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“Later, Ants.”
I hadn’t exactly been kind to him the last time I saw him, I’d dismissed him. Guilt gnaws at me as I stare into Blake’s vacant office and imagine the horror of finding him lifeless, all the light and playful mischievousness in his beautiful brown eyes gone…forever.
Stifling a sob, I cup my hand over my mouth with grief for Blake, for the life he cut short, and for my husband who’s suffering this very stab a thousand times worse.
“You okay?” Amanda asks.
Wiping the tears away from my eyes, I do my best to tamp down my own pain. I’m here for Amanda, to get her through this. I nod. “Memories. Just thinking of the last time I saw him. It wasn’t here.”
“Good, because I hate this place,” she says, and I follow her past the office, through the living room into Blake’s bedroom.
“I think maintenance has been in. Everything looks picked through. I wouldn’t be surprised if half his shit were on eBay already,” she sniffed. “His Emmy is at my house, thank God.”
“Do you want to place a complaint?”
“I don’t have the energy.” She stands idle, too thin for her tall frame and ghastly pale. When I met Amanda, she’d been full of life, her tactless jokes terrible but her laughter contagious. We were on a high when we met. Lucas had just earned his first SAG award nomination, and Blake had guest-starred on a season of a crime series and won an Emmy. We were all on one edge or the other of thirty. Champagne and money were both flowing, and the red carpet was stretched out as far as the eye could see for both Blake and Lucas. We all looked the part, in both health and heart, we were unimaginably happy. And somewhere in the last few years, we’d lost sight of why. Looking at Amanda now, it feels like it had been a decade ago, but it was as close as yesterday. Her once vibrant auburn hair lay lifeless, piled on top of her head underneath two inches of new growth. Dark circles drown out the shimmer in her light blue eyes, and it’s easy to see she’s been doing the kind of crying that weakens the body but doesn’t heal the soul.
“I can say something to management,” I offer, surveying the ransacked apartment. “Do you have a list of things that are missing?”
She shakes her head. “It’s not worth it. Let’s just get this over with, okay?”
I nod because I can physically identify with her ache and I’m already on the verge of more tears. Amanda pushes past her emotion, pulling a box from a stack next to the wall. I feel like I’m circling in place as I try to muster up the courage to go through a dead man’s possessions.
Amanda reads my thoughts. “It’s okay to dig around. I know it might make you uncomfortable and I can’t thank you enough for helping me. Just pack what you think I might want to look through. I trust your judgment. I’m donating his clothes, and I have someone picking up the furniture. A cleaning service will come after that. We’re mostly here to make sure there’s nothing that could hurt him further, you know?”
“I know.”
Her chin trembles as she speaks. “They’ve already decided he hurt that woman who keeps bringing up his name. They think that’s why he did it. His death being an admission of guilt.”
My mouth goes dry. “What do you think?”
“I think he was too busy sabotaging himself. And I don’t think he would hurt anyone else, not like that.”
I’m at a loss for what to say. Silences with Blake were never comfortable. As far as my perception went, he seemed like a man with a thousand secrets, his personality split between the man he wanted to be and the side of himself he couldn’t fight. He was both tyrant and sweetheart, and you never knew where you stood with him. I’m not sure the man liked me, but I truly believed he loved his ex-wife with his whole tortured heart. I’d witnessed that love firsthand. Adoration clear in his features every time he looked at her or spoke of her.
“Whatever you’re thinking, you can tell me. If his death doesn’t provoke anything else, the least it should do is provoke some honesty. I want so much to say I knew him better than anyone, but I didn’t see this coming. I wonder now if I ever knew him at all.”
“What you knew you loved, and he knew it, Amanda. He knew it. I don’t think I tried to know him enough, but I do know he loved you. That I’m sure of.”
“Thank you,” she whispers.
I don’t have to, but I speak the truth because she deserves to know I don’t think ill of Blake, not in that way. “I don’t think he took part in whatever happened to those women, and I agree he was too hard on himself.”
She opens his nightstand drawer and begins to trash the contents. “You know one of the reasons he asked me for a divorce is because he didn’t want me to suffer for him anymore. He told me when we got married that he felt calm for the first time in his life.”
The words are eerily familiar. “Lucas said something similar to me when we got together.”
“How is he?” She grabs another box and begins to tape it up.
“I wish I knew. He’s just taken on a significant role. I think he’s hiding.”
Amanda pauses with a new box in hand and looks over to me with concern. “That’s not good.”
“I agree, and he won’t listen to me. He’s not ready, but he seems to think it’s the answer.”
“The job is what made him sick. It made him so sick,” she whimpers. “There is no answer. I’ve looked everywhere, his laptop, his emails and at every fucking piece of paper in this apartment. There’s nothing. There’s no reason, no answers. And I still can’t believe he did it sober.”
Curiosity wins my idle tongue.
