The Lion's Den (Faraway Book 2) (2 page)

Brad let go and I stayed, watching Liv, feeling safe in her presence. She would protect me from whatever he knew.

Brad went to the bathroom, and I continued to stare out the doorway as the rotting sense of death rose up inside me. I swallowed hard to try to force it back down, but it was there and wouldn’t be ignored.

I e-mailed the colonel. There was no subject and nothing in it.

Chief Vincent Pratt

I USUALLY DIDN’T CHECK FOR
an e-mail while I was on duty. She was here with me most weekday mornings, but today was Sunday. She was home with her family, and I was working. There was no nine-to-five for police officers. Not even the chief.

So I looked. I knew there wouldn’t be a new one, but when I missed her, I’d read the old e-mails, anything to feel closer to her, to have her tell me something. She wrote me every night before she fell asleep in her husband’s bed.

Her bold-faced address at the top of my inbox shot adrenalin through me like electricity through a wire until I saw there was no subject. I leaned my arms on my desk with my phone in my hands, holding my breath as I opened it.

There was no content.

The silence in the station surrounded me until the air conditioner turned on and blew cold air over me from the vent above. The rule I never thought would come up, the one that I was sure we’d never need, had been invoked. I went back to my inbox, hoping for another e-mail explaining that she’d sent the first one by mistake, but Meredith Walsh never made mistakes. I was her only one.

The day she read her extensive list of rules to me, I’d thought she was paranoid, but I didn’t care. I would follow her rules if she needed me to. No calling, no texting, and no using her name. She was the most thorough person I’d ever met. I’d laughed at her as she’d listed her demands one by one so seriously but without any clothes on. I wasn’t allowed to fall in love with her, but even then, I knew I’d already broken that one. And this one: If I ever send you an e-mail with no subject line and nothing in it, you are to delete your account immediately and NOT contact me. I wanted to break now. The fact that she was married to another man was only tolerable because I could see her almost every day. This e-mail, this direction to stop contacting her, choked me with jealousy. Even though I knew it was to protect her children, not Brad Walsh, I still couldn’t stop the anger at the helplessness welling up inside of me.

There’d been a few months she hadn’t spoken to me. They’d been the worst of my life—worse than boot camp, the police academy, and Kuwait. Worse than anything, and now, it was going to begin again. I had no choice but to wait for word from her.

I scrolled down my inbox. For so long these e-mails had been the only piece of her I was allowed to have. For almost a year, I had only these words and two days a month to see her. They were our secret that taught me what it felt like to live, and now I couldn’t bear to delete them. I stared at the screen. Every e-mail in the account was from Meredith. She was the only one with the address. No one else in the world knew it existed, just like our relationship.

I searched for the ones where she’d told me she loved me. It took forever for her to believe we
could
love each other and that love could be a component of an affair. But I’d loved her before I’d had an affair with her. I’d loved her the first time I’d met her.

I found the one she’d sent last Thursday morning before she’d come to work. I’d read it, and instead of working, I wanted to drive her somewhere, anywhere we could be alone. But what Meredith yearned for was to not have to be alone. The subject of the e-mail was “I always dream of you.”

I had a dream last night we were out to dinner and everyone in town stopped by our table to say hi. You were wearing the Phillies T-shirt, which forced me to touch you the first time. Yes, I think it was the shirt that caused this. After dinner, we met John and Jenna for drinks.

We were real.

The frustration I’d felt when I’d first read the e-mail came flooding back. She insisted she’d never divorce her husband and that we’d never do things other couples did. It killed her that our relationship only existed in the dark, but Meredith had created the impossible situation.

I scrolled up to my reply.

We are real. We’re just different. You are a huge part of my life. Whether the rest of the town knows it or not. I love you.

I searched through the list of e-mails I couldn’t bear to lose and considered printing some out or forwarding them to my personal account, but Meredith would kill me. I found account preferences and selected Delete Account and All Data.

There was nothing left to do but wait for her. A forbidden text, a Facebook message, both of which I knew would never come. If she sent this e-mail, her husband knew something or suspected something. She wouldn’t risk a shred of evidence of our relationship being found. I’d spend every minute looking for a sign until I heard from her. I’d check the windshield of my car for a handwritten note. I’d watch the door to the police station each time it opened, hoping she’d found an excuse to come in on her day off. I knew I’d drive by her house while out on patrol today, anything to catch a glimpse of her.

I wouldn’t make it through the night without hearing from her. Not tonight. Not any night.

I pulled the pot off the burner and put my cup directly in the flow of coffee. I couldn’t wait for the archaic machine to finish brewing the whole pot. I hadn’t spoken with Meredith, and I hadn’t slept a minute last night. I’d driven by her house twice yesterday, but the house was empty. Even after dark, no lights were on. It was as if she’d disappeared.

She’ll be here soon.

Swim practice started early. Her son’s age group was at eight thirty. She’d be here. She was going to walk through the door, and I already had an excuse ready for why I needed to talk to her in my office with the door shut.

I replaced my mug with the coffee pot and tried to calm down. This was yet another rule we were going to break, because I wasn’t ever going through a night like last night again. Daniels came in and grabbed a cup off the counter. One of the cups Meredith had bought for us.

“Hey, Chief. Did you hear about Meredith?”

My chest tightened, trapping the air inside of me, where it surrounded my heart like a vise. “No. Hear what?”

Daniels moved around like nothing was a big deal. Like Meredith hadn’t sent a warning that her husband knew we were having an affair. “She fell at her house. I just saw Jack from the Rescue Squad at Wawa. He said they transported her yesterday. I was hoping she called out sick. That you heard something.”

“No calls.” I wasn’t sure if I was speaking aloud. “Is she okay?”

“Unresponsive.”

Without a word, I put my cup down and walked out of the station.

When I turned off Main Street, I switched on my siren and lights and sped to the hospital, breaking every rule. Not caring. It wasn’t going to matter after I killed Brad Walsh.

Brad Walsh

LIV WAS SO TIRED SHE
couldn’t walk. None of us could. I told James he had to man up because I couldn’t carry them both, but he looked like a little boy. My back throbbed as I tried to fit Liv in behind the driver’s seat of my car that wasn’t meant to transport children. I should have brought Meredith’s.

Her name sent a pain from one side of my head to the other. Meredith.

How did this happen?

Sixteen hours, and she still hadn’t woken up.

What if she never wakes up?

The kids had cried nonstop the first hour until I’d convinced them she’d be fine. But when she didn’t wake up, I just wanted them to go to sleep, too. Their sad eyes churned the guilt like acid in my stomach. She had to wake up. She had to come back.

Both Liv and James were asleep before I exited the parking lot. I’d just turned off the radio and was pulling my phone from my pocket when a police car flew by with its lights on. Whoever was driving must have been going a hundred miles an hour. I watched in the rearview mirror as the car careened into the emergency entrance’s parking lot.

Maybe a cop’s been hurt.

I had my own problems to worry about. I glanced at the kids in the back seat. The nurses had been good to us. By eight last night, the kids had started complaining they were hungry, and I just wanted them to shut up. I wanted their mother to wake up and shut them up. “Look around, take note of where we are,” I’d snapped at them. I was a dick. Taking care of them was not my job. Meredith did that, but now she wouldn’t wake the fuck up. If I didn’t know better, I would have sworn it was just to spite me. But that was crazy. She might have hated me. Even enough to leave me one day, but she’d never hurt the kids.

One at a time, I carried my children to their rooms and placed them in their beds. I kissed their foreheads and told them I loved them. Meredith always tucked them in. But today was different. They were going to bed at eight
A.M.
instead of eight
P.M.
, and I was the only one home. I needed to sleep myself. The exhaustion descended upon my body. Every step was an effort I could barely expend. The nagging feeling wouldn’t go away, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I had some answers. Some answers as to how we ended up here, with Meredith unconscious in the hospital.

I walked through the house. The front door was still unlocked from the day before. Once the paramedics had taken Meredith, the kids and I closed the door and ran to the car to follow her. I locked it. I needed to be alone with her things. Her phone lay at the bottom of the steps next to the plant she fought so hard to keep alive. I bent over, grabbed the phone, and paused at the plant’s hearty green leaves. It was finally thriving, and so was Meredith. It’d taken her years to accept her life here, and she was finally settling in.

The phone had flown past me when she’d hit her head. I’d wanted her to face me, but I’d also wanted the phone. I wanted to know what the hell was going on with my wife. Two months ago, I’d seen the strange text message to Jenna. But Jenna was her best friend, and they were always talking in some code.

Meredith: This is me. Saying the word.

Jenna: Nibac.

I told myself they were trivial.

I didn’t understand a word of it. It meant nothing. But it had tormented me. Something changed with Meredith. A quiet peace had descended upon my house, upon my marriage, and I wasn’t stupid enough to take credit for it.

I traced the lock pattern with my finger and opened her world captured in her phone. I started with the texts. The ones I’d seen to Jenna were missing, making me wonder for a second if I’d fabricated them. I went through every message. Practice times, playdates, birthday parties, babysitting, talent show . . . They were all about the kids. Jenna’s were the only entertainment, and most of her texts were comments about the pain of motherhood. Many of the names I barely recognized. Our children’s lives were Meredith’s domain.

I exited the texts and proceeded to invade every app on her phone, starting with the photos. There were tons of them. Liv and James were in almost every single one. Some I recognized she’d sent to me when I was away on business and she knew the kids would want me to see whatever they were accomplishing at that moment. The photos were useless.