A letter written on behalf of a wife who was his ex-wife in all but a legal sense.
After all the gifts and all his promises, she’d gone ahead and done it.
* * *
Bree jolted awake. “Who is it? Emily or Imogen?”
It took her mind a moment to join the rest of her body. Sam wasn’t nudging her with one of the girls at their bedside; she was at forty thousand feet, and the jolt was a pocket of colder air. She pushed up the eye mask, cracked open one eye, and looked at the LCD monitor. Five hours to go.
Eliza snored lightly—completely at peace, not a hair out of place even in sleep. The years had been more than kind. They’d been lavish in their generosity.
Bree wriggled her toes, cocooned in warm airline socks. People slept alone in the dim half-light of business class or were bathed in the fierce wash of a screen. Bree needed another nap before they arrived in Australia. Another connecting flight meant she needed as much sleep as possible when she could get it. No different than raising two girls under the age of three.
She lifted a finger to the screen and punched her way through the in-flight entertainment, hoping for good music. She was blessed—the latest album from Dave Rawlings and Gillian Welch. She started the music and closed her eyes. The melodic twang of his guitar. The sweetness of her voice. A rough clipping and tailing of lyrics, somehow carrying both the stab of pain and the promise of hope.
She let her mind drift to the Ryman Auditorium, whose center stage she had once dreamed to grace. She sat, enthralled, at the two voices entwined as one, the song melancholy but strong. What she wanted to be.
The voices rang beyond the final strummed chord, and she opened her eyes, now damp with tears. On the other side of business class, noisy snores erupted from Lincoln—his head thrown back, his mouth wide open as he twitched and rolled in a fitful sleep. Andy was buried under a blanket that twitched with the occasional flicker of obvious dreams.
Bree closed her eyes again and lay her chair fully flat as more melancholy strength piped into her headphones, and her soul. She drifted back to the Ryman and the singular spotlight, under which sat a microphone in its stand, the stage now empty.
* * *
Andy’s fidgeting wasn’t driven by a dream. He was trying to escape a nightmare.
With the airline blanket tented over him, he flicked through his tablet, sourcing jobs in Australia, preferably somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Google Maps confirmed Australia had plenty of that. He had three months on his visa, time enough to work out his next moves.
The blanket dropped away, and Sue—Andy’s friend from his Cincinnati flight—looked away from her movie and fixed Andy with a smile. Andy feigned waking from a deep sleep and pulled the blanket back over his head. He had hoped the flight to Australia would be the first time he could stop looking over his shoulder. But the need for a constant state of alertness remained, forty thousand feet above the Pacific.
Andy tapped in Cattle Station Jobs. Months of research revealed that while Texans had ranches, Australians had cattle stations. He flicked through the scant options, checking each one not for salary and conditions but for distance away from civilization.
He selected Onkaparinga Station—twenty-five hundred square kilometers of outback for cattle to roam, which quick mental math converted to about a thousand square miles. About the size of Rhode Island. Surely he could lose himself there for a while. He would draw a line in the sand. Sure, it was another one, but if that line was miles away from the battering waves that usually washed away his good intentions, it would be different this time. It had to be.
* * *
The ice clinked in the muted drone of business class as Lincoln reached for the letter. The handwritten wording on the bottom was in the same hand as the front of the envelope.
You shut me out even though you claimed to love me. Until you get over your past, you will never have a future. I could put up with it because the money was good, but with all the women . . .
All the women? Hardly. He’d run out of patience explaining he’d stayed faithful to his marriage vows while it became obvious she had no intention of keeping hers. The “other women” had only started once Dianne had kicked him to the curb, saying she didn’t want him back under any circumstances. She’d only gotten back in touch with him once news spread that he would make partner.
She’d added one last line to her own note at the bottom. In defiance. To make an angry point.
“And it’s because of this mental anguish that I want more than half.”
Mental anguish? Their marriage had crammed two months of his happiness into two years. Two years! His head pounded as the alcohol fought with his broiling anger. Lincoln chugged the rest of his drink, drowning out the anxiety that threatened to overtake the excitement of the reunion.
He scanned the legalese dotted throughout the letter, his thumb brushing over the embossed lawyer’s logo at the top of the page. Formal notice of intention . . . file for divorce . . . irreparable differences . . . division at the court’s discretion . . .
But he drew his gaze back to her words that cut him to the heart: “Until you get over your past, you will never have a future.” Lincoln was tired of hearing that, and it came from more sources than Dianne.
He dragged his bleary eyes to the far side of the cabin. His past was fast asleep. He flexed his jaw as his determination to reconnect solidified in his vodka-soaked, sleep-starved mind.
* * *
Bree sat in the center wedge of a packed auditorium, hemmed in by a murmur of impatience. The stage was clear, a single spotlight pinpointing a Gibson guitar behind a single microphone on a stand. The audience waited on tenterhooks for the next act to arrive.
The impatience grew as Bree craned her neck to see into the wings of the stage. Who was due to perform? She wracked her brain—she didn’t even know who she was here to see.
Bree felt eyes on her. To her right, a woman in gray drilled her gaze into Bree. Beyond her, a balding, ruddy-faced man in a checked shirt glared. She again scanned the empty stage for some clues—any clues—of who was due on the stage and why people were so angry.
Down her row, face after face turned to her, animosity etched into each one. Animosity directed at her.
Why are they looking at me like that?
People from the rows in front of her turned, resting elbows on chair backs, penetrating glares aimed at her. Bree shrunk away from them as the spotlight bounced from the Gibson’s neck on the stage. Her thin smile melted into numbing horror at the guitar’s pink-and-silver inlay between the frets—frets that had spent years under the flash of her fingers.
The Gibson was hers. Her beloved guitar that had graced the stage and the radio station at Flagstaff College. The guitar she was now using to pass on to her girls her love of music.
A creeping embarrassment heated her cheeks and neck. The entire audience now turned toward her, a few of them jerking their heads to the stage. Anxiety bit deep. Were they waiting for her? There was no way they were all here to listen to her performance.
She fumbled in her pocket for the ticket stub. The dim light revealed the artist’s name due to perform. It couldn’t be—
A burning spotlight clunked to life from above and illuminated her in her seat. Faces hardened and eyes narrowed as a perfect silence descended onto the auditorium.
They were waiting for her. Ready or not, she had to go up onstage. She felt a tap on her shoulder. Something about the tap felt familiar. Heavy. Accusing. And her mother’s perfume drifted across her shoulder.