No woman stood in the corner. Only the coat rack and Charlie’s hooded black coat.
Charlie’s breath hitched as she tried to force her body to accept what her eyes knew. A trick of the mind, a cruel prank by her own psyche.
“It’s a coat,” she laughed as she shakily returned the candlestick to the table, eyes still locked on the corner.
She walked over and ruffled the coats. Nothing but air. No one had stepped behind them, no feet poked from beneath them.
On the sidewalk out front, two little girls paused on their bikes. They both gazed up at Wilder’s Grove before squealing as if with fear and pedaling away.
Charlie smiled and shook her head.
“Kids.”
6
Jake parked in front of Allison’s office and, before he could talk himself out of it, stepped from the truck and hurried through the glass door.
Regina, the wife of the head accountant and one of Allison’s best friends, pursed her lips and gave him a curt nod when he walked in.
“Is Allison-?” He gestured toward Allison’s office.
“Yep,” she said coolly.
He knocked on Allison’s door and then pushed it open.
She sat at her desk, hair down and curled with a curling iron, her makeup expertly applied. She wore a low-cut black top and a gold necklace with a butterfly charm in the center.
He knew why she’d put so much effort into her appearance that morning, which made his intended words sticky in his throat. Not because he wanted her. But because she expected him to grovel, apologize and beg for her to come back.
She said nothing, only shot him a scathing look and returned to punching keys in the large electronic calculator that clacked and beeped as she worked.
“I’m sorry about last night,” he said, sitting in the chair opposite her desk.
“Hmph,” she scoffed.
“Allison. This isn’t working.”
A little frown creased her brow, and her typing stopped. She turned to face him, her eyes misting.
“I’m so sorry, Al. I am. I never wanted to hurt you. I just don’t think…”
Tears rolled over her cheeks. The cool demeanor vanished in an instant.
“Shit, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” He walked around the desk and knelt before her, taking her hands and squeezing them against his chest.
He truly didn’t want to hurt her. It tore him apart to see her cry, but it was time. It had been time for months.
She shook her head. “But… I thought… You said you loved me,” she sputtered. Her hands shook as she pulled them away from him. “You stood me up last night and now you’re breaking up with me?”
Jake looked up at her. “I didn’t stand you up on purpose last night. Some stuff happened. It was… out of my control. But I realized I’ve known for a while we’re not… we’re not a good fit.”
Her face contorted as if he’d punched her, and she pushed her high heels into the floor, rolling her chair back on the plastic mat, putting distance between them.
“You led me on,” she whispered. “You knew I wanted to get married. How could you, Jake?” The tears came harder now, faster.
Regina stuck her head through the door. “Is everything okay?”
Allison looked at her and shook her head.
“Maybe I better go. I’m sorry, Al. I’m…” But he didn’t finish. He brushed past Kim, who hurried into the room as he left.
When he climbed into his truck, he cranked the key and slammed on the gas. The truck shot forward. He wanted to get away, though he couldn’t outrun the look in her eyes, the guilt pressing in around him.
He drove straight to the job and didn’t mention the break-up to the guys.
The next eight hours passed with barely a thought of Allison.
He returned home from work to find Allison had emptied the house of her things. She didn’t live with him, but she’d left bits of herself when she stayed over—a silky pink robe on the back of the bathroom door, a pair of knee-high red suede boots in the front hallway, a scattering of romance novels, chapsticks and makeup.
She’d even taken the three photographs she’d stuck to his refrigerator with little heart-shaped magnets. They had taken two on Mackinac Island the previous fall when she’d talked him into taking a weekend off work and going north. The third had been Allison alone, wearing a fluffy purple bridesmaid dress as she sat on the edge of a fountain. He’d missed her friend’s wedding to shore up a seawall in front of a mansion that was slowly slipping into Lake Michigan. But that had been the early days of their relationship when such transgressions had been forgivable.
Her key sat alone in the center of his kitchen table.
The rooms held an emptiness without her. The halls were dark and cold. When he sat on his couch in the living room a tiny puff of despair seemed to release with the dust motes that floated in the late afternoon sun. He’d never been good at being alone, and yet he’d never been good at being a partner.
He tried to watch the game, gave up, and walked into the kitchen where he’d spread a print for a clearing job on his counter. The owners, wealthy thanks to the husband’s recent sale of an insurance business in Farmington Hills, wanted to return to northern Michigan. Foundations needed to be dug for a house, a guest house, a pole barn. But first, weeks of tree-clearing and grading the land.
It was the perfect distraction from Allison, but as he scratched his pencil across the gridded page, he thought not of his now ex-girlfriend, but the woman who’d arrived at his office two days before.
Petra.
Her name filled his head, pressed against the hard contours of his skull and refused to be contained.
“Petra.” He spoke her name as if to relieve the pressure, but it didn’t help.
“Shit,” he muttered, realizing he hadn’t just said it, he’d written her name on his print. He erased the name.
He’d watched the news each evening after work, but the reporters only offered brief snippets. The search continues for missing woman Petra Collins… They didn’t offer details on her life. No crying boyfriend or hysterical mother pleaded for her safe return. It got under his skin. The lack of friends or family parading across the screen and demanding justice.
The evening before, Norm had done an interview—eyes dripping, hands tugging at his button-down shirt, this one as outrageous as the one he’d been wearing the day Jake met him. It was pink and dotted in tiny black flamingos.
Jake took the stairs two at a time to the second floor. The jeans he’d been wearing two days earlier lay crumpled next to the hamper. Allison had given him hell about that more than once.
“Right next to the laundry basket, Jake? Really?” she’d demand, but in a sweet voice before she plucked the garments from the floor and crammed them inside.
They were the kinds of comments that usually made him feel better after a break-up. This time he only felt guilty.
He dug into the back pocket of his pants and found Norm’s phone number written on a Post-It note with a grinning cat hanging from a tree branch on the top. ‘Hang in there,’ a voice bubble by the cat said.
Jake grabbed the cordless phone from the stand next to his bed and dialed Norm’s number. It rang once, and the man picked up.