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“Relax! I thought you might have been with some guy, that’s all. You told me you were in a bar, you didn’t know where exactly. You said you’d done something bad and you didn’t want to go home yet.” She laughs again, but I wince and my heart misses a beat or two.
“God, no. Just like you said, I got drunk, June, no big deal. I’m paying for it.” I laugh. I could tell her,I went to see Isabelle and we had a big fight.But my old friend, the old feeling of doom, gives my stomach a sharp twist. I take a sip of the coffee, try to laugh but end up coughing and sending splatters all over my computer screen.
“So if it wasn’t a guy, what was it? What did you do that wasreallybad?” She smiles, arms crossed over her chest.
“Nothing,” I say, too quickly, wiping my monitor with the edge of my sleeve pulled over my hand. I laugh, a cackle of noise. “I just wanted a night out by myself! I’d had a pretty rough day. I was upset about Ryan, you know that. I can’t tell Luis about Ryan. I just ended up…Okay, fine, I drank too much. What are you going to do, arrest me?”
She tilts her head at me. “Oh, okay. We don’t have to keep talking about this if you don’t want to. I should go, we both have work to do.” She gets up.
“Thank you, June, for covering for me. I mean that. I owe you one.”
“That’s okay,” she says. “It’s what friends are for, right?”
It’s the first of two final year math exams for freshmen. I walk down the middle of the room and pass out the papers, then I sit at the front desk and spend two hours trying not to think.
When it’s over, I gather the tests and take them back to my office. June pops her head in asking if I want to go to lunch. I tell her I’m busy, but thank you. I point at the pile of exams and mutter something about having lunch at my desk. “Thank you very much, June,” I say again, because I just don’t have a lot of buffer right now. I can’t afford to put anyone offside, June least of all. I didn’t bring lunch, that goes without saying. I should go downstairs to the cafeteria later and grab a sandwich.
I spend the next two hours marking. It’s easy work, if a little time-consuming, but it’s what I need right now and I’m lost in it when my phone rings, making me jump.
And I know, I just know, my body knows, that finally this is the call I’ve been dreading all day and frankly by now it’s almost a relief.
“Luis?” I try to sound normal and I can’t remember what that sounds like so it comes out forced and overly cheery.
There’s silence on the other end, and I’m about to ask if he’s there, when I hear him take a ragged breath, the sound you make after you’ve been sobbing your heart out and it’s finally over.
“What’s wrong?” I ask. What I really want to say is,I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.No, I’m not sorry. I don’t know what I want to say anymore but he speaks before me.
“She’s dead. Isabelle is dead.”
My heart leaps in my throat. I sit up. “Are you sure?” Then I realize the wrongness of my question and add, “We saw her only last Friday night, how could she bedead?”
“The police called me. She was found this morning. At her house.”
“I can’t believe it. Did they say what happened to her?”
“Not yet. Just that she was found dead this morning in her house.”
“But I don’t understand!” I’m on my feet now. I’m almost shouting. “How can she be dead?”
“I don’t know!”
“When they did call?”
“An hour ago.”
An hour ago. He has waited for an hour before telling me. There’s the beep of another call in my ear but I ignore it.
He sighs, a beat of silence passes between us. I wait.
“The police are coming over, they want to ask me a few questions. That’s what they said.”
“What questions?”
“I don’t know! Jesus, Anna! Are you listening to me? They’re probably talking to everyone who knew her. Her colleagues. Other artists who worked with her. Her friends!”
Her lovers?“Oh my god, this is awful.”
I sit down again. Do the police even know they were lovers? Then suddenly it occurs to me that maybe Luis didn’t even know she was pregnant. I try to remember what Isabelle said to me last night.I’m carrying his child…But did she say she’d told Luis? Maybe she didn’t. Maybe the police don’t have to find out about any of that.
