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Samantha didn’t want to dignify his childishness with an answer, so she pursed her lips and kept silent.
No, Cindy had not helped her, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Over and over Cindy had tried to fix her up with men. Nice men, handsome men, Christian men, but Samantha wasn’t interested.
Since the day Brent had left, the plan had always been to get sober and get him back. She now knew that that wasn’t realistic. Too much time had passed. Brent hated her, was disgusted by her. He’d probably fallen for someone else by now.
It wasn’t going to happen.
But no one had convinced her heart of that yet.
Chapter 4
It was too dark tolook for bloodstains, but Samantha tried it anyway. She shined her phone’s flashlight at the street, the sidewalk, and the dead leaf-covered lawn, but she saw no clues.
She went slowly up the steps, bending over to study the concrete. Then she crept her way up the stairs to her apartment door, examining the banister, the floor, the walls.
Nothing.
Was she really going to have to live with this? Was she going to die without finding out what had happened last night?
Maybe. And maybe that was a good thing. Maybe this would be enough to scare her straight.
She’d lost count of how many times she’d fallen to her knees before her savior and vowed to never touch the booze again. And she’d meant it with every cell of her body. And then she’d gone days without a drop.
But she always went back. And so now, every time she decided to quit, she had a little less faith that she could do it.
But maybe this was what it would take. She never wanted to be in this situation again, trying to solve a scary mystery while not even being able to think straight, spending all day in a law firm worried that the police were going to come busting in and take her away.
She unlocked her apartment door, found a dish towel, wet it, and went back out into the hallway to scrub the single smudge off the wall. It told her no more than it had that morning.
Morning. It seemed so long ago now.
With the wall and doorknob cleaner, she went back into her apartment and dropped the towel into the trash. Then she stripped her bed clean and carried her bedding and her coat to the basement laundry. She couldn’t afford to throw out her sheets, and she liked that coat. It wasn’t even that warm, but it was long and tan and nondescript, and it made her feel invisible.
Back in her apartment, she saw the bottle of wine on the sideboard and was sorely tempted. But she walked by it and into her bedroom, where she made her bed with fresh sheets so threadbare they were nearly transparent. She needed new sheets, but that was pretty far down on her list of priorities. Winter was coming. She would need to pay for heat soon.
She climbed into her bed, and the cool sheets gave her cold comfort. She opened her Bible to the same old passage. She’d underlined it and highlighted it so many times that she’d needed to reinforce that part of the page with transparent tape. Now, when she wet the words with her tears, they just slid off the page—an unexpected advantage to the layer of plastic.
