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CHAPTER 1AVA
The letter had been sent by a dead man.
There was no doubt in my mind.
Fine. There was alittledoubt. Okay, a lot of doubt. Buckets of it.
But after thirteen long hours in the car during which I’d thought of very little else, I couldn’t come up with anyone else who might have sent the note. Not one single person, other than Alexander Bryant, who’d died exactly a month ago yesterday.
Yesterday also happened to be when a late-summer breeze blew through my apartment’s kitchen window and caused an unassuming envelope to fall from the thin stack of this week’s mail on the countertop. The letter had drifted steadily downward, soundlessly landing at my feet while I’d been washing dishes.
The strange thing was I didn’t remember receiving the letter. I didn’t get much mail, so it should’ve stood out to me. But I had no recollection of the crisp kraft brown paper envelope that had no return address. Or the way my name and address had been hand-printed in neat letters that almost looked machine-produced except for the unevenness of the blue ink. I definitely didn’t remember the butterfly stamp in the upper right corner of the envelope, the colorful sticker unmarred by an adjacent postmark too smudged to read.
Now, as I rolled to a stop at a traffic light, waiting to turn left down a road lined with palm trees that swayed in the breeze, I thought itextremelyodd I’d not noticed the stamp. Usually, all things animal-related captured my attention. But I had toadmit that life had been a bit of a blur since Alex had passed away. My mind had been elsewhere, tangled up in a guilty net of what-ifs and should-haves.
“Are you sure this is the best job choice for you?”
My mother’s voice drifted through the car’s sound system, her concern crisp and clear.
“Only one way to find out,” I said, adjusting the volume on the Bluetooth system. Her sharp worried tones made my ears ache.
“Ava,” she said on a sigh. “I know you’ve been a little lost this past month, but this feels rash. You’ve always worked a computer job from home, now suddenly you’re applying to be acaretaker?”
I’d told her a little bit about the job I was applying for, but not all. I hadn’t told her how the position had come to my attention. Or that the job was in Alabama. Or that I’d driven through the night to get here.
It didn’t matter that I was twenty-seven years old—she’d have thrown a fit if she thought for a second I wasn’t taking good care of myself.
I almost hadn’t answered her call at all, but that would’ve only sent her into a blind panic. It was better to ease her fears now, get them out of the way.
I didn’t want her worrying about me. She’d had a lifetime of that already. It was only in the last couple of years that she could breathe more easily, sleep better, and live a normal life without feeling like she always had to be on alert to keep me safe.
I didn’t want to go back to what used to be.
“I think a change of pace will be good for me,” I finally said. I swallowed hard. “Get me out of my comfort zone.”
It was a gray morning, the sky filled with low-hanging clouds. Leftover rain droplets from a storm that had rolled through in the wee hours of the morning sat fat and sparkly on the edges of my bug-splattered windshield as I glanced at the dashboard clock: 8:38.
I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel, unable to stop thinking about the letter that had set this trip in motion.
Inside the envelope had been a wrinkled piece of paper, folded neatly in thirds. It was a typed help-wanted ad that looked to have been crumpled up at one point then smoothed out. At the top of it, someone had written me a note.
Someone.
Alex?
The short, scribbled message had several of my ex-boyfriend Alexander’s earmarks. The cheesy buttercup line? That’s exactly something he would say. He had a way of making old-timey phrases sound endearing. Plus, that doublex? It’s how he’d always signed off on his text messages. The handwriting could’ve been his, that slanting, masculine scrawl, but I didn’t know for sure and didn’t have anything to compare it to other than a belated birthday card he’d given me back in June. But that had onlyxx Alexhandwritten on it. He’d been a nice guy but not overly sentimental and often forgetful—always too focused on the next thing to simply be present, to take notice, to justbe.
That, honestly, was one of the many reasons I’d broken up with him after only three months of dating. We’d parted the same way we’d started—as friends—and made promises to stay that way. But he’d pushed those boundaries in the weeks after the breakup. And then he was gone.
“All right, Ava,” Mom said. “I’ll let it go for now. What time is the interview?”
If the letterhadcome from Alex, why? How?
I let out a frustrated huff of air, my breath making a soft whistling sound, as if testing its wings in the unfamiliar humidity. I had a suspicion about a reason, but thehowbaffled me. I supposed it was possible he’d mailed the letter before he passed away. It could’ve been lost for a month in the mail system, then found and delivered recently. That kind of thing happened all the time. All. The. Time.
But…
Why send a letter? As someone who had his phone with him twenty-four/seven, why not just snap a picture of the want ad and text it to me? That seemed more like something Alexanderwould do. Snail mail was too old-school for him. Plus, why not put a return address on the envelope? Or sign the note? Also, it was only recently that I’d started looking for a new job—I hadn’t needed one when he was still here—so how would he have known? It had been only two weeks since I was fired, unable to concentrate on much of anything in the aftermath of Alex’s death.
