Waking up in Laurel’s old bedroom without her made my muscles tense. Having abandoned the wet spot in the guest bedroom last night, at first I was reluctant to sleep in Laurel’s bedroom again, since the last time this happened, I went home without her. Sleeping in this bed almost felt like a bad omen.

But as I sat up in bed, I quickly relaxed when I heard the sounds of someone moving around downstairs. Glancing at the clock, I saw it was 7:13 a.m.

It was a good thing I didn’t have any important meetings at work today. I could go in late or take the day off. Though, I probably shouldn’t slide back into my old habits. I’d call Jade later to tell her I would be in after lunch.

I found Laurel in the kitchen, her blonde hair pulled into a high ponytail as she flipped pancakes on a griddle. The sizzle of the batter hitting the hot iron made me nostalgic for the first year after we began living together.

Laurel thought she had to make me my favorite lingonberry pancakes every weekend. It took me an entire year to work up the nerve to tell her I was sick to fucking death of lingonberry pancakes.

“Oh, great,” she said, spotting me out of the corner of her eye. “I was trying to let you sleep in, but I was getting hungry. So I went to Freddy’s and got some stuff to make breakfast. I’m making pancakes — not lingonberry.”

I shook my head. “Did you buy a new griddle and utensils just to make breakfast?”

She laughed. “I know it’s wasteful, but I didn’t feel like having cereal again, and I was too hungry to dig through the boxes in the garage for the one that has my mom’s old griddle and baking sheets.”

I came up behind her, grabbing her hips as I leaned in to kiss her neck. “When did you start waking up so early?”

“I have a job now, remember?” she said, wiggling her hips to squirm out of my grasp. “You’re gonna make me burn myself. Go sit down and I’ll bring it to you.”

I cocked an eyebrow. Who the hell was this person?

The Laurel who left me a month ago only cooked after she’d read the latest self-help book on grief. Those bouts of motivation only lasted a week or two before she would start refusing to eat again and staring into space for hours at a time. It made me wonder if the answer to her withdrawal was just to hire one of those self-help writers to bloviate their comforting platitudes at her all day long.

Someone once told me that proverbs were platitudes until you’d experienced something that gave them meaning. That wasn’t true for me. All that shit, the motivational quotes and words of wisdom we were fed through our social media feeds, it all became meaningless nonsense.

No wise man or woman could ever string together the right combination of words to make sense of what it felt like to lose a child. The pain defied description. It transcended words. I understood why Laurel ran from it.

But as I watched her pull a sheet of foil layered with crisp bacon out of the oven, I hoped that this busy, cheerful mood she was in wasn’t just another way to bury the pain.

As Laurel had spent the past two years trying to hide from her agony, I had been trying to chase mine down, hoping to one day tackle it and beat it to a bloody pulp. Though I had done a pretty good job of remembering not to fill Laurel in on the details of the case, it didn’t mean it wasn’t always on my mind.

Every night, I opened my laptop and checked the latest posts on the websleuths.com thread dedicated to Junior’s case. Every day, I checked my Facebook app to see who had posted and commented in the Justice for Jack Stratton Jr. group.

I weathered the ups and downs of the promising leads that went nowhere. I stayed up at night remembering the moment I had to check my baby boy’s cold body for a pulse. In the end, I did it as much for Laurel as I did it for myself. I knew when — not if — we cracked this case, she would finally understand why I needed this so badly.

She served the food and set down a carafe of French press coffee and some mugs in the center of the table. “Can you help me look through the boxes in the garage for the rest of the kitchen stuff?”

I waited until she was sitting in the chair next to me. “Baby, I have to go to work today. But I promise I’ll come by after work and bring in anything you need. I’m sure you want the pictures of Junior, too.”

She paused as she picked up her fork, balling up her fist around the handle in a white-knuckled grip. “On second thought, I’ll look for the boxes myself. I don’t want to make you drive all the way back here.”

I tilted the maple syrup bottle over my pancakes and cursed when I accidentally poured too much. “It’s not that far. You know I drive into Portland regularly. Do you not want me to come back?”

She was taking too long to answer. I had to stop myself from telling her to spit it out. Did she not want me to come back or was she just trying to deflect my attention from the missing pictures of our son?

She admitted to me in the letter I burned that she hated how I put up dozens of framed pictures of Junior in our house. Well, she didn’t say she hated it, but it was implied.

I wanted to be supportive. I did. But this was one of her many coping mechanisms I couldn’t understand. It made me wonder if she was trying to forget Junior.

She finally answered. “Okay. Yes, you can bring in the pictures. But just one of the boxes. I… I can’t handle going through all of them. Not yet.”

I nodded. “I understand. I’ll get the boxes before I leave,” I said, cutting a chunk off my stack of pancakes. “I actually have a favor to ask of you, too. I know you already agreed to go to the Halloween party with me, but I was hoping you’d also come with me to my dad’s birthday party in a couple of weeks. You should be home by then, right?”

Her gaze flicked toward me with panic in her eyes. “Oh, my God. I can’t believe I almost forgot that.”

I swallowed my pancakes. “I would have reminded you. So can you come?”

She let out a heavy sigh as she stared at her untouched pancakes. “Do they know we were separated?”

“Of course not. I promised Jess I’d murder her if she told them.”

The tension in her shoulders loosened at the mention of my sister. From what Jess had told me, Laurel and her had struck up some kind of long distance friendship since she left.

They used to mostly tolerate each other. Jess thought Laurel was too much of a goodie-goodie. She didn’t know my pixie’s dirty ways. I supposed now that Laurel left me, Jess felt she could relate to her a bit more.

“Will Jess be there?” she asked, finally digging into her breakfast.

“It’s my dad’s sixtieth, so she and John will definitely be there. As will his golf buddies and his friends from work and the homeowner’s association and every relative in a hundred-mile radius. I’ll understand if you’re not feeling up to it.”

She chuckled. “Of course I’ll be there. You know I love your dad more than I love you.”

“Yeah, no fucking shit,” I said, cracking a smile as I stuffed my mouth with more pancakes.

As I watched her eat her breakfast with gusto, I was torn between two emotions. I was happy to see her eating again, but it also made me a bit angry, maybe even suspicious.

Why did it take being apart from me for her to regain her appetite? Why did she have to leave me to gain the strength to bring out Junior’s pictures? What was she doing in Portland to overcome the debilitating anxiety that had kept her so closed off for the past two years? This couldn’t all be attributed to her new gardening hobby, could it?

I thought of the wedding ring I’d accidentally left at home. Maybe it was a fateful slip of memory. Knowing Laurel was out here without her ring gave me a reason to keep fighting for her to come home, to keep attending those counseling sessions.

After breakfast, I located five more boxes in the garage labeled KITCHEN STUFF and one labeled BABY PHOTOS, and left them on the counter. “Do you need me to come back later and help you move some more stuff?”

Laurel joined me in the kitchen, shaking her head as she looked up at me. “Nope. I’m just going to work in the garden. I need to get that laurel tree transplanted before the rain comes.”

I reached up and clasped one side of her face in my hand, smiling as she leaned into it. “I love the fuck out of you, you know that?”

She smiled and nodded, then she surprised me by wrapping her arms around my waist and squeezing me tightly as she buried her face in my shoulder. “You don’t have to come back… unless you want to.”

I laughed as I crushed her in my arms. “Would I ever say no to you?”

As soon as the words came out, I regretted them. Thinking of all the times I’d said no when she asked me to have another baby. Talk about putting my big foot in my big fucking mouth.

Her arms loosened and she stepped back, looking up at me with so much trepidation in her wide brown eyes. “Did you really mean it when you said you want to have another baby?”

“Of course I meant it,” I replied without hesitation, though inside me a battle of heart and reason raged on. “I know we’ve still got work to do, and I’m going to ask Jade today to help me find a support group, like Bonnie suggested. But I want to move on. I—”

I cut myself off before I made the mistake of bringing up Junior’s case. There had been some recent developments — a possible suspect living in Idaho who was brought to our attention by someone in the Facebook group, a woman who noticed similarities in a string of burglaries in Boise. But I knew Laurel wouldn’t want to know about it until someone was actually arrested.

Her gaze fell and she took another step back. “Jack, I couldn’t sleep last night, thinking about how things might be different… better if I moved back in. Not in a couple of weeks, but now, like, as soon as I get the tree replanted. And there’s one thing I would need you to do before I can even consider it.”

My heart raced as I anticipated her asking me to do a fucking cartwheel on a tightrope. It sure as hell felt like that was what I was doing lately. Trying to figure out how to get Laurel to come home was like trying to wrangle a difficult piece of code. It was keeping me up at night and driving me absolutely fucking insane.

“What do you need me to do, pixie?” I replied softly.

She looked like a child about to confess to stealing from the cookie jar. “I need you to get rid of your guns.”

I fucking knew it. Pressing my lips together, I took a deep breath and, once again, swallowed my discontent.

“Baby, we’ve already talked about this. I’ll get rid of the guns if and only when you let me get a full-time security team.” I stood up straighter, not afraid to use my size to make a point. “Marriage is a compromise, but I will never compromise your safety. Those are my terms.”

I didn’t understand how she could fault me with wanting to keep her safe; especially after all the weird threats we received in the months after the murders.

She closed her eyes as she let out a deep sigh, and I knew I was breaking her down. Laurel always got this look when she was ready to give in: eyebrows raised as she chewed on her lower lip. She had so many tells, and I knew every single fucking one, because they all belonged to me.

She exhaled a deep sigh. “Okay, we can get a security team. But I still need a couple days to wrap things up in Portland.”

I couldn’t control my Kool-aid grin. “So you’re moving back home when? Tomorrow or Sunday?”

She shrugged. “Tomorrow?”

I let out a huge sigh. “Thank. Fuck.”

She rolled her eyes. “Go to work before I change my mind.”

I laughed as I wrapped my arms around her waist and she yelped as I lifted her off the floor. “If you change your mind, I’ll just change it back.”

Her breathing quickened as I held on to her, our faces nose-to-nose, eyes locked on each other. She was thinking about something, but this time I couldn’t read her, which surprised and scared me.

I set her down on the floor and kissed her forehead. “I’ll call you if I get out of the office in time to stop by tonight.”

I wanted her to know that the decision to come back tonight was mine. But I would be coming back, because I wanted Laurel to feel safe.

As she was about to turn away, I grabbed her waist and pressed her up against the refrigerator. She moaned as I thrust my tongue inside her mouth and slid my hand down the front of her panties. I kissed her long and hard as I shoved two fingers inside her. Gathering her wetness, I brought it forward and used it to finger her clit until she orgasmed.

I bit her lip, tugging it a little as I stepped back. “I’ll call you later.”

I walked out of the kitchen leaving her breathless and stunned, just the way I wanted her. After a brief stop at the gym and the house to wash up, I arrived at the office at half past one in the afternoon.

Jade briefed me on the phone calls I’d missed and warned me that she had heard Kent talking to one of the other partners, speculating about whether I was going to start missing work again.

I thanked her for her stellar spy work and asked her to call a few grieving parent support groups in the area to see which meeting times were the least active. I didn’t want to go to a meeting with dozens of sad sacks wallowing in their own self-pity.

Jess called me at four p.m. to tell me about her latest conversation with Laurel. “She told me you two had a very nice evening together. You fucked her, right?” she said, getting straight to the point.

“Don’t ask me if I fucked my wife. I don’t ask you if you fuck every basement-dwelling geek you go out with.”

“Touché, bro. So is she moving back in? She wouldn’t give me a straight answer.”

I leaned back in my chair. “She’s moving back in once she’s squared things off in Portland. Did you book your ticket?”

“For the party? What do you think I am? Some kind of loser procrastinator?”

“Do you need me to ask Jade to book it?”

“That would be fantastic. Thank you, brother.”

“My pleasure. If you talk to Dad, tell him I’ll bring the beer and the food for the party.”

She laughed. “You fucking kiss-ass. Whatevs. See you in twelve days, loser.”

Jade entered my office with a yellow Post-It note stuck to her index finger. “I wrote down the addresses and meeting times for the groups with the least attendees. I figured you wouldn’t want me to email that information,” she said, nodding toward the door.

She knew all our emails were monitored, whether we liked it or not. One of the many pitfalls of working in a competitive field like app development was that it was very difficult to trust anyone. There was a constant lingering fear of having your code or designs stolen by a competitor or a disgruntled employee.

Kent and I agreed, when I came to him asking for venture capital funding, that the only way we would work together was if all our emails and electronic devices were subject to constant surveillance. I kept the microphones and cameras on my phone and laptop disabled, but that didn’t change the fact that all the data traffic was monitored.

I accepted the Post-It note from Jade. “That’s great. Thanks for your discretion.”

As she closed the door behind her, I stared at the note for a very long time. None of the groups were in Hood River, but one of them was in Portland and was meeting tonight at six p.m. My instinct was to question whether I was ready to go, but that was stupid. There was no reason I couldn’t just go and listen. I doubted they would force me to participate. If they tried, I’d find another group. Simple as that.

When I entered the meeting room in the office building on Southeast Division Street, I thought I had arrived at the wrong location. Every folding metal chair in the room was filled was occupied by an elderly person. There weren’t many, as Jade had verified, maybe nine or ten people in total. But none of them were under sixty years old.

I turned around to leave, when someone shouted out, “Excuse me, sir?”

I turned around and almost groaned when I realized it was a woman at the front of the room calling out to me. “Sorry. I think I’m in the wrong place,” I said with a shrug. “I’ll see myself out.”

She smiled. “Are you here for the Traumatic Loss Grief Group?”

I glanced around at all the wrinkled faces staring at me. What the hell? Maybe it would be better to do this in a room of old people.

“Yeah, is that what this is?” I replied.

She tossed her light-brown hair over her shoulder and nodded. “Sure is. The registration is over there,” she said, pointing at an elderly woman in the corner who was sitting at a folding table with a clipboard in front of her. “You’re aware this is a ten-week course, right?”

A fucking course? What was I getting myself into?

I highly doubted Jade knew this was a course, or she wouldn’t have written the information for this grief group on the note she gave me. Still, I wished she had done a bit more research.

I smiled politely. “Thanks. I’ll just register over there.”

The elderly woman with the Betty White hair and Bea Arthur attitude took my name and phone number before she asked me to pay a $100 registration fee for the course. I managed not to roll my eyes as I handed over my credit card and the woman ran it through a phone scanner with the deftness of a tattooed barista.

I found an empty chair in the back row, in case I wanted to sneak out, then I unlocked my phone to shoot off a text to Nate.

I ended our text convo by inviting him to my dad’s birthday party next weekend, but I was relieved when he said he was busy. I didn’t want to spread myself too thin with Laurel around.

A heavyset man with a thin combover a few rows up turned around, scowling at me as I glanced at the Facebook app on my phone. Why did old people hold so much scorn for technology?

The lady with the long, light-brown hair and no makeup introduced herself as Dr. Meryl Burke. She had a Ph.D. in psychology and she specialized in helping people deal with the loss of a loved one to a traumatic event such as suicide, homicide, or tragic accidents.

“Since this is a paid course, I won’t push you to go beyond your limits. If you don’t feel comfortable sharing with the group in the first couple of classes, that is totally understandable,” she began, and I could swear she glanced in my direction. “However, you will eventually need to participate. I can only show you the path. You, my friends, must walk it.”

Why was I the only one here with a firm ball sack? Did old people lose loved ones to traumatic incidents this often? I would think they mostly lost them to illness. Maybe this doctor had a private practice where she saw mostly geriatric patients, and she forgot to mention that in the description of the grief group.

As soon as this thought crossed my mind, in walked a woman with dark, shoulder-length hair, wearing a black North Face jacket that appeared to be at least two sizes too big.

Dr. Burke’s eyebrows perked up. “Hi, there! Are you here for the grief group?”

The woman clutched the jacket tightly closed over her breasts as she looked around the room at all the heads of thinning, white hair. Then her blue eyes fixed on me, and she looked surprised.

Quickly turning away, she addressed Dr. Burke. “Yes, I’m… Yes.”

“Great!” Dr. Burke replied cheerfully, and directed the woman toward the hipster grandma at the folding table.

Once the woman had finished registering, she turned around and, with great trepidation, walked toward the back of the room. I was not surprised when she sat in the chair in front of me. But I was a little surprised when she spent almost the entire one-hour “class” on her phone. It seemed she was as enthused about being here as I was.

I spent the entire class doing my usual checks on Facebook and websleuths.com. When Dr. Burke excused us, I rushed out of the building, eager to get back to Laurel. But as soon as I stepped outside, I heard the woman’s voice.

“Hey! I know you,” she called out, and I rolled my eyes.

No doubt this woman had seen me on a news broadcast or in a tech news bulletin in her Facebook feed. It sucked being just famous enough for people to recognize you, but not famous enough for them to remember your name.

I spun around with a phony smile plastered to my face. “Hi! I’m sorry. I didn’t catch your name.”

She squinted at me as she stopped clutching her jacket over her breasts. “Jack?”

Her jacket fell open and my eyes widened as I noticed the ample tits she was hiding under there. I knew when I looked up, I’d finally notice the scar on the left side of her upper lip. The evidence of the night we’d gotten shit-faced and she slipped and fell, splitting her lip open on the bathtub.

“Natalie? What… What are you doing here?”

She shook her head as she pulled her jacket closed again. “Long story. Why are you here?”

I nodded. “Long story. Look, I have to get going. My wife is waiting for me. I’m… I’d say it’s good to see you, but under these circumstances… Well, I’m sorry I can’t stay and chat.”

She nodded. “Yeah, me too. Drive safe.”

The eight-minute drive to Laurel’s mom’s house felt like an eternity as I tried to shake off the guilty thoughts of how I’d ended things with Natalie more than a decade ago.

She was the reason I’d gone to OSU Cascades instead of going to any of the other dozen colleges I’d been accepted to. She was my high school sweetheart and I couldn’t imagine being hundreds of miles away from her. Then I fucked up by losing sight of her at that party.

I still cringed every time I thought of how I accused her of cheating on me the next day. Once I’d found out the truth about why she’d disappeared on me, it was too late. The damage was done.

Now here I was, struggling to get my wife to understand why I needed to protect her. If Laurel backed out on letting me bring in a security team, I was going to put my foot down. No way I was going to let anything happen to anyone I loved.

Never. Again.

When I pulled into the driveway behind Laurel’s SUV, the sun was just beginning to set, casting long shadows over the parched yellow lawn. As I searched the first floor, I grabbed the bottle of bourbon off the coffee table and headed for the kitchen. Peeking out the kitchen window toward the backyard, I smiled when I saw her on her knees, refilling the hole where she’d transplanted the laurel tree with more fresh soil.

I stepped out onto the back porch and she looked up at the sound of my footsteps. “Hey, baby.”

She nearly jumped out of her skin, then she clutched her chest as she squinted at me. Her shoulders relaxed as she swiped the back of her wrist across her sweaty brow. “You scared the hell out of me. But you’re just the person I was hoping to see. Can you help me with some of those bags of soil in the shed?”

I followed her to the shed and set down the bottle of bourbon on the workbench so I could grab a bag of dirt. She asked me to take four of the six bags to the backyard, where I dumped them around the roots of the tree. As I entered the shed to retrieve the fourth and final bag, I caught her reaching her hand down the front of her jean shorts.

“Don’t laugh. I’m so sweaty and itchy right now,” she said, her eyes rolling back as she scratched her crotch.

I laughed. “I can scratch that itch for you.”

She slid her hand out and looked up at me with enough smolder to start a forest fire. “Be my guest.”

Looking her in the eye, I reached down and undid the button and zipper on her shorts. I shoved them down her legs until she stepped out of them, kicking off her flats in the process. Grabbing her by the waist, I lifted her onto the potting bench and spread her legs.

She had shaved off the landing strip of hair that was there last night. Did she know I was coming back?

“Where does it itch, baby?”

She pointed at her clit and I cocked an eyebrow as she tried not to smile. Reaching for the bottle of bourbon, I handed it to her and she took a long swig. I laughed when she began to cough.

“Give me that,” I said, taking the bottle. “That’s good stuff. You have to treat it nicely. Like this.”

I tilted the bottle, letting a generous pour of $300-bourbon stream over her sleek pussy in smooth amber rivers. She moaned as I licked her clean then thrust my tongue inside her. The sweet, sharp bite of bourbon and the earthiness of her arousal combined to form a flavor better than any vintage liquor in existence. It was a decadent cocktail of pure adrenaline and lust. And I couldn't fucking get enough.

I drank her up, literally. I splashed her clit with bourbon and licked it up slowly, until she was begging me to let her come. When her legs began to twitch, I eased off a bit, massaging her entrance and teasing her gently until the twitching stopped. Then speeding up again to bring her to the brink.

Rinse. Repeat. Until she fucking exploded. Her walls clenching and unclenching before me was a fucking magnificent sight to see.

But I didn’t watch for too long. I needed to be inside her. Every inch of my cock seethed for the warm embrace of that plush pussy.

I slipped a condom out of the back pocket of my slacks and quickly undid the front of my pants. With one-handed stealth, I sheathed my erection, wrapping my other arm around her waist to pull her forward. I slid into her slowly enough to know that the tears on her face weren’t from any physical pain.

I sighed internally. It was the condom.

Old habits died hard.

Sliding out of her, I hissed at the sensation of the rubber stretching my taut skin as I pulled off the condom with way too much haste. As I pushed back into her, I noticed her eyes were closed now. I leaned forward and kissed her, but she didn’t return the kiss.

“What the fuck is it now?” I said, unable to control my frustration.

She pushed me away and hopped off the bench, violently snatching her clothes off the floor. “You lied.”

I looked down at my rock solid erection and shook my head.