Live to Tell (Live to Tell #1)(7)

Brett found her, though—just in time.

In the hospital, he stayed by her bedside for days on end, as though he was afraid she was going to try it again.

She didn’t. She saw the ravaged look in his eyes. She couldn’t do that to him. He couldn’t bear to lose her, too.

So she was released from the hospital, and she started taking medication.

Back then, it was all Elsa could manage just to get out of bed in the mornings, numbly moving through her waking hours doing what is necessary to stay alive: namely, eating and breathing. Not much more than that, most days.

In her early twenties, Elsa had been a runway model, and she’d kept her looks over the years.

But after the tragedy, her dark hair—always kept sleek and chic—grew long and straggly. Her face, preternaturally bare of makeup, became gaunt; her figure dangerously skeletal.

For a while, she honestly thought she was going to die, even if not by her own hand.

Brett and all those therapists were right, though, about her needing to find a new purpose. When she did, she slowly came back. Not back to life. But back.

Dr. Hyland was wrong. There are other options. You can curl up and die, or you can go on living…or you can, as Elsa has, settle on something in between.



Every night when Nick Walsh walks into Grand Central Terminal at rush hour, he has a single objective: getting right back out again, on a northbound train, as quickly as possible.

More than ninety-nine percent of the time, that’s exactly what happens. But once in a while, things go wrong. A car gets struck at a suburban crossing, a tree falls across the tracks, there’s flooding in the Bronx, a power failure, ice…

You never know when you’re going to be stuck here for a while, waiting for service to resume, or forced to rely on a bus or car service with tens of thousands of other stranded commuters.

That’s why, on nights like this, when everything is moving like clockwork, you don’t hang around and thus increase the odds for something to go wrong.

There’s a 6:22 leaving in ten minutes from track twenty-nine, but by the time Nick detours down to lost and found on the lower level, grabs Sadie’s lost toy, and makes it onto the train, there likely won’t be any seats left. He’ll have to wait twenty-three minutes for the next one, and by the time he’s walked to his building, taken his car from the garage, and driven up to the house in Glenhaven Park and back, it’ll be well past nine o’clock.

Well, if things go well in the lost and found, maybe he can still make the 6:22. Better to stand around on a moving train than in the station, right?

Having lied to Lauren earlier about having a late day meeting, he just hopes karma won’t come back to bite him in the ass.

But it just slipped out. He couldn’t help it. He was irritated that she’d been in the neighborhood with Sadie, hadn’t bothered to tell him, then had the nerve to call him up and start ordering him around. She seemed to assume he had nothing better to do in the middle of a workday than go on a scavenger hunt to retrieve something that shouldn’t have been lost in the first place.

Aren’t you being a little hard on Lauren? asks an annoying little voice in the part of his brain reserved for postmarital guilt.

Maybe. But not nearly as hard as she is on me.

When he reaches the small lost and found office, several people are there ahead of him. One, a blond teenage girl about Lucy’s age, is standing at the service window, scrolling on a hot pink iPod, accompanied by an equally blond friend who’s busily texting into her phone. Behind them, a middle-aged businessman impatiently checks both his BlackBerry and his watch.

Taking his place in line, Nick thinks back to what the world was like in the good old days before everyone was plugged in; tries to recall whether people actually interacted with one another in public places.

At forty-five, he’s plenty old enough to remember the pretechnology era, but he’s never given it much thought. It all must have been terribly inconvenient and inefficient—communication, entertainment…

Then again, if you don’t know what you’re missing, you can’t miss it, right?

Nick thinks of his marriage.

Right. Absolutely right. All those years spent stagnating in suburbia, thinking he was content, and he had no clue.

Then he met Beth.

Well—not exactly. He knew Beth. Casually. He’d seen her around town, and on the commuter train. But she didn’t travel in the same circles. Her kids are older than his; in fact, Beth is a few years older than he is…not that she looks it.

He never really knew her, though, until that snowy December night a year and a half ago, when they found themselves sharing a double seat on the late local home after their respective corporate holiday parties.

Glenhaven Park is almost at the end of the line. By the time they reached their stop, the rail car was all but empty. They were both tipsy. Flirting shamelessly.

He’d been too distracted to call Lauren to come pick him up. Beth had her car; she drove him home. It was snowing. Springsteen was on the car radio, singing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” and it reminded him of college, and snowy nights after bars in cars with girls.

He didn’t kiss Beth good night when she dropped him off, but he wanted to. Damn, he wanted to. Out of the blue, he, Nick Walsh, husband and father of three, wanted to kiss a woman who wasn’t his wife.

And suddenly he, Nick Walsh—who had been estranged from his own mother for decades because she’d left his father for another man—got it.