Total pages in book: 26
Estimated words: 25827 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 129(@200wpm)___ 103(@250wpm)___ 86(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 25827 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 129(@200wpm)___ 103(@250wpm)___ 86(@300wpm)
I look at my left hand.
The wedding band is still there. The metal hasn't had time to warm to my skin yet.
I take it off.
I set it on the bedside table where she'll see it. Where there's no way she won't see it. Because if she's going to see what I'm about to make her see, she's going to see all of it. The ring stays where I put it. The placing of it is the only honest thing in this room.
I start feeling sick again as I slip under the covers.
She rolls toward me immediately...but stops the moment she feels the cold of the barrel against her naked belly.
“Don't even think about it.”
She pouts. “You've already paid for it.”
I cock the gun.
“Jeez.” She flips onto her side. “You're so damn boring.”
“So boring.”
For her, obviously.
But for me, all of this just means the end of everything.
Five.
I remember seeing her for the first time, my Tuesday-afternoon-in-the-cemetery girl. Stone bench under a maple, V.C. Andrews open in her lap, a sweater the color of a sweater that has been washed too many times. I'm really not scared of you. And she'd pointed up at the CCTV camera I'd walked under without checking. I had walked away. It had cost me. I had not been a man who could afford anything that might cost him, that day, but she had cost me anyway.
Four.
I remember the second time we met. Six months later, a hotel conference room in Chicago, Mr. Coates apologizing for being two minutes late. Simons Holdings, LLC. My alias on the intake form. Francine pawing at my arm under the table. She'd been pawing at my arm for six months, for the cameras and the witnesses and the men who needed to believe in Nate Simons. Juniper had walked in behind her boss with a notepad and a cardigan and the same sensible glasses, and her eyes had done the thing they had done to me at the cemetery, and I had looked away from her like she was nothing, because Francine was watching, and the rest of the room was watching, and Sara had been the lie I gave back to her in the parking garage after, when she chased me five flights down a stairwell I hadn't even told her existed.
Three.
I remember our first kiss. My name's Juniper, she'd said in the parking garage, with her shoe in her hand and her hair coming undone, and I had pretended not to know and she had not let me. Are you trying to make me jealous? I had snarled at her in the elevator three minutes later, when she'd told me she'd find another guy by the end of the day, and her yes had been the last word she'd gotten to say before my mouth had been on hers and the rest of her sentence had died there. I didn't want it to be this way, Juniper. I had said it against her mouth. I had meant it. I had also not stopped.
Two.
I remember the way she started crying the moment she walked into the judge's chambers and saw her mother waiting. Five secret months of rehab. Weaning Ronna off her alcohol and off her addiction to bad guys, every dollar and every favor and every quiet flight to the facility I'd hidden under five layers of paper companies—all of it worth it, just for the way Juniper's whole face broke open in that doorway. Her mother stood up from the bench. Juniper stopped breathing. And then she turned to me with a teary smile, her eyes saying it all.
I love you so so much.
Never thought that would be the last time she'd say it. With or without words.
One.
Footsteps.
Her footsteps, in the corridor outside the door. She's finally coming back from the bridal suite, where she and Odessa did whatever girls did in the hour after the wedding reception and before the wedding night.
“Show time, honey.”
The woman turns to face me again, but she doesn't make the same mistake again. She doesn't inch close, with the gun still between us.
The footsteps stop.
The door handle turns.
I fight the urge to turn around as I hear her open the door.
I hear her take one step in. Then nothing. Then her stumbling back. Footsteps. The click of the door.
My heart feels like it's turning into stone by the second.
She doesn't make a sound. Doesn't have to. Because the silence of my marriage falling apart is the loudest thing I'll ever hear.
And once I'm sure she's completely gone—
I don't waste time sitting up. “Get out.”
“Are you—”
“I said get out!”
“Asshole!”
She's not wrong about that. But I still want her out.
I wish I had the luxury of just punching the wall again and again and again.
But I don't.
Mi dispiace.
Mi dispiace, moglie mia.
Because it's at that moment I also realize.