The Sister-in-Law by Pamela Crane (great books for teens txt) 📗

darkly poetic that way. He was the only one there for me when my parents died, picked up my broken pieces, helped me put them back together. But they never quite fit, no matter how hard we forced them. And those jutting edges that were left? Well, they cut me so deep I bled out.

I breathed a patch of warm dew on the window, then traced a heart in it. I didn’t know if I would ever love another again – because no matter how dysfunctional Noah and I were, I still loved him deeply – but now I would begin to love myself. The sunrise pouring through the heart promised light. Light cast out darkness. No more feeling sorry for myself. No more swimming in the ache. I didn’t quite know where I was going, but I would know when I arrived. Freedom was a lofty goal for a broken spirit, but I was a fighter backed into a corner.

Armed with nothing more than a single duffel bag, a pocket full of stolen cash, and a lie, I would leave my identity along with the pain behind. But instead of being another victim, this time I vowed to be the victor.

Chapter 12

Harper

It took one moment to break trust and a lifetime of work to rebuild it. I really thought Candace and I had shared a connection at the mall today. United over fashion, related over décor. Retail therapy! She even let me snap a selfie of us raising our banana-mango-kale smoothies, as if toasting the camera. I think she even smiled! We had started over, lemony fresh.

My gait was perky when I entered my bedroom with its stiff, avocado green wallpaper, the kind your grandmother would have picked out when she bought her first house in the 1940s. Trails of mustard yellow flowers climbed in distressed rows where the sun chewed away at the paper. The scent of hardcover books and dust lingered in the fabric of the walls, telling stories that only ghosts remembered.

After our rejuvenating outing, I yearned for companionship. Friendship. I even felt more like myself, my face made up and hair curled. It felt good to feel pretty again, existent, alive. Picking up my phone, I stared at the black screen. It was time, time to freefall back into society. Modern society, that is, where face-to-face human interaction was as rare as a monkey sighting in the city. Now, we all lived inside our phones, where our deepest human connections were tethered to our Internet connections.

First things first, I wanted to look up that name Detective Meltzer had mentioned, the one Ben had opened up a bank account for. I found the envelope in my purse where I had scribbled it in the corner: Medea Kent. A quick Google search gave me nothing. Not a single result. Strange. The name sounded exotic on my lips. An international client, perhaps? Clearly I wouldn’t find my answers today.

My Facebook hiatus had raised a lot of concern among my so-called friends. I hadn’t posted on social media since Ben’s death, only browsed my newsfeed a time or two and searched for Candace. After all of the messages offering condolences and prayers, I figured I owed my friends a status update. It was the least I could do to show I still existed in the land of the living. Ben had believed that social media was the downfall of society. According to him, it turned everyone into agoraphobic preachers with their own personal pulpits to spout whatever nonsense bubbled inside them that day. Everyone now had a cause, but only behind the safety and anonymity of a screen where there was no accountability. But even I couldn’t resist its draw. You could impulse buy, get your fake news, and make new best friends all in a matter of minutes, with just the swipe of a finger!

Initially, I joined the bandwagon to keep track of long-distance high-school friends. Though maybe friends was a stretch when you hadn’t seen or spoken to someone in person in nearly two decades. But it sated that gnawing curiosity – was the head cheerleader still prettier than you (there went her tight body after three kids!), does the captain of the football team still have that charm (look at that receding hairline!)? It turned out that even the most popular, good-looking kids in high school eventually did plateau out into normalcy, with flabby arms and beer bellies and wrinkles and bad haircuts just like the rest of us. Social media was a socially acceptable form of stalking and self-validation.

Today I had decided to end my Facebook lull and publicly grieve – and publicly heal, I suppose. It was expected when everyone knew your husband had passed … and those who didn’t know deserved fair warning before they tagged me in marriage memes. I admit, I clicked on my Facebook app icon with trepidation. When Ben’s murder hit the news, a lot of speculation had pointed to me, the black widow. It was inevitable, since even the police had their eyes on me. The questions. The accusations. The suspicions. When a spouse ended up dead, with no enemies to speak of, people tended to point fingers at the only obvious suspect: the one with the most to gain. A multi-million-dollar insurance policy was exactly that.

Considering all this, one couldn’t blame me for hiding from public view. Wasn’t that what guilty people did – hide? But I wasn’t guilty. I just wasn’t ready to face all the backlash or sympathy. Until today, when Candace had validated me as a human, spent time and shared laughs and smoothies with me … and it felt so good. I needed more of that, and I knew the first step was back into the virtual world if my healing was to start gaining traction in the real world. I wasn’t the talk of the town anymore. People had moved on for lack of caring. After all, it was a