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“Well, when you put it that way...”
“My guess is Josh and Abby had a good relationship.” Rachel swirled the coffee around in her mug. “Fun and fairly positive for both of them. But then it got serious, and the wedding got closer. They started fighting then one day Abby looked at the guy she was about to tie herself to for life and nothing felt right.”
“Possibly.”
“I’ve heard she was a bit free-spirited, so the idea of marriage might have spooked her,” Rachel suggested.
That seemed to be the party line even though it didn’t explain Abby’s choice to run away without saying a word. Then there was thetwo dead wivesproblem, an issue Rachel might not even know about, so Elisa tried to tiptoe around the topic. “His history with problematic relationships goes deeper than just Abby.”
“That’s the most diplomatic way I’ve ever heard of saying his first wife died in a freak accident.”
Wives. Plural.
“Has he talked with you about . . .” Elisa’s mind clicked off. She had no idea how to broach the subject of a secret dead wife.
“What?”
Elisa wasn’t quite ready to ruin Rachel’s mood or issue an ominous warning. She just didn’t have enough information to support her concerns about Josh. What she had looked pretty bad, or she thought so. The police didn’t even blink at a guy with dead women littered throughout his history... or they didn’t know everything. She wasn’t sure what that Detective Burroughs hid in an attempt to savepoorJosh from being embarrassed after Candace’s accident.
Elisa went with the benign. “I just miss Abby.”
Rachel hummed as she took another sip. “That’s not what you were going to say.”
“I’m sure Josh is pissed off at me.” It counted as a conversation pivot, of sorts. Elisa knew the answer but tested anyway.
“He’s... confused. He views you as a sister and can’t understand why you don’t believe him about Abby.” Rachel shook her head. “Look, I get it.”
“That makes one of us.”
All the amusement left Rachel’s face. She slid the mug onto the table and sat there, as if whatever she planned to say took some effort.
A minute or two ticked by before Rachel started talking again. “My sister died when I was a kid.”
Elisa jerked and almost dropped her coffee. “Oh, wow. Rachel, I’m so sorry.”
“Do you have any siblings?”
Elisa wished she did. She often wondered if they made a mistake, not giving Nathan a sister or brother. “No. I’m an only child raised by a single mom.”
Rachel looked around the bustling café. No one sat close, and no one seemed to be listening in. The guy with the laptop a few tables away glared at his screen but kept typing.
“Well, it was a long time ago. I was the youngest and clearly not the favorite,” she said.
“I doubt that’s how your mother viewed it.” It seemed like the right response. Elisa had exactly zero personal experience with siblings. Harris rarely talked about their dad except to make clear he blamed his father’s drinking for their mother’s death. His comments about his mother made her sound perfect, almost saintly, which Elisa chalked up to the expected aftermath of the unexpected death. But no chatter about favorite sons.
“Not all parents are you, Elisa.”
Elisa decided to take that as a compliment.
“It’s just that...” Rachel played with the handle of the mug, slipping her fingertips over the gentle curve of the ceramic surface. “Losing a child destroyed my mother. It was as if she only had so much room in her heart and mind, and her first kid’s memory ate up all of it.”
Elisa couldn’t figure out the right way to respond. “I can’t imagine how unbearable that kind of loss must be.”
“Unfortunately, I can.” Rachel continued to trace her finger over that mug handle. “My mom breathed in the ache. Wallowed in it. She was this shell, shuffling around without any energy. If anyone dared to be too happy or too excited aboutsomething, she’d berate them for not rolling around in the loss with her. For her, grieving was a full-time occupation. Her sole personality trait.”
Elisa could hear... what was it, jealousy? Contempt? “That’s awful.”
“She called me by the wrong name to drive home that I was an unworthy substitute. She didn’t go to my events because seeing all those parents and kids happy highlighted her pain.” Rachel shook her head. “I remember one birthday where she sat and cried because the party wasn’t celebrating therightchild.”
