The Good Widow_A Novel Read online

  I think about the time we spent asking questions Nick already knew the answers to.

  “But you weren’t honest. You’d already been there.”

  “That’s true. But I never told you I hadn’t been.” He folds his arms across his chest. “I went because I needed to know.”

  “Know what?” I whisper fearfully.

  “Why she’d chosen James over me. Why he’d won.”

  Won? My God. He’s delusional. I cover my hand with my mouth.

  “I followed them to Maui, yes. And then I watched them on their excursions. They were so giddy. And I just kept getting more and more angry. Thinking about you, at home. So oblivious.”

  That word is like a slap across the face. Because I was. Blind to it all. Pushing my stupid cart through Trader Joe’s, trying to pick the perfect fucking milk. Thinking my husband was where he said he was. Having no clue he was swimming with sea turtles with his lover, being trailed by some—

  “And then they decided to drive the road to Hana. I saw them kissing by some store. Dylan was wearing this little dress—one I’d never seen before. That she’d clearly bought for him.”

  “Stop it! Stop it right now!” I yell.

  “No. You need to listen to me.” He holds up the purse. “I’m going to explain!”

  But I don’t want to listen. I don’t want to know. I just need out of this car. I picture Dylan and James having their picnic, saying what would be some of their final words. Had James whispered that he loved her, told her how happy he was that he’d now have the family he’d always wanted? Or had my shadow been in the back of James’s mind, our tattered love still a placeholder in his chest?

  “Once I was in Maui with you, it all made sense. Why they had the accident.”

  Accident? I shake my head, tears rolling down my cheeks.

  “The brakes giving out right when they did—at the cliff where there were no guardrails, where so many other accidents have happened—that was fate. When I pricked a tiny hole in the brake line, I had no way of knowing when or if James would lose control of that Jeep. That was between him and God. Everything happened the way it did because you were meant to be with me.”

  I see James’s smile. His bed head. His lanky body. His sea-glass eyes.

  I glance at Nick’s profile.

  He really doesn’t think he’s responsible for killing them.

  One man dead. Another responsible. I gave my heart to both of them.

  A wave of nausea cascades through me, and I swallow the bile in my throat.

  “What about the pregnancy test?” I whisper. “What did you think when you found that in her purse? Because you didn’t already know, did you?”

  He shakes his head. “That was a surprise. But they’d made a fool of you. Of both of us,” he says. “It worked out as it should. Those two didn’t deserve to bring a baby into this world.”

  “Nick! You can’t mean that!” I stare at him in disbelief. How could someone do something so horrific and not see it?

  How could I have loved a man like that?

  His arms go rigid. His jaw tightens. “I love you, Jacks. Don’t you get it?”

  The sob I’ve been holding in finally escapes my throat. “Why aren’t you upset about what . . . you did to them?”

  “What I did?” He’s yelling now.

  “The brake line didn’t prick itself! You killed them!” I scream, my voice shaking with emotion.

  He shakes his head. “That’s on him.”

  “No!” I yell the word so loudly I don’t recognize the sound of my own voice. I yell at him for taking James. For Dylan. For that baby. “No! No! No! You killed them. Oh my God. How did I ever love you?” I’m sobbing so hard I can barely see the road. Fear and anger are swirling together inside me, and I’m not sure which feeling is more powerful.

  “How can you say that?” He slams his hands on the dashboard. Dylan’s purse falls off of his lap onto the floor.

  A sign. That I need to get out of this car. Now.

  He looks at me, a rage in his eyes I have never seen before. I let out a startled yelp when he punches the radio, his knuckles covered in blood when he draws them back. I wipe my tears. We’re on a high stretch of highway that overlooks the beach, which is several hundred feet below—if I stop now, I’ll need to outrun him while dodging the traffic on the curvy road. I know I won’t get far.

  Suddenly he lunges for the steering wheel, and I turn it sharply, narrowly avoiding an oncoming car. “What are you doing?” I scream.

  “Why couldn’t you just love me? Why doesn’t anyone love me the way they’re supposed to?”

  He gives me a long look that I can’t read, then grabs the wheel before I can stop him. He yanks it, and I fight to regain control, but he’s too strong. I scream as we slew off the road, the car smashing through the guardrail and sailing toward the sharp rocks that separate the canyon from the ocean.

  In the next strange moment of sudden silence, I think about James—the day he proposed. The goofy grin on his face as he waited for me to answer. I picture my sister, the tears glistening in her eyes when I held up my college diploma. I see my parents on my wedding day, smiling widely through their apprehension, their love for me stronger than their fear I might be making a mistake. I listen to Nick’s screams bleeding into my own and realize that no one will ever know the truth—that he killed James and Dylan. That we are both going to die with his secrets and his lies.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  JACKS—AFTER

  The first thing I hear is an incessant beeping sound.

  Ding. Ding. Ding.

  Where am I?

  Ding. Ding. Ding.

  My foggy mind tries to take inventory of my body. There is pain. So much of it. Everywhere. In my legs. My arms. My chest. Especially in my head. I try to open my eyes, but they won’t cooperate.

  “Her eyelids just fluttered! Call the nurse!” I hear my mom’s voice, more high pitched than normal, and feel someone squeeze my fingers. “Jacks, can you hear me?”

  Yes, I want to say. I can hear you, Mom. But my mouth won’t open. I want to tell her I can hear the tears in her throat. She’s been crying.

  Where am I?

  “Doctor, she’s trying to say something!” It’s my sister’s shaking voice now, and the urgency in it gives me the push I need to force my eyes open. Beth is by my side—dark shadows under her eyes. My mom’s are swollen and puffy. Dad’s are filled with relief. He smiles at me.

  I look around, my pulse quickening. I see monitors. An IV drip attached to my arm. A thin hospital gown covering me. A cast on one leg. A scratchy sheet rubbing the other. I try to move, but the pain is too severe. I try to talk, but no words will come.

  A man with thinning gray hair rushes in. “I’m Dr. Turner.” A nurse follows him, and he says something about checking my vitals. They start to examine me, flashing lights in my eyes, checking my pulse, looking inside my mouth. They ask me questions that I struggle to answer, not because I don’t know what my name is or what year it is, but because my mouth is so dry. The nurse hands me a cup of water and tells me to sip it slowly. Finally Dr. Turner pulls up a stool, gives me a sympathetic smile, and asks me what I remember.

  I can feel a memory sitting in the periphery of my mind, waiting for me to grab it. I think hard. Force myself to recall what happened. What brought me here.

  I close my eyes, and it comes to me like an electric shock.

  Nick. The lack of remorse. The refusal to accept what he’d done. His ambivalence. My rage. His rage. The fight for the steering wheel.

  “A car acc—”

  I start to say accident, but stop to correct it to crash. Because it wasn’t an accident at all. Just like James’s wasn’t. Tears stream down my cheeks at the horror of what’s happened—the memory of Nick’s words, his justifications—hitting me all over again. I fell in love with the man who killed my husband. James.

  He’s gone. Oh my God. It feels like the wound has been torn open all ov
er again. As if he’s been ripped from me all over again.

  Beth rushes over and wipes my tears, having no idea how much pain I’m actually in. What’s really happened.

  Dr. Turner continues. “You are at Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach. You have several lacerations from the impact,” he says, giving me a moment. I reach up and feel a bandage around my head. “We had to put eleven stitches in your scalp and three over your right eye, so you probably have a pretty nasty headache.” The nurse comes over and adjusts my IV. “You’ve been unconscious for almost twenty-four hours.”

  Almost a full day? It feels like I was in the car just moments ago. I can still hear his voice.

  “On a scale of one to ten—ten being unbearable—how much pain are you in?”

  Emotionally or physically?

  “Five,” I finally say, choosing the first number that comes to mind. How could I explain that the pain in my heart is far worse than the one in my body? I’d give that pain a fifteen.

  “Janet just gave you a dose of Percocet,” he says, nodding at the nurse. “So you should feel relief very soon.”

  Will I?

  “You also broke your leg,” the doctor continues. “In two places.” He taps the cast just below my knee and also by my shin.

  “You’re lucky to be alive.” Beth says, squeezing my hand.

  “Thank God,” my mom sobs. “First James and his terrible accident, and then you. When I got the call, I was outside of my own body, thinking I could not lose you, my baby. Thank God. Thank God.” My mom presses her face into my chest, and I wince from the pain, but don’t let her know how much it hurts.

  “The police asked to be called when you’re feeling up to it. They have a few questions for you,” the doctor says.

  I feel the rush of the car swerving out of its lane, my head slamming against the window.

  The police.

  The last time I talked to two officers, they told me my husband was never coming home because he’d died in a car crash. And now they wanted to talk to me about my car crash. But there was so much more to tell them.

  The ID, the purse, Nick.

  “How is Nick?” I find my sister’s eyes, and they tell me the answer I both feared and hoped for.

  Beth and my parents exchange a look, and the doctor and nurse silently leave the room. Beth is still holding my hand, gripping it harder as she talks. “He was ejected from the car. He didn’t make it,” she says softly.

  “Nick is dead?” I ask, needing to hear it again. To be sure.

  “Yes, I’m so sorry.” Beth says, not realizing my tears are flowing faster and harder not because I’m sad, but because I’m relieved.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  JACKS—AFTER

  A month later, the sound of Nick’s screams as we flew over the cliff aren’t quite as deafening. I don’t see the flash of the guardrail every time I close my eyes. I don’t remember my head hitting the driver’s-side window each night when I lay it on my pillow. The memories of the crash have subsided slightly.

  But the vivid details of Nick’s words, those memories—they could live with me forever.

  Beth was horrified when I told her the story in the hospital—then enraged. She said she would’ve killed him if he hadn’t already been dead.

  “You knew something wasn’t right with him. You tried to tell me,” I said to her.

  “I was being protective, but I had no idea what he was capable of. My God. No one could have known that.”

  Then I told her what I couldn’t reconcile no matter how many times the thought passed through my mind. “He said he did it for me—that he killed them for me,” I said. “How am I supposed to live with that?” I whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Beth said. “I wish I did, but I don’t. But I will be here for you as we figure it out.”

  “Why couldn’t I see it?” I blinked through my tears. “Am I that much of an idiot?”

  “No, you were mourning James.”

  “Who was dead because of Nick! I wish I had made different choices—if I hadn’t ruined things with James, he would still be here.”

  “Jacks . . .” She trailed off, the skin between her eyes gathering as she thought. “At some point you’re going to have to let yourself off the hook.”

  “I can’t do that.” I said. “James is dead because of me.”

  “I could never pretend to understand what you’re going through, but I can tell you this—it is not your fault. And hopefully, after some time, you’ll see that—that you weren’t in control of what happened. That you didn’t make James have an affair. Or make Nick do what he did,” Beth said, her eyes filling with tears.

  I shook my head gingerly. “No, you don’t understand. I deserve this. To live with what I’ve caused.” I rolled over, my back to her, and cried silently until I fell asleep.

  And now, thirty days later, I’m still working to believe what Beth said. Intellectually, I understand I didn’t kill anyone. But my actions started a ripple effect that ended with three people dead. My therapist tells me if I stop blaming myself, if I stop being mad at myself, that I will have to deal with the real pain. The real loss. And that’s what I’m hiding from. But my therapist also says that I will come to terms with what’s happened—with her help, but also at my own pace. And that’s okay. She helped me talk to the police about what happened. She sat with me while I recounted the story for what I hoped would be the last time for a while. And she listened to me sob hysterically after they ended their investigation and told me that, after talking with Briana and some of Nick’s coworkers, and looking at flight records and talking with people in Maui, that Nick had, in fact, been there during the exact dates Dylan and James were. And, although they couldn’t prove he’d pricked that brake line of the Jeep, they believed he had.

  I took a leave of absence from work. And I’m in the process of putting my house on the market. My therapist also warned me not to undergo too much change at once, but I’ve found that it’s helped me take my mind off things—at least a little bit. And she does agree a fresh start will be good for me.

  I’m searching James’s desk for some paperwork the real estate agent needs when I see it.

  The heart-shaped tin.

  It holds our letters. The ones James and I wrote to each other in the beginning of our relationship. The ones I couldn’t find.

  I thought it was gone.

  I slowly remove the lid. I exhale when I see James’s messy handwriting jumping off the pages. “I wonder why he had these?” I say to myself as I read the one on the top of the stack—the first note he ever sent me, when his love for me radiated off the page in deep waves, making me laugh and cry at the same time.

  Jacks,

  I should start this letter by telling you that you’re like a fine wine—you know, because of how we met. But you’d just call my bullshit, I know it. So I’ll tell you something else, something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since that day. You’re unlike anyone I’ve ever met, and you are going to change me in amazing ways. I can’t wait to see what happens next with us. And yes, I am writing US, even after such a short time together. Because there’s no going back to my lonely Lucky Charms life now. The only life I want is the one with you in it.

  I feel a warmth run through my body, realizing he had read this one recently too. Had he sought these letters out to dispose of them as he began his new life with Dylan? Or had he been rethinking his choices? Rethinking us—his life with me in it?

  I’ll never know for sure. But I’m choosing to believe he knew we had simply lost our way, that our love wasn’t the kind to disappear. Like the sun behind a cloud, it would still peek out from time to time.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing The Good Widow was an amazing experience. (And we aren’t just talking about the research trip we took to Maui while crafting it!) Suspense is something we’ve been wanting to write for a long time. And we are incredibly thankful to Danielle Marshall at Lake Union for giving us
the opportunity to spread our wings with something new. And Dennelle Catlett, your publicity support has been amazing. And Kathleen Zrelak at Goldberg McDuffie—you are always a huge cheerleader. And to our editor, Tiffany Yates Martin—your smart observations were spot on and made this book better than we could have imagined! Thanks to everyone at Amazon Publishing for making us feel special.

  Elisabeth Weed! Your unwavering belief buoys us. Your notes on this novel made it shine, and as always, you steered our career in the right direction. Thank you for all of your awesomeness. Dana Murphy—we are so appreciative of everything you do!

  To the wonderful bloggers and reviewers who tirelessly champion books and literacy in general—we hope you realize the tremendous positive effect you have on authors and readers alike. Thanks to each and every one of you. You are making a difference. And a special shout-out to Andrea Katz for being one of our earliest readers. Your feedback was invaluable.

  And of course, we can’t forget you—the readers. The ones who generously read our novels. We hope you come with us as we try something new. We are nothing without each and every one of you. Thank you!

  The island of Maui is one of our favorite places in the world. We’ve vacationed together with our families, and when we took the trip to Maui and drove the road to Hana, we didn’t do it just for the fruity cocktails and gorgeous beaches. We wanted to make sure we got everything exactly right. Thank you to the lovely Hawaiian people who helped inspire this book.

  To our friends and family—you are the best! Thank you for attending our book events and listening to the same stories dozens of times. We promise to come up with some new material soon!

  To our husbands, Mike and Matt—you have both been so patient, especially when we tell you we want to book a research trip to Hawaii two weeks before we do it. (Oops.) Now is probably the time to tell you the next book is set in Mexico . . . You let us ride out this dream, and for that, we are forever grateful. We love you guys.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Photo © 2016 Debbie Friedrich