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Prologue
Caiti
Grief isa knife severing my life into two parts—The Before and The After. While looking at The Before hurts like nothing I’ve felt before, existing in The After is a void.
Hollow. Aching. Alone.
I’ve cried all the tears my body could produce. The anger bled free from my fingertips as I packed up the remaining pieces of a life now gone, occasionally pausing the jerky efforts to throw something I couldn’t bear to keep. Fear swept me into its grip day after day, week after week, month by month, tossing me against the rocky shore every so often to remind me that I couldn’t escape this.
The love of my life—gone. Like that. The universe was cruel enough to keep from me the painful memories of the lasts, so my final recollections of Eric are tainted with regret.
A chaste kiss. A mumbled good night. A flurry of shifting limbs and shaken blankets as I crawled in beside my beloved for the last time.
Time drifts in a lonely, chaotic blur. The stimulation of grief keeps my body stressed to the max, to the point I exist daily with these sensations. The random pounding heart, as if it’s calling out to him in rapid bursts. A trembling in my arms, as if they’re mourning the loss of his body pressed deeply to mine.
I miss it.
Watching Eric’s sister, Evie, leave this bar with her new love slices my inside to ribbons. I want that. I had that.
I miss him.
The condensation on my glass of water cools my hot palms. The welcome sip quenches my cotton mouth. Only a minute after being left alone does the quiet bartender set down his own drink beside mine and join me on a stool.
“Hey.” The word produces a graveled tone. Low and soothing, somehow heard above the bar chatter and music.
I twirl my ice with my straw. “How many shots did you water down?” I expect a wince for being called out, but he holds his features steady.
“How’d you know?”
“I haven’t drunk enough not to notice, and I’m not getting any drunker.”
“A couple.”
I tilt my head back to suck an ice cube from my glass between my lips. “I’m not paying for them.”
“I already comped your tab.”
“Why’d you do that?” I lean toward him and plant my elbow on the wooden bar top. His silence draws me nearer.
“You’re a friend.”
“You don’t know me,” I argue hotly.
“Friend of a friend, then.” The side of his lips twitches as if he’s holding back a smirk.
“I don’t even know your name.”
He holds out a large hand. The nails are clean and trimmed, and callouses surround his palm. “I’m Dane Blackwood.”
Touching him casts light on the shadows in my chest. “Caiti Harris.”
“Now we’re friends.”
A hmm sneaks out under my breath, but I have no retort. I can afford my bar tab. The energy to argue is what remains in deficit. Right now, I have more money than I know what to do with, but the thing nobody tells you about life insurance money is how tainted it feels. I’d return the check in a heartbeat if only to have Eric back.
The sound of his bottle hitting the wood drags me away from the thoughts of my dead husband.
“Where’d you go just now?”
“That’s a scary question to ask a stranger you meet in a bar.”
He leans closer, wafting the scent of bourbon and smoke. He’s drinking a beer, though. The enticing aroma must be a soap or cologne. “Luckily for you, I’m not afraid of anything.”
I slurp the remnants of water stuck beneath the ice in my glass. “Sounds like a challenge.”
