shake my head, blinking away fresh tears in order to read the hotel information at the bottom of the flyer. “I’m looking at the conference flyer right now. It says Universal Boulevard.”
Her voice brightens. “Oh, well, if he’s here for a conference, then perhaps I can get a message to the organizer’s point of contact. Which conference?”
“Cyber Security for Critical Assets: An Intelligence Summit.”
She hesitates only a second or two, but long enough that bile builds in my throat. “I’m very sorry, ma’am, but there’s no conference by that name at this hotel.”
I drop the phone and throw up into my wastebasket.
* * *
Claire Masters, a colleague from the admissions office across the hall, drives me home. Claire and I are friendly enough, but we’re not friends, though I don’t have to ask why I’m here, buckled into the passenger’s seat of her Ford Explorer instead of someone else’s car. Early last year, Claire lost her husband to Hodgkin’s, and now, whether she volunteered to drive me home or Ted asked her to, the reason is clear. If anyone will understand what I’m going through, it’s another widow.
Widow. I’d throw up again, but my stomach is empty.
I turn and stare out the window, watching the familiar Buckhead strip malls fly by. Claire drives slowly, her hands at ten and two, and she doesn’t say a word. She keeps her mouth shut and her gaze on the traffic in front of her, and as much as I detest being lumped into her tragic category, at least she knows that the only thing I want is to be left alone.
My phone buzzes on my lap. My mother, calling for what must be the hundredth time. Guilt pricks at my insides. I know it’s not fair to keep avoiding her, but I can’t talk to her right now. I can’t talk to anybody.
“Don’t you want to get that?” Claire’s voice is high and girlish, and it slices through the silence like a serrated knife.
“No.” It takes all my energy to speak around the boulder on my chest.
Her gaze bounces between me, my phone and the traffic before us. “Take it from me, your mother is losing her mind right now.”
I wince at her knowing tone, at the way she’s putting the two of us on the worst kind of team. “I can’t.” My voice cracks the last word in two, because talking to Mom would mean saying those awful words out loud. Will is gone. Will is dead. Saying the words would make this thing real.
The phone stops, then two seconds later, starts again.
This time, Claire plucks the phone from my lap and swipes the bar to pick up. “Hi, this is Claire Masters. I’m one of Iris’s colleagues at Lake Forrest. She’s sitting right beside me, but she’s not quite ready to talk.” A pause. “Yes, ma’am. I’m afraid that’s correct.” Another pause, this time longer. “Okay. I’ll make sure to tell her.” She hangs up and places the phone gently back onto my legs. “Your parents are on their way. They’ll be here before dark.”
I’d thank her, but I can’t muster up the energy. I stare out the window and try to picture it, my Will in a field of smoking wreckage, with luggage and debris and charred, twisted chunks of metal scattered all around, but I can’t. It seems incomprehensible, as abstract to me as a concept from Dr. Drukker’s AP physics class. Will was going to Orlando, not Seattle. He can’t be dead. It just isn’t possible.
Claire turns onto the ramp for Georgia 400 and floors the gas, and we roar south in blissful, blessed silence.
No matter how many times I assure her it’s not necessary, Claire walks me up the flagstone path to my front door. I dig through my bag and pull out my keys, sliding them into the lock. “Thanks for the ride. I’m going to be okay.”
I open the door and walk through, but when I go to close it, Claire stops me with a palm to the stained-glass panel. “Sweetheart, I’m staying. Just until your parents get here.”
“No offense, Claire, but I want to be alone.”
“No offense, Iris, but I’m not leaving.” Her high-pitched voice is surprisingly firm, but she softens her words with a smile. “You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to, but I’m staying, and that’s that.”
I step back and let her pass.
Claire glances around the foyer, taking in the honey-colored walls, the gleaming pine floors stained almost-black, the carved railings on the original staircase. She cranes her head around the corner into the front parlor, empty save for a tufted beige sofa we’re still paying off—our Christmas gift to each other from Room & Board—then points toward the back of the house. “I assume the kitchen is that way?”
I nod.
She drops her bag by the door and heads down the hallway. “I’ll make us some tea.” She disappears around the corner into the kitchen.
As soon as she’s gone, I latch onto the newel post, this morning’s memories assaulting me. The weight of Will’s body on mine, heating me with his hands and hot naked skin. His lips in the crook of my neck and heading south, the scratch of his morning beard against my breasts, my belly, lower still. My fingers twining in his hair. The water sluicing down Will’s muscled torso as he stepped out of the shower, the brush of his fingers against mine when I handed him a towel. His smooth, warm lips coming in for just one more kiss, no matter how many times I warned him he was in serious danger of missing his flight. That very last flick of his hand as he rolled his suitcase out the front door, his wedding band blinking in the early-morning light, before driving off in his car.
He has to come back. We still have dinner dates and hotel reservations and birthday parties to plan. We’re going to Seaside next month, a Memorial Day getaway with just us two, and to Hilton Head this summer with my family. It was only last night that he pressed a kiss to my belly and said he can’t wait until I’m so fat with his baby, his arms won’t reach all the way around. Will can’t be gone. The finality is too unreal, too indigestible. I need proof.
I dump my stuff on the floor and head down the hallway to the back of the house, an open kitchen overlooking a dining area and keeping room. I dig the remote out of the fruit basket, and with the punch of a few buttons, CNN lights up the screen. A dark-haired reporter stands in front of a cornfield, wind whipping her hair all around her face, interviewing a gray-haired man in a puffy coat. The text across the bottom of the screen identifies him as the owner of the cornfield now littered with plane parts and human remains.
Claire comes around the corner holding a box of tea bags, her eyes wide. “You really shouldn’t be watching that.”
“Shh.” I press and hold the volume button until their voices hurt my ears almost as much as their words. The reporter peppers the man with questions while I search the background for any sign of Will. A flash of brown hair, the sleeve of his navy fleece. I hold my breath and strain to see, but there’s nothing but smoke and cornstalks, swaying in the breeze.
The reporter asks the old man to tell the camera what he saw.
“I was working on the far west end of the fields when I heard it coming,” the old man says, gesturing to the endless rows of corn behind him.
