I open my mouth to catch a few cool, sweet drops on my tongue. I hear muffled laughter and music from inside, the sound of voices floating to me on the night air. Then I hear the words that haunt me the most, the thing Cass used to whisper into my ear every night before we fell asleep in each other’s arms. The last thing he said to me before he died.
I love you, sweet pea. I’ll love you till the end of time.
How long will it be until I can no longer remember the sound of his voice? How many years does it take to forget the love of your life? Will I wake up one day and the memory of his kiss will have vanished, trampled to dust by the relentless forward march of time?
“Babe,” I whisper, my heart twisting. “I miss you so much. Why did you leave me?”
A tingle like a mild electric shock zings up my spine. From one heartbeat to the next, I realize I’m not alone.
My eyes fly open. I swing around and look back toward the house. I’m momentarily blinded by the lights, but when my eyes adjust, I see a figure in the shadows leaning against one side of the columns that support the patio.
It’s a man. A big man with wide shoulders and long legs. His hands are shoved deep into the pockets of his black raincoat. The hood of the raincoat is pulled over his head, but even in the shadows, I can see the glint of his dark eyes.
He stares at me with an unblinking gaze, his expression grim.
Theo.
As if he heard his name in my mind, he straightens. He pulls his hands from his pockets and stands there staring at me with his hands flexed open like some kind of psychopath about to pounce on me and wring my neck.
That doesn’t scare me so much as piss me off. I call out, “Lurk much, pal?”
When he doesn’t respond—because, oh yeah, talking isn’t his thing—I take a few steps toward him. Simultaneously, he takes a few steps back. When I stop, he stops. Then we stare at each other while I try to decide if I should find a rock to throw at him or calm down and act like an adult.
I’m embarrassed he caught me standing alone in the rain, talking to myself, but it isn’t his fault I’m strange.
When his gaze sweeps over me, snagging on my chest before flashing back up to my face, I realize several things at once.
One, I’m not wearing a bra. Unlike Suzanne’s double Ds, my B cups don’t require scaffolding to hold them up. Two, I’ve been standing in the rain in a white T-shirt, which means, three, I’m probably giving this nontalking Theo quite a show.
I hunch my shoulders, grab my shirt, and pull it away from my stomach, trying to make all that look nonchalant.
He doesn’t move. He doesn’t look away. He just stands there, staring, his jaw like granite and his black eyes burning holes into my head.
The tingle in my spine increases until it feels like an itch.
“There you are!” Suzanne’s voice rings out over the patio as she pulls open the door and spots me on the lawn. “What’re you doing standing in the rain?”
“Nothing. I’m coming.”
I glanced away from Theo for a second to look at Suzanne, but when I look back to the place he was standing, he’s gone. I catch a glimpse of moonlight reflected off a slick surface around the side of the house. It’s Theo, striding toward an open gate, his shoulders stiff beneath the raincoat. He disappears through the gate and melts silently into the night.
Finally, I can move. I hurry back toward the patio, shaking the rain from my hair, wondering why he was standing alone in the dark, why I felt compelled to come out to the patio, and what would’ve happened if Suzanne hadn’t appeared when she did.
I go to bed that night pondering what Suzanne said when I told her I saw Theo in the backyard.
“Oh no, honey, it must’ve been someone else. That man wouldn’t be caught dead at a party.”
Somehow, I can’t scrub those words from my mind.
4
The next week was a blur of activity.
Suzanne’s cleaning crew, an efficient team of five young women, showed up the day after the party and got to work. They tore through the house, scrubbing walls and washing floors, exclaiming in surprise that the place wasn’t as dirty as they anticipated. I wondered who’d gotten rid of the cobwebs and swept before I moved in, but forgot about it in the press of everything else that had to be attended to.
I called three contractors from Portland to come out and give me a bid, only two of whom showed up. One of the contractors was a guy in his sixties who looked at my ass one too many times for comfort. The other one was a perfect gentleman, but the quote he gave me was so high, it made me laugh out loud before I tore it in two.
The following week, I got two more quotes from two more contractors. One was closer to my budget, but the owner said he couldn’t start the work for ninety days. The other was from a guy who kept suggesting I’d be more comfortable having my husband deal with “this kind of thing,” as if my vagina were a handicap to rational thinking.