Page 31 of Chasing the Other Woman

He makes a notation on his clipboard. I suspect it says, “Brooks is an idiot,” but I have no desire to really find out.

Across the warehouse, Luci’s voice rises.

“…should even have that,” she hisses.

She’s talking to Tony, who answers too low for me to catch. His posture’s screaming irritated. Shoulders tight with his phone clutched in his hand.

“I don’t care,” Luci says. “Just don’t mess it up.”

Tony looks toward me.

Luci’s gaze follows his and her face goes tight.

For a second, that old suspicion stirs. Tony. His phone. How many times has he texted Sam since she’s been gone? Is she answering his texts? His calls? Is he offering her his shoulder to cry on?

“Whatever you’re thinking,” Hershel begins, “I’d wager money that you’re wrong.”

I push away from the wall. “Let’s get going. Nothing’s going to get done if we sit here and keep avoiding the storm.”

And if I have to stand here and think about how wrong everything seems without Sam here, I’ll lose my mind.

If the team hadn’t noticed Sam’s absence before, they do now.

Someone asks where the laminated county grid maps are, and then we all have to spend precious minutes figuring out where they are.

The urge to get mad at someone and tell them that Sam would know exactly where they are is right there, but the only person to snap at would be me.

When we’re trying to figure out which route is best, everyone’s thinking it but no one is saying it: Sam would have had this figured out in five minutes flat.

Well, no one but Hershel.

“She’d probably tell us to do whatever we have to do to avoid the county roads because the rain last night probably washed out anything lying low.”

By 2 p.m., the system starts organizing faster than we expected. People are moving, getting ready to roll.

And all I want to do is drive straight to Sam. I check my phone again as if she might magically decide to call me.

She hasn’t.

A producer sticks his head in and tells me he needs the topography maps. Without thinking I say, “They’re in Sam’s files.”

No one says anything because likely they value their jobs.

I move toward Sam’s desk in the warehouse before anyone has a chance to say anything. It’s exactly like she left it. Handwritten notes all over the desk. Her work laptop closed but connected to the charger. A dirty mug that had likely been left here right before everything went south. More so than it already was.

I open the bottom drawer, the big one where she usually kept her handbag. It irritates me that it’s not in there now, but I know she usually kept maps in the bottom of the drawer.

I curse as I fail to find the maps, instead finding notebooks filled with notes. I pull the top one out, thinking perhaps it may have some sort of organization system tucked inside that may give me a clue as to where the maps are kept.

As I pull the notebook out, something slips from the pages and lands facedown on the floor. At first, all I see is the glossy back of a photograph. There’s a faint processing mark printed along one edge.

I turn the photo over and sit back hard on my heels, feeling like someone has punched the air out of me. The warehouse sounds fade around me until all I can hear is the blood rushing toward my ears.

Our baby. That first ultrasound photo where it looks like nothing and everything all at once.

I remember the day we got this. Sam was lying on the exam table, pretending not to be nervous in that way she always does. But she was gripping my hand hard enough to bruise. I remember joking that if she was gripping my hand this hard now, there’d be nothing left of my hand when she was in labor.

The memory that comes next is one I wish I could scrub from my brain.