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“Just know I’m here for you if you need anything, Rachel.” The grip tightened, and I dared a look at his face. There was no empathy, then. Just a leering interest. “Anything at all. Even if you just don’t want to be alone.”
Was he actually hitting on me while telling me that my fiance just died?This man was so disgusting. Just the sight of him made my skin crawl.
“Are you sure you don’t want us to come in and keep you company?” He asked, as if not taking the hint that I wanted him to go away. “I just hate to think of you being all alone out here.”
All alone,I thought, the words pinging around in my head.Am I really all alone now?
Again, I only knew what happened from the footage because my heart and mind had blacked out minutes before. I stood like a zombie in the doorway, ignoring the few other questions the officers asked me until they looked at each other and shrugged, eventually moving to leave. I watched them go, still standing, unmoving, as the old boxy cruiser turned around and crept back up the driveway.
Finally, I closed the door on the empty night, shambling to the couch, and collapsing bonelessly onto it. I remember the hot tears rolling down my cheeks but no other part of me moving except the rise and fall of my chest. I lay there, in shock and denial, staring out through the window and over the lake as the night eventually fell away, and after many hours, the sun began to rise.
Chapter Six
I’m not sure if I slept at all, but I must have gotten some sleep since I woke up on the couch with a crick in my neck and the weight of the world pressing down on my chest. It was a little past 10 a.m. when I finally rose from the place where I had been in catatonia for so many hours and wondered what I was supposed to do now.
How does the day after your fiancé dies proceed? It felt wrong somehow to go to the kitchen, make coffee, and start my day. I had appointments, places to be, and a life to live, but no one worked the day after a death, right? But I was alone here, far from anyone who I could pour my heart out to, and completely unsure of what my next step were supposed to be.
My shirt was still damp from crying, and when I touched my cheeks, I could feel the dried salt there. Should I be crying more right now? There is no handbook for this type of thing, nothing that I’ve ever learned that teaches you how to grieve in the right way. With no one watching, was it wrong that I didn’t feel the need to weep anymore?
A million questions were pinballing around in my skull, and I didn’t feel like I was part of my body, just a slip of consciousness watching from behind my eyes as I went through the motions. I made coffee, pouring it into Trevor’s favorite metal mug and drinking it black, the sting of it on my tongue and down my throat not even registering.
The phone did not ring. Trevor had no one in his life besides business associates and me. No one called with condolences, to cry with me, or even to see if I needed a shoulder to lean on. If my fiancé had parents out there somewhere or siblings, they wouldn’t even know I existed. Or that he had died.
I was truly alone in this house, memories, bad and good, lining the walls, the floors, and saturating every inch of air I breathed. His hair still in the hairbrush on the bathroom counter, and cologne on the collars of the shirts in the laundry basket.
How could he just be gone like that?
I’d been losing Trevor for months now, like the slow slippage of sand between my fingers, but at least there had been a chance to bring him back, to close my fists and hold those little grains in my palms stubbornly. Not anymore, though. Never again.
My hands started to shake, the coffee splashing against the metal rim of the mug until the droplets escaped to hit my fingers. I hissed, throwing the cup into the sink with more force than was necessary, and buried my face in my hands.
There on the kitchen floor, where we had stood side by side to cook together and where I had spent the last weeks trying to feed life back into Trevor, I sank to my knees and cried. The big, heaving sobs I had denied myself last night in my shock came on without warning. They wracked me beyond my control, and I let them come as if screaming my pain to this hollow place would somehow lessen it. But my pain wasn’t water to be poured from a cup. It was born inside and spilled out into a river that might never run completely dry.
I had dreamed of my life here with Trevor, even when he was so far separated from the man I fell in love with. I had built it up in my heart brick by brick, even if it was messy, or uneven, but last night a car skidded off the road and knocked it down with one fell swoop.
Finally, when the last bits of furious grief had been expended, I dug through the cabinets with unsteady hands, pulling out a bottle of wine we had been saving for our wedding. I opened it with no grace, just pushing the corkscrew straight through the foil, down into the cork, and yanked it out. After peeling the sharp foil edges aside, I drank straight from the mouth of the bottle. It was bitter. I didn’t care.
I spent the following hours on the balcony where Trevor had proposed, sitting, drinking, and sending out texts and emails to people I had lined up to do content shoots with next week, explaining the situation.
As expected, my phone started blowing up with friends, work contacts, and acquaintances, probably calling to offer canned words of condolences, but I ignored every one of them. I didn’t want to hear it, at least not now, and that made me feel a wave of guilt.
Here were people trying to support me, and maybe it would actually help, but there was no way I could have answered a call, and with my own mouth, uttered the words, “Trevor is dead.”
Trevor is dead.
I would survive. Of course, I would. I had a successful career and given how Trevor never seemed to have another important person in his life, I was probably set to inherit his assets, the house included.
Could I really live within the walls of an engagement present from my dead fiancé? He bought this place for us to live in, far away from the chaos of the more crowded parts of the state. Just because he used it as a way to make himself a prisoner to his own paranoia in the final weeks of his life didn’t mean it wasn’t an incredible house and a beautiful property. I could stay here, but did I want to?
It was the first crack in the concrete chest in which I had hidden all these worries about my engagement deep inside my heart. The Trevor I met back at the garden party and fell in love with was a man that I would fall for all over again if given the chance, but knowing what he would become changed things. I pieced things together in my mind, sitting on that balcony and drinking. The wine tasted metallic as it passed over the foil and into my mouth.
In the city, Trevor was social, outgoing, and confident. Once we moved into the house, things changed bit by bit, as if he didn’t have to put up a front anymore. At the same time, I didn’t think anything between us had been fake, at least not the actual emotions, but if I stood on the outside looking in, there were some signs that made my skin crawl.
As much as I had sworn not to let Trevor affect my career, in the end, he hated when I left, pushing harder and harder for me to switch completely to being an influencer. Even through the haze of my grief, I felt a twinge of embarrassment at that. Others I worked with had to have noticed the change, and I had never wanted to be that girl who let a man come between her and her career.
What if the house had been the beginning of the end for us, and I had just been too blind to see it? If Trevor had wanted to hide me away, it was the perfect plan. Whether he wanted that to keep me safe or just to possess me fully, I guess I’d never know.
The bottom line was that there was no denying that the house was a way to cut me off from my job and support system, making me more reliant on him by the day. I still couldn’t say if he had malicious intentions, but …
