But that was before.
Maya didn’t laugh anymore. She’d withdrawn to her room and hardly ever came out.
Cooper and Colton still put up a fight at bedtime, but the antics were no longer cute or innocent. Cooper had thrown a shoe at her tonight, and it had been all she could do not to break down into a sobbing mess in front of the boys.
She didn’t know how to handle them without Danny.
She shut herself in her room and leaned against the door. She needed a moment. Just a moment to breathe, and then she’d resume the battle. She heard the boys screaming at each other, heard something crash, and exhaled a breath that was half sob, half exhausted laugh.
She couldn’t do this. How some women managed to raise their children as a single parent was a mystery. Three months of single parenthood and her nerves were shot. She couldn’t take Cooper’s angry outbursts anymore, couldn’t deal with Maya’s refusal to acknowledge the world outside her iPad or Colton’s morbid fascination with death.
She needed help or she was going to break.
She had to fix her family before they fell completely apart.
Therapy. After the funeral, a friend had suggested she seek grief counseling for her and the kids, but she’d originally balked at the idea. Now, as she heard another crash from the boys’ room and more shouting, she’d take any help she could get. She lunged for her phone on the nightstand, looking for the text message Marlena had sent her with the name of a renowned family therapist.
As she scrolled, the screen lit up with an incoming call, and her stomach twisted. Marcus. The last time she had seen his name on her caller ID, she’d received the worst news of her life. Last time she’d seen the man himself—the night of Danny’s funeral—she’d kissed him. Or he’d kissed her. Maybe they’d kissed each other, but it didn’t matter. The memory of it filled her with so much shame.
She should ignore him. He’d extracted himself from her life, made it quite clear that he’d help her financially, but he was staying away. And that was for the best.
So why was he calling now?
Against her better judgment, she thumbed the answer icon and raised the phone to her ear. She didn’t say anything for a handful of beats. Neither did he. They just sat there in silence, listening to each other breathe.
She started to shake and clamped her other hand around her wrist to steady herself. “If you’re calling to talk about what happened after the funeral, I can’t right now. I—”
“There’s nothing to talk about.” It sounded so final. The door had shut and locked on that conversation, and he had tossed away the key.
“I know you don’t want to acknowledge it. I don’t, either. I’m so ashamed, but—”
“Stop. I didn’t call to talk about that.” His words slurred and crashed into each other.
“Are you…drunk?”
“Not yet,” he muttered. “And not for lack of trying.”
Yeah, she could tell. Maybe he didn’t feel drunk, but he was definitely not sober.
“Marcus…” At a loss, she trailed off. She was a fixer. Always had been. But she didn’t have the first clue how to fix him. And, honestly, she couldn’t spare the mental time or energy for him when her own life was falling apart. She sighed. “Then why did you call?”
“He’s dead.”
And just like that, she was thrown back in time to the morning phone call that had shattered her life as she knew it.
She’d woken up early to enjoy her coffee in peace before the kids got up for school. The sun was only thinking about rising, staining the horizon with a pale glow, but hadn’t decided to show its face yet. She sat at the kitchen island with her steaming mug, enjoying the quiet, and idly flipped through a glossy tabloid she’d picked up at the grocery store the day before. Just as she stood to refill her mug, her cell phone rang. She’d always remember the first thought to cross her mind: It’s too early.
Nobody calling at 5 a.m. had good news.
Dread had already been coiling around her spine as she reached for the phone with Marcus’s name flashing on the screen. He might have said a greeting. She didn’t remember. All she’d heard were two words: “He’s dead.” And she’d known. He didn’t need to elaborate. If anyone other than Danny had died, Danny himself would have called her, not Marcus.
Her limbs had lost all feeling. The phone and mug had fallen from her hands, crashing to the sleek tile floor she and Danny spent hours picking out. The mug had shattered, cracking into jagged pieces, like her heart. The phone had landed screen up, still connected. It had mocked her with its slowly ticking clock and Marcus’s name on the screen. She’d grabbed the island to keep from collapsing, and the scream that tore from her was so elemental and animalistic it left her throat and chest aching.
Pain cleaved through her now at the memory, the blade of it as hot and brilliant as it had been that morning. Even after three months, the wound was still too fresh, too raw. Why was he doing this to her again? Why was he making her relive the worst moment of her life?
She wanted to yell at him, I know he’s dead! I know every morning when I wake up alone! But when she opened her mouth, only a numb “oh” came out.
“I wanted to kill him for you.” Marcus’s voice was tight, and she heard him take a swallow from whatever he was drinking. “I wanted to avenge Danny for you, but he was already dead. He was already dead when we got there.”
“Oh,” she said again, understanding finally sinking in as the fog of grief cleared from her mind. They were thinking of two different dead men—her of her husband, him of the man who killed Danny.
The man who killed Danny.
It still seemed so surreal. Danny only ever made friends, not enemies.
She made herself ask the question she knew Marcus expected, even though she wasn’t positive she wanted to know the answer. “Who was he?”
“His name was Sebastian Haly.” He spat the name like it left a bad taste in his mouth. “He was a hired gun.”
She gripped the phone so tightly her fingers went numb. “And he’s dead? You’re sure?”
“Don’t get much deader,” Marcus said. The laugh that followed was caustic. “But, yeah, I made damn sure.”
Chills raced over her skin at the ice in his tone. This man wasn’t the Marcus she knew. The one who always joked around and made her laugh. The one who had held her the night after she buried the love of her life. The only man other than Danny who had ever stirred desire in her—
No. She shut down that line of thought.
Kissing him the night of the funeral had been a colossal mistake. She’d been desperate for a connection and delirious with grief and lack of sleep. Yet something had sparked between them. Something that terrified them both. He’d been right to walk away, but the man who left her that night was not the same one she spoke to now. In the weeks since, he’d changed, and she didn’t want to know this new Marcus. She wanted the old Marcus back.