, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

Go to Hell, Cole.

If only I’d given him justonemore chance, he’d still be here—my daughter would still have a father—and I despised him even more for that. For making me suffer the consequences of his decisions for the rest of my life because a grieving wife was only supposed to mourn her famous husband’s death in one way for it to be deemed acceptable:

With absolute, unfixable, wailing to the skies heartbreak.

For me, it was a little more complicated.

Grief was a cruel bitch at the best of times but throw in the agony of trying to mourn a man you’d taught yourself to despise over the years, and the torment became unbearable. A constant weight of mixed emotions chewing you up and spitting you out every goddamn day.

My body missed his touch.

My heart remembered the way it had felt to love him and have him love me in return.

But my mind? That couldn’t forget the unforgivable amount of pain he’d caused over the years. It also couldn’t figure out how the hell to help me cope with so many conflicting emotions, forcing me to break down and cry one minute, only to get annoyed for being so weak the next. No part worked properly now, not knowing what to do or how to react anymore. Even my memories had become confusing, never knowing which were real and which were nothing but a fantasy I’d tried to create along the way. Because despite the way things had ended with us that night, no one had wanted our marriage to work more than I had.

And now I wanted him back more than anything, to give us the ending we surely deserved, even if that ending had to be a proper goodbye. One without so much hate and disappointment fueling it from both of us.

Cole had been the only love of my life, but we’d been over for a long time. I knew what he’d done behind my back throughout the years. The whole world knew… except for the little girl currently curling the pigtail of her doll around her finger while singing along to some Disney classic I couldn’t even remember the name of.

Songs, music, lyrics… none of them mattered. Movies no longer made sense. The words in books blurred together. Each color managed to look the same as the next. Even my little girl’s voice failed to bring me back to life the way it once would have. All I heard when she sang now was the way she sounded so much like her daddy. I wondered if he ever knew he’d passed that on to her while he’d been busy with the band, out living his life to the fullest without a care for what we were doing or how we’d cope when he’d gone.

That’s the problem with losing someone to drugs.

You couldn’t just be sad. You had to be angry, too.

I’d been angry at him for far too long, but nothing could compare to the state of total numbness I’d been in when Bella had looked up at me in the kitchen earlier and said, “Mommy, we never go out for our special car rides anymore. Is that because of Daddy? Can’t you drive us for ice cream anymore because he’s gone to live in Heaven?”

The way her bright blue eyes had shined with pure sadness had, for the first time in a month, made that cracked and beaten-up heart of mine throb at least one strong beat that changed everything.

She deserved a better, stronger mother. It was time to become that for her.

Not long after, I drove her into Culver City, and we pulled into the right lane of her favorite drive-thru, The Frozen Spoon.

It only took a split second—one glimpse of the illuminated menu board staring at us, inviting me forward to go to the kiosk where a server would be waiting to look me in the eyes and hand over our order—and the panic set in, twisting me up and spinning my whole world upside down.

My confidence waned, and my blood ran cold, the fear of speaking to absolute strangers for the first time in weeks setting in all too quickly.

What had I been thinking?

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