look, girl,” he said, eyeing her as she crawled next to him.
“I’ll show you sexy.” She kissed him. That was all the cajoling Steven needed. He set down the paperwork that had held his attention. His hands found the softness of her skin underneath the T-shirt. She let out a sigh. They were tenderly entwined, tangled in the bedsheets.
“Didn’t take much,” she said. “Did it?”
Steven’s stubbled face skimmed the surface of her breast as he slid lower into the bed.
She still felt the excitement that came with the touch of her husband.
“No, baby. Not much.”
Neither one said another word about Jason Reed. If his ghost had hovered around the dining room only a couple hours ago, he’d vanished once more.
CHAPTER NINE
Tacoma
Tears filled her eyes and there was no stopping them.
I shouldn’t feel this sad, but I do, Laura Connelly thought. Her ex-husband’s death had left her feeling bereft in a way that she would have told someone a week ago was completely impossible. Alex had left her for another woman. Betrayed her. Left their son.
And yet my heart aches? Why?
At her home in Fircrest, just south of Tacoma, a brokenhearted Laura moved about her seventeen-year-old son’s bedroom, picking up what he’d carelessly left on the floor. It was early in the morning, and Parker hadn’t come home. He’d been doing a lot of that lately—staying with his best friend, Drew. Laura was a petite strawberry blonde, with green eyes that she made the color of clover with tinted contact lenses. In her mid-forties, she was a single mother with no prospects for being anything but. Her world was about her son. It had been that way for a very long time. Until that week, Parker had his dad, too.
But no more.
She shook her head as she looked around. Parker was no more a slob than any boy his age, but she’d noticed a little improvement in areas that mattered. He’d asked her to buy new jeans and a couple of new shirts. He even wanted new underwear.
“Not boxers, Mom, boxer briefs. They fit better.”
Point taken. In fact, everything Parker wanted those days seemed to reflect a need to improve his appearance. He’d been working out, bulking up his adolescent frame to one that showed the definition of a young man’s physique. Not quite six-pack abs, but getting there. When he wasn’t Skyping on his computer, he was out running or lifting weights in the basement.
Parker was growing into a young man, and whatever she thought of Alex, she knew that only in death—senseless, untimely, tragic—would he leave his son behind.
A pair of Tacoma police officers came the morning after the shooting to let them know what happened. Parker got up from the breakfast table and bolted for the door. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t even take his backpack to go to school. He just left.
Come home, baby, she thought over and over. I’m still here. I won’t leave you.
Everything in her son’s room took on an unbridled poignancy. Laura smiled when she came across his cache of personal hygiene products on top of the cherry highboy. A bottle of body spray, a tube of acne medicine that he’d begged her to buy off a TV commercial, and a hair product called Bed Head. Her teenage son was growing up. He was still somewhat distant, but the signs were there. He was interested in girls. That was good. While her relationships with men had not gone the distance—her failed marriage to Alex was only one of four longtime relationships that had ended—she hoped that Parker would have better luck in that arena. His relationship with his father and stepmother had also improved. The cellular phone bill indicated a sharp increase in phone calls to his father’s.
That was good, too.
In putting away his neatly matched socks in a top drawer that was only organized when she did the arranging, she noticed a flash of red and white, a greeting card. Its red heart with an arrow indicated a valentine. She opened it and read the message:
Our love is forever. I will wait for you. Will you wait for me?
It was signed, somewhat cryptically, Me.
Tears flowed freely as she thought of Alex and how they’d met on the stainless-steel dance floor at the Black Angus in Bremerton. He was young, handsome. Attentive. A naval officer with plans for the future that included getting a master’s degree in finance. The message on the card reminded her of their own love story. Alex was transferred to San Diego for a year.
And, yes, she waited for him.
When he returned to Bremerton the following year, he had a new tattoo on his chest and a diamond engagement ring for Laura’s finger.
Underneath the first card, she found a second one. This one featured the image of two swans, their necks forming the shape of a heart.
It was wrong to invade Parker’s space and his mom knew it. Yet she couldn’t help herself. Her son had been so unhappy, so wounded. Few mothers can resist the urge to learn more about the girl who had given her boy a reason to smile.
When one swan dies, so does the other. I can’t live without you.
The handwriting was a neat script, the same script as on the other.
Teenagers. Everything is so dramatic, she thought, closing the drawer.
Before Alex’s murder, Laura considered Parker’s eighteenth birthday as a personal and financial game changer. The substantial child support that Alex had faithfully sent each month since their divorce would cease. It was far from a gravy train, but its derailment was going to be tough. She was unsure exactly what she would do to get by. It was true that she had investments and a decent nest egg, but the cash flow that came from Alex’s account to hers was the kind of money that made the difference between being comfortable and having strained finances. She could buy what she wanted. Eat out whenever she liked. She could even afford to have her car detailed once a month.
All of that would be off the table when the support checks stopped.
Alex wasn’t blameless in all of that, of course. And, though she loathed to admit it to herself, she’d once hoped that Alex would drop dead of a heart attack. He had a sizable life insurance policy and she was the beneficiary. She could have lived nicely on that. She could have avoided the embarrassment of giving up a big house, European vacations, and platinum tennis bracelets. But Alex didn’t drop dead before they were divorced.
And there was clearly no stopping Tori. She popped into her husband’s life at a time when Laura and Alex were at odds, when the excitement of their marriage had faded into a world of obligation.
She saw Tori as a schemer who used her considerable charms to snare a man who wanted that last gasp of youth that comes in one’s forties. A wife the same age was only a mirror to the passage of the days and months of his life.
Laura hated Tori for coming into their lives. The blonde with the perfect body had wriggled her way into their affairs like a beautiful virus. She wanted what she saw—a husband with a bank account
