Page 55 of His Hot Mess

I took a step, the floorboard creaking under me, and she turned, startled. I smiled at her, but when I saw what she was holding her hands, it fell away. My skin went cold.

She was holding the photo album.

SADIE

The album was small—maybe fifty photos total. And there was nothing on the cover of the well-worn little rectangle to make me think it was anything other than an old family album.

I didn’t have a single album from my childhood—we weren’t exactly a memory-making kind of family—so I always loved looking at friends’ photos of their happy childhoods. Trips to Disneyland. Holiday dinners. Kids just hanging out with parents in backyards and living rooms. It was like looking at the kind of childhood I always wished I could have had.

But when I opened this one up while waiting for Chris, I couldn’t turn away.

All the photos featured either Chris or a dark-haired woman, or them together. The woman was beautiful in a regal looking way, and she had a radiant smile. She was beaming in every photograph.

This was the fiancé.

She looked nothing like me. I felt small next to her; a peasant next to a queen. Seeing the two of them together made my chest hurt.

Clearly she was happy: happy with her life; happy to be with Chris. Almost every photo was the two of them together, and if their arms weren’t around each other, they were looking into each other’s eyes.

The photos in the beginning of the book were so old I could tell the two of them were still in high school. Chris looked so sweet—a little awkward but lit up to be around this girl. He was tall and gawky. He hadn’t quite filled into the broad-shouldered man he was today.

Soon the photographs progressed through time, the two of them looking to be in their twenties. There were photos in Europe—in London, smushed into a red phone booth; in France, by the Arc du Triumph. In Germany, eating sausages.

I thought back to the second time I’d met Chris, last year at Graydon’s barbecue. That must have been why he knew so much about Bratwurst—he’d traveled there with his girlfriend.

The love of his life.

What had happened? Had she left him? Cheated on him?

Maybe she was dead.

My chest clenched further as I continued through the pages. Vacations. Restaurants. The beach.

I knew I shouldn’t be looking at the album. Chris was beyond tight-lipped when it came to his past. But it wasn’t like it was his diary or something. Plus, it was just lying there on the coffee table.

My hands were mechanical as I followed their journey from their teenage beginnings all the way to the last photo, where they stood in front of a cute bungalow with an actual white picket fence around it. The woman was holding an oversized garden gnome in her arms, cradling it like a baby. My stomach churned.

The photo wasn’t that recent. Chris’s hair was different—more closely cropped. And he was wearing a suit, which looked alien on him. Handsome as hell, yes, but strange when I’d only seen him in work jeans and plaid button-downs and cotton t-shirts. And with none of that on at all.

Guilt ran through me for examining the pages so closely. I was about to put the album down when I heard the floorboard creak behind me.

Turning around, an apology on my lips, I took in his bare torso, the towel knotted on his waist. His freshly showered body was dewy, rippled muscles glowing in the steamy light behind him. But his eyes were on the album. He looked like a ghost. A tense, clench-jawed ghost.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It was just… sitting here and…” I lowered it back down to the table.

Chris swallowed. “I need to get dressed.”

“What was her name?” I blurted out.

He looked from the album to me, then back again. “Jessica,” he said, his voice as tight as a drum.

God, she was dead. She had to be, for him to be this upset.

“Is she—” I hesitate, unable to say the word.

“She’s very much alive,” he said, a bitterness creeping into the edges of his voice. He stepped forward in two quick strides and took the album from my hands.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It was sitting there and—”

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