The Perfect Stranger (Social Media #2)(113)

“That it was Kay?” Elena shrugs. “I hope she didn’t. I hope she never knew what hit her.”

Landry hopes so, too, and yet . . .

Meredith never got to say good-bye.

That her cancer had progressed and was most likely terminal—news Detective Burns shared over the telephone a little while ago, believing it had contributed to Kay’s twisted motive—is irrelevant.

She should have died on her own terms—not on somebody else’s. Some people fear dying, others fear death . . .

Still others fear nothing more than life itself.

Not me, Landry thinks. I’ll take it. Every scary, glorious minute of it.

She looks at her watch. It’s after eight. Rob is landing in about an hour. She didn’t try to talk him out of it when he said he’d be on the next plane home. She told him to hurry.

Landry takes a deep breath, inhaling warm air scented with rain and roses.

Elena slaps her arm. “The mosquitoes are coming out.”

“Yes,” Landry says, “but so are the stars.”

And together, they sit in silence for a while longer, gazing into the darkening sky until the heavens are ablaze with pinpricks of light.





The Day My Life Changed Forever

When the doctor’s receptionist called to say that they had the results, it never dawned on me that it might be bad news.

“Hi, hon,” Janine said—she calls all the patients “hon”—and casually requested that I come by in person this afternoon. She even used just that phrasing, and it was a question, as opposed to a command: “Can you come by the office in person this afternoon?”

Come by.

So breezy. So inconsequential. So . . . so everything this situation was not.

What if I’d told Janine, over the phone, that I was busy this afternoon? Would she have at least hinted that my presence at the office was urgent; that it was, in fact, more than a mere request?

But I wasn’t busy and so there I was, blindsided, numbly staring at the doctor pointing the tip of a ballpoint pen at the left breast on the anatomical diagram.

The doctor kept talking, talking, talking; tapping, tapping, tapping the paper with the pen point to indicate exactly where the cancerous tissue was growing, leaving ominous black ink pockmarks.

I nodded as though I was listening intently, not betraying that every word after “malignancy” has been drowned out by the warning bells clanging in my brain.

I’m going to die, I thought with the absolute certainty of someone trapped on a railroad track, staring helplessly into the glaring roar of an oncoming train. I’m going to be one of those ravaged bald women lying dwarfed in a hospital bed, terrified and exhausted and dying an awful, solitary death . . .

I’d seen that person before, too many times—in the movies, and in real life . . . but I never thought I’d ever actually become that person. Or did I?

Well, yes—you worry, whenever a horrific fate befalls someone else, that it could happen to you. But then you reassure yourself that it won’t, and you push the thought from your head, and you move on.

“Would you like to call someone, Kay?”

Call someone . . .

Would you like to call someone . . .

Unable to process the question, I stared at the doctor.

“A friend, or a family member . . . someone who can come over here and—”

“Oh. No. No, thank you,” I said.

Because back then, in that moment . . .

There was no one. No one at all. No one to call. No friends, no family.

You know what? I thought that was the unluckiest day of my entire life. But really, in the end, it was the luckiest.

Cancer was, ultimately, my greatest gift—because it led me to you, the only friends—the only family—I have ever known.

—Excerpt from Kay’s blog, I’m A-Okay





Read on for a sneak peek

at the next thrilling novel

THE BLACK WIDOW

by New York Times best-selling author

WENDY CORSI STAUB





Prologue

“Some things,” Carmen used to say, “just don’t feel right until after the sun goes down.”

It was true.

Mixed drinks . . .

Bedtime stories . . .

Turning on the television . . .

Putting on pajamas . . .

All much better—more natural—after nightfall, regardless of the hour or season.

There are other things, Alex has since discovered, that can only happen under cover of darkness. Such endeavors are far less appealing than the ones to which Carmen referred. Unfortunately, they’ve become increasingly necessary.

Alex opens the door that leads from the kitchen to the attached garage, aims the key remote at the car and pops the trunk.

It slowly opens wide. The interior bulb sends enough light into the garage so that it’s unnecessary to flip a wall switch and illuminate the overhead bulb.

Not that there are any windows to reveal to the neighbors that someone is up and about at this hour . . .

And not that the crack beneath the closed door is likely wide enough to emit a telltale shaft of light . . .

But still, it’s good to practice discretion. One can’t be too careful.

Alex removes a sturdy shovel from a rack on the side wall. The square metal blade has been scrubbed clean with bleach, not a speck of dirt remaining from the last wee-hour expedition to the remote stretch of woods seventy miles north of this quiet New York City suburb.