The Marriage Lie(78)

Which means...what? Will is dead? As furious as I am at the idea he’d choose money over me, I don’t want to believe it. What about the notes, the ones apologizing and warning me to stop snooping into his past? If Corban is behind the texts, is he behind the notes, too?

I slump my shoulder against the window, the day crashing over me all over again in a sickening wave. I feel it coming. The familiar little tickle in my lungs, a burning at the edges of my eyes, that tightening deep in my throat. All signals I’m on the knife-edge of an impending meltdown.

When the notes and the texts began, I chose to believe Will was on the other end. I needed to believe it. When faced with the reality of a plane and a charred cornfield, I chose to look the other way, just like I did in our marriage. So Will didn’t like to talk about his past. So there were some holes in his stories. Whenever an incongruity would arise, I convinced myself it was a silly mistake, told myself to overlook it. What mattered, I always thought, was our present.

Only, how can you love a person you don’t really know?

The answer breeds and multiplies in my gut, chomping away at the grief, eating it whole and belching it back up in a spiky ball of anger—not just at Will’s betrayal but more at myself for falling for it.

Love and sacrifice. Honesty. Trust. We see what we want to see. We gather information, use it or ignore it to shape our own beliefs, to make our own choices, to withhold love or to give it freely.

I toss the phone onto the passenger’s seat and shove my car into gear, pointing it back toward the highway.

My husband is dead.

My heart is broken.

My eyes are wide-open now.

*

Despite rush-hour traffic, I make it back to Little Five Points in under an hour. By now it’s closing in on seven, and the sky has faded to a pinkish purple.

Inside, the record store is empty, save for the pretty girl behind the counter. She’s counting out money and, when she hears the bell jangle on the door, holds up a finger. I don’t wait, shoving through the bright yellow door before she can look up from her pile.

I find Zeke exactly where I left him, still clacking away on his keyboard in the cluttered back room.

“You’re back,” he says without looking away from his monitor.

I drop my cell onto his desk. “You missed the tracker.”

“No, I saw it.” He looks up, then rears his head back at my tousled hair and disheveled blouse, my right sleeve ripped in two places. “What the hell happened to you?”

“The tracker happened to me. It would have been helpful if you’d told me it was there.”

“You didn’t ask.”

I can’t swallow the sigh that sneaks up my throat. “Can you take it off now, please? And I have another number I need you to trace. It’s the 678 number at the top of my text app.”

Zeke swipes a finger over the screen, pulls up the messages. There have been four more since the first two, sinister texts promising pain and death if I don’t cough up the money. “That’s seriously messed up.”

“Tell me about it. I was hoping you could tell me who sent them.”

“This dude routed the messages through a company site, too, but—” He taps a couple of buttons on the phone and frowns. “Huh. That’s weird. Hang on, this may take me a minute.”

“While you’re at it, is there anything else suspicious or sneaky on there I should know about?”

He digs a charger out of the crate by his feet and holds it out to me. “Throw all your other chargers away, or better yet, bring ’em to me. I’m always in the market for sniffers.”

I don’t know what a sniffer is, but I drop the charger in my bag anyway.

He returns to my phone, swiping a finger across the screen. “How tight you need this thing to be?”

“Pretend it’s your girlfriend’s phone.”

His eyes gleam, and he gestures to the chair behind me. “Have a seat. You’re gonna be here awhile.”





27

Over the ravioli special at Cafe Intermezzo in Midtown, I fill Evan in on the latest developments. How Zeke traced the phone to a house in Vinings where I found Corban Hayes. How I then hightailed it back to Zeke, who took the tracker off my phone as well as an app that was logging my call and text history. How when I left he was still working his magic on the 678 number, the one that sent the two threats.

“For some reason, it’s harder than the other one to trace. Zeke promised to call as soon as he cracked it.”

Evan is still in his work suit, an immaculate pinstripe that has to have been custom-made for his extra-long frame, but his jacket is draped over the back of his chair, his collar is loosened, and his sleeves are shoved up his long arms. Together with his mountain-man beard, the effect would be ruggedly charming if it weren’t for his eyes, drooping with sorrow at the edges.

“But this other number,” he says, reaching a long arm over the table to hand me back my phone, “the blocked one you thought was Will, Zeke traced it to Corban Hayes?”

“No. Zeke traced it to the address of a McMansion in Vinings. But when I looked through the back window, Corban Hayes was who I saw.”

Evan’s brows blow skyward. “You looked through the back window? Have you gone completely insane?”

“Funny you should ask that, because yes. I have gone insane. Either that, or I’m being haunted by my dead husband. Take your pick.”