“Shut the fuck up!” I roared, slamming my hand down on the steering wheel. “I have always known the risks. And right now, until I can find her and explain, the only risk I’m thinking about is losing her. No more lies. I’m telling her everything. And then I’m going to deal with the fallout no matter what it looks like.”
I hit the end button. She wasn’t at their house, and that was honestly the only reason I’d called. With that knowledge, I no longer needed a damn thing from Mark or Aaron.
Flying down the road, I made my next call to her dad.
“Yello,” he answered jovially.
Fuck. From that cheery greeting alone, I knew he hadn’t seen her.
“Remi knows. She was at my house, found an old thumb drive with pictures, and took off. I’m headed to her office now. Do me a favor. Call me if you see her?”
“Shit, son.”
“Full disclosure: This ends today. I’m telling her the truth. I’d rather have Sally back than lose Remi again.”
“I…” He sighed. “It’s a slippery slope, Bowen. One we’ve all been chasing her down for a long time. I trust you to make the right call, but if I know my girl, she’s going to be a live wire over this.”
“As she should be.”
He wasn’t blaming me. He was just as culpable for this façade as I was. But desperate men make desperate decisions. The question was how badly would they grow to regret them.
“I’ll let you know if I find her,” I told him.
“Same, son. I’ll go check The Wave in case she was in need of something that felt like home.”
Fuck. Once upon a time, I’d been her home. Not because we’d shared a house, but rather because we’d shared a love that neither time nor distance could ever challenge.
Fate though? That cruel bitch was ready to wreck it all over again.
“Thanks, Jack,” I mumbled before hitting the end button and dropping my phone into my lap. An all-too-familiar hopelessness washed over me.
Remi
After my mom left when I was in high school, my dad had been a mess. Present, accounted for, but still filled with more grief than my adolescent mind could process. Life just hadn’t felt whole without her. I distinctly remembered lying in bed one night, staring up at the ceiling, wondering if the chill of loneliness would ever leave my bones.
It had been many years since I’d felt that way. But as I sat in my rolling chair in my office, with nowhere to go, no one to talk to, and no one left in my life that I trusted to give me an honest-to-God explanation, the chill in my bones returned. Only this time, it felt more like I was dying of hypothermia.
However, as I frantically tried to make sense of even the tiniest detail of the last few months, a fiery rage kept me ablaze.
I racked my brain for clues I’d somehow missed. Things I’d written off as coincidences at the time but now seemed more like flashing red lights.
Like how he’d never asked me if I was on birth control, which I had been since I was a teen because my cycle was so bad. Something a fiancé would have known for sure.
Holy fuck. We’d been engaged.
Based on some basic math from my last memories to the plane crash, it wasn’t possible we’d been together for a whole year, yet I’d accepted his proposal? I must have loved him something fierce for him to be able to get me to agree. That, or he was a fucking master of manipulation. My heart told me the former, but my brain was pretty damn set on the latter.
I folded my arms on my desk and rested my head on top of them.
He knew my favorite wine. At our first run-in at McMurphy’s, he hadn’t sent me the house chardonnay or a pinot grigio. He’d sent me a glass of New Zealand Sav Blanc. My favorite. A coarse laugh escaped my throat. I’d just thought he had good taste.
My stomach sank even lower as I remembered how he’d had Frosted Flakes in his pantry before I’d ever expressed my love for them. I’d been giddy we had something so small in common. Now, it just felt like a slap in the face. A cruel joke only he had been in on.
“Of course he’d never asked any questions,” I moaned aloud to myself. “He already knew all the answers.”
My throat burned as memories from Katherine’s mixer flooded my mind.
“He was sitting next to you and Scott Kirk on the flight. I didn’t even realize he knew anyone else on that plane.”
“He wasn’t sitting next to me. I was with Aaron.”
“That’s what the flight log says, but I watched you spill a Bloody Mary myself.”
Jesus, everyone had told me I was sitting with Aaron on our way home from a ski trip.
