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4:11 A.M.
He sat staring at the bottle.
Samara was safe, alive, sleeping in the hospital. Her stalker was dead, his body had been fished out of the river and was now at the morgue.
Michael should be feeling on top of the world.
But he wasn't.
Instead, he had been sitting in his kitchen for the last few hours, his elbows on his knees, staring at a bottle of whisky.
He wanted to drink it so badly.
Although he knew that Samara would be okay, his mind kept spinning with a litany of what-ifs.
What if he hadn't seen Samara in the water and been able to get her out in time for Fin to save her?
What if Brady had stopped him from jumping off the bridge, and by the time they drove down to the bottom of the river it was too late?
What if Dante had realized that Samara still had her phone on her and had thrown it away?
There were too many scenarios where things might not have turned out the way they had.
There were too many ways he could still lose Samara.
This was a time when he should be rejoicing that not only was Samara alive and safe now that her stalker was dead, but they were in love, and nothing was standing in the way of them starting their lives together.
Nothing except this bottle.
This bottle that he couldn’t tear his eyes away from.
After Heidi’s death, when he’d had to drink to dull theguilt enough to function, he’d worked a case much like the one Samara had just lived through. A young woman had been stalked by her ex, he’d been relentless, turning up at her house, vandalizing her car, following her to and from work. Stalking cases were always hard to prove and even harder to get a conviction, but then the guy had made it easy for them, he’d grabbed her at the supermarket parking lot one evening, tied her up, thrown her into the trunk of his car, and driven her back to the house they used to share.
The abduction had been reported, and he and his partner had been called.
It had been eight at night, and he was already drunk.
He’d written the address down wrong.
Written down fifty-three instead of thirty-five.
By the time they realized his mistake, it was too late.
Amy Mack was already dead.
That case had been the catalyst for him quitting his job and quitting drinking. He’d gone cold turkey thinking he was strong enough to resist the urge to drink ever again. He hadn't joined AA, he hadn't even let anyone know just how bad things had gotten with his drinking. His mistake in writing down the street number had been written off as just that—a mistake.
Just like his attitude to his drinking had been a mistake.
He hadn't taken ownership of his problem, he’d just brushed it aside, ascribed it to grief over Heidi’s death, but that had been the coward’s way out.
He was an alcoholic.
What more evidence did he need than the fact that instead of sitting in the hospital at the bedside of the woman he loved watching over her as she slept, he was sitting alone in his house at four in the morning contemplating throwing away seven years of sobriety just to erase—or even dull—the images of Samara going over the side of the bridge and splashing into water fiftyfeet below.
Michael picked up the bottle.
He held it in his hands, enjoying the feel of the smooth glass. Nothing else felt like it, not soda bottles or milk bottles. It was like the glass of a whisky bottle was possessed by what it held inside.
