Page 39 of Heartbreak Bay

I head home, and arrive to relative calm ... or so I think. Lanny and Connor are playing a video game and body-slamming each other to try to throw each other off; I settle them down and go look for Sam.

I find him in the office. He’s just ... sitting. When he looks at me, I feel my steps slow in response. It isn’t that I know that look, but I don’t like it. At all. “Sam? What is it?”

For answer, he holds up an envelope. One glance at it, and I know what it is. My heart drops.

It’s the letter I received. The one written by Melvin, delivered posthumously. The sight of it makes my mouth go dry, my knees weak. I don’t like that Melvin still sparks this physical revulsion in me, but it’s also more than that. It’s fear. Not of Melvin, not anymore ... Fear that he’s still got the power to destroy something I love even if he’s six feet underground.

Sam says, “Why didn’t you tell me?” His tone is as hollow as a struck bell. “I saw it in the drawer.”

“I was going to, and then this thing with the flyers—”

“Gwen. You had plenty of time to tell me.”

He’s right. I did. I kept it from him because ... I don’t know why I did, really. It felt private. Horribly personal.I didn’t want to worry youis the first thing that I think of saying, but I don’t, because it’s disingenuous. There’s something about receiving letters from my dead ex-husband that makes me want to keep them to myself, and I know that isn’t right, or fair.

And I know it’s wrong when I jump to the attack, but I still do it. “You went through my drawer?” My words are sharply pointed, and they draw blood. Sam sits back in his chair, staring.

“I needed staples, and that isn’t the point. Gwen.”

I’m instantly sorry, and I know I’m wrong. Damn, I wish I could flip a switch and turn off this darkly aggressive streak I have, just bedifferent, but I have to work at it. Hard.

But after counting to five, I finally try. “Sorry. I—you caught me by surprise with it, and when it comes to Melvin, I still have places that aren’t really healed. You know that, right?”

He nods. “I’ve still got some sore spots there too. Maybe more than sore.”

“He’s not your rival, Sam. In any way.”

I know, as soon as I say it, that I’m wrong, and I see it flash in his eyes. He leans forward and looks at me intently. “I wish that were true, but Melvin’s still here. He’s standing here right between us. Can’t forget him if he won’t go away. You have to let him go, Gwen.”

He’s absolutely right. And it’s the scariest thing I’ve done so far, it feels like jumping off a cliff into the dark, but I take the envelope and letter out of his hand. Then I walk over to the crosscut shredder and feed it in. Watch it chewed to random bits. Utterly gone.

Turns out that wasn’t a cliff. It wasn’t even a fall. It waseasy. I feel a strange surge of release and wonder, like stepping out into the sun after a long, long darkness.

I feel Sam’s hands on my shoulders, Sam’s warmth at my back. He kisses me gently on the side of the neck. “Thank you,” he says. “I know that was hard.”

“It wasn’t.” I thought it would be. I thought it would hurt, or be terrifying, that there would be some kind of consequences for the action. I’ve been bracing myself for a long, long time. Treating Melvin Royal like a threat even when he’s gone.

Treating him like junk mail feels astonishingly like freedom.

“You’ve still got the address it came from?” Sam asks.

“I have the mail center envelope. That gives me a place to start looking for the sender. If we can find the source of those letters ... we can put a stop to it. Maybe, finally, forever. We could shred every single thing that’s left of Melvin Royal.” I swallow. “I’d like that. That would begreat.”

“It would,” he says. “We start tomorrow. We owe the kids a movie today. I don’t want to let them down.”

Neither do I. So we wait until they are ready to pause the game, and we load up the SUV, and we spend a glorious couple of hours not home, out of our too-full heads, transported to another world.

It’s a temporary escape. But God, it matters. Happiness, however brief, always matters.

Even if it makes things that much more jolting when we get home.

The night’s chilly; people are still burning fireplaces, and I smell the pleasantly pervasive scent even through the closed windows as we turn off into our neighborhood. It’s calm, well lit, quiet, totally normal. Our house sits at the far end of the block, and we glide past glowing houses and neatly kept yards, and I make the turn into the driveway.

There’s something taped to our door. I focus on that sheet of paper and feel the hair raise on my arms, pull tight at the back of my neck.No. Oh God.Then I get hold of my anxiety and push it down, hard.Maybe it’s a pizza delivery ad. Or a note from a neighbor. Or ...

It isn’t. I know it isn’t.

I pull the SUV into the garage and take the alarm off as everybody crowds into the house after me. Relocking the garage door is second nature, and so is scanning the place to be sure everything’s just as we left it.

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