Page 1 of A Lifetime in 30 Days
Chapter 1
July 31
“So, this is what a dead body looks like,” Savannah Carlson murmured, her voice low amid the loud thumping of her heart.
Myhusband’sdead body,she corrected in her mind. The man—or rather, the body—lying perfectly still on the metal table a couple of feet in front of her was her husband.
“Caleb.” She forced herself to say his name.
Forced her eyes to remain open and her knees not to wobble. All those things were hard to do because, really, she just wanted to run up out of there.
She shouldn’t be the one making the identification. But that was her own fault. Caleb had sickle cell anemia and, at Vanna’s insistence, had worn a MedicAlert bracelet; that was how the medical examiner had gotten her name and phone number. Since receiving that call, she’d been chastising herself yet again for what she deemed the biggest mistake of her life—marrying Caleb Carlson. Well, no, an even bigger mistake had been not divorcing his trifling ass immediately after putting him out five years ago.
Forget blaming her failure to divorce him on the alcohol—that decision rested solely on the heart that refused to learn its lesson. Love didn’t come easily, and if it did, then Vanna must’ve missed the boat that was supposed to take her to it, because damn ... having her heartbroken so completely twice in her thirty-nine years of life was some majorly bad mojo.
Although, if anybody asked her, she’d vehemently deny that for those first three years after she sent Caleb on his way, she’d held out hope that her taking a stand would shock him into acting right. She certainly hadn’t been able to love the red flags out of him, and she’d definitely tried in the twenty years she’d known him—had prayed and tried, wished, hoped, and waited. But that change never came. And when she’d finally started to realize that it never would, the process of letting him and all the dreams she’d had for their marriage go had begun.
Once she’d taken her vows, Vanna hadn’t thought she would ever walk away from them, so the letting-go part of their separation had taken a lot longer than she would’ve imagined.
“Are you okay, ma’am?”
She jumped at the voice and kept her gaze focused on Caleb’s swollen and ashen face. She knew damn well he wasn’t the one talking.
Caleb’s and all the other dead bodies that were probably in this building were freaking her out. But she couldn’t let the uneasiness get the best of her, so she put a hand to her chest and took a deep breath. “Y-yes,” she stammered when she lifted her gaze and saw the medical examiner who’d escorted her into the room standing on the other side of the table.
He looked like he might’ve been younger than she was, maybe in his early thirties. There wasn’t a speck of gray in his low-cut black hair, but a box of Bigen hair color could always be the culprit for that.
“Would you like me to go out and get the woman who accompanied you?” Mr. ME Guy asked.
“No” was her hurried reply. The last person she wanted with her right now was Granny. Or Frito, Granny’s moody French bulldog, whom she never traveled without.
Vanna cleared her throat. The ME wanted her to confirm that this was Caleb so they could get on with whatever the next steps were. Vanna wasn’t too sure what that involved, because while she workedas an office manager in a law firm now and had been in the legal field for over a decade, her expertise regarding the handling of dead bodies stretched toward the medical malpractice realm, not homicide or anything else criminal.
She could do this. She nodded in agreement with herself. She could look at him one more time, just to be sure. But her throat had already started to tighten, her rapid heartbeats giving the tears she’d sworn on the ride over that she wouldn’t shed permission to at least form in her eyes.
“I’m okay,” she told the ME, more so trying to convince herself, and continued to stare down at the man she’d once loved.
From the time she’d received the call to the moment she’d sent a text to let her boss know she would be in late—and even when her car hadn’t started and she’d had to call Granny for a ride—Vanna hadn’t felt sad, glad, or even angry over the news that Caleb might be dead. But the second she’d walked through the doors of this building, an uneasiness settled over her. Yet she’d marched into this room, fake bravado in action, and stepped up to this table like what, or rather who, lay on it didn’t faze her.
But it did. Her breath hitched, and she suddenly clapped her hand over her mouth. Those tears threatened to fall, and her knees said to hell with the previous warnings—they began to shake.
This was indeed the once-handsome face she’d loved to stare at. One of his eyes was blackened and even puffier than his other features. They’d found him in the Potomac River, in an area of National Harbor where the Maryland state line met Washington, DC. So she presumed that was why he appeared to be bloated.
She shook her head, a motion that seemed to trigger the rest of her body to begin quaking as well. This wasn’t the Caleb she knew. And yet it was definitely Caleb. She had no idea how or from where she summoned the strength, but she took a step forward and then another, until she was standing right next to the table. The hand clamped to thestrap of the purse on her shoulder moved, shook, and lightly touched the sheet where it rested just beneath his chin.
“Caleb,” she whispered again.
Then, as if a partition had been dropped down on her emotions, she sucked in a breath and squared her shoulders. “This ...,” she said, and swallowed deeply. “This is Caleb.”
Pulling her hand from the sheet, she took a step back. Her gaze lifted and she repeated, “This is Caleb Carlson.”
“Well, you’ve done your part, right? You made the ID like they asked?” Granny said as Vanna sat quietly in the back seat of her grandmother’s twenty-year-old Buick.
Frito danced around in the front passenger seat, as if the ridiculous dog needed to remind her that that was his spot. Never—not in the last seven or eight years since Granny had bought that fawn-colored pooch home from some breeder she claimed to have met in the parking lot at Target—had Granny allowed anyone in that front passenger seat other than that dog.
Mabeline Jackson, with her roller-set, fluffy gray curls and lean caramel-brown face, turned to give Vanna a quick but serious glare. She’d raised Vanna, had taken her in to live with her when Vanna was just seven years old and Diane, Mabeline’s only child, had leftheronly child at a bus station. She knew Vanna better than anyone in this world—loved her better than the whole world did too.
“Yes, ma’am,” Vanna replied, but she continued to stare out the window as Granny broke the speed limit without remorse.
