CHAPTER SEVEN

“Coffee or tea? Tea, right?”

Becky hadn’t answered her. She was hunched over her menu, studying it intently.

“Tea with sugar, right?” Annalise said, speaking louder, trying to get her attention. The waitress had stopped by to ask if they wanted drinks, and Becky hadn’t noticed the woman or Annalise’s gentle prod.

Becky startled then looked up. They’d met at a hip little breakfast café not far from the Strip, since Annalise was due at today’s shoot in an hour for set-up.

Becky’s gray-blue eyes looked weary. “Sorry, dear. Tea is fine,” she said to the waitress, as her fingers fiddled with the edge of her menu. Becky hadn’t seemed like herself this morning. True, Annalise had only spent a quarter of an hour with her so far, and the first few minutes after she’d arrived at the restaurant had consisted of one of the biggest hugs Annalise had ever experienced.

Annalise hadn’t expected the intensity of the older woman’s reaction. Yes, she liked Becky. Well, she loved her in the way you love an aunt or uncle. Becky and her husband had been her family in America the year she’d lived here, and through them she had gotten to know Michael. Sanders hadn’t made it to breakfast today, even though he’d said he would be here. Busy with “some things” Becky had said. “Appointments…you know,” she’d added.

Annalise turned to the waitress. “Some sugar for the tea please. And a coffee for me. Black.”

The waitress nodded and swiveled on her heels.

“Do you know what you want to eat?” Annalise asked, and Becky shook her head.

“Can’t decide.” Becky absently ran her finger across her fork.

“Maybe the special, then? I saw it on the chalkboard. Eggs and chives with homemade sourdough bread.”

“Sure, fine,” Becky said.

After they ordered, Becky continued on like that through breakfast—scattered, distracted, patting her purse, sneaking peeks at her phone as they caught up on the highlights of the last eighteen years. There were highs and lows—awards Annalise had won in journalism, meeting Julien, losing Julien to an early and not unexpected death—all the way through to her work now. Becky shared the latest on her sons and her husband. But every time she mentioned Sanders, something hitched in her voice.

“Is everything okay?” Annalise asked, reaching out a hand and resting it on top of Becky’s.

“Yes,” she said quickly.

“Are you sure?”

The older woman nodded and then clasped Annalise’s hand. She gulped, then fixed on a smile.

“Becky,” Annalise said in a soft voice. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Becky’s eyes floated closed, as if pained. When she opened them, she wiped her finger under her lashes, erasing the threat of tears. “I’m sorry. I’m not usually like this.”

“Is it Sanders?”

Becky’s face looked pinched, and the color seemed to slip away. She sighed heavily. “I’m trying to keep it all together. I really am.”

“Are you guys okay? Is he sick? Is that the appointment?” But then, if he were ill, surely Becky would be with him.

Her old friend shook her head. “Oh no. He’s fit as can be. Well, he has that bad back. But he’s all good otherwise. It’s just…”

“You’re not separating, are you? Divorcing?” Annalise continued, since she’d never been one to tiptoe around a tough situation. Best to be direct. Ask the questions. Most people wanted to talk. Most people were looking for an opening to share their woes. If Becky was, Annalise wanted to be the person to listen.

Becky scoffed and shook her head. “I wouldn’t let him out of my grasp. Same for him,” she said, her tone chased by a light laugh. “It’s just been a tense few months. I haven’t really said much to anyone.”

“I’m here if you want to talk. Or if you just want me to listen,” Annalise offered. Sometimes people shared more with someone they didn’t see regularly. Knowing the person across from you was leaving soon could make it easier to say the hard things. If you knew you didn’t have to see him or her in the near future, you could open up. Your secrets would be tucked safely away in their luggage on the return trip home.

Becky’s shoulders rose as she inhaled deeply. “Ever since the investigation…” she began, then trailed off. “I shouldn’t say anything. I can’t say anything.”

Annalise squeezed her hand. “I understand.”

Clearly, Becky had said all she was able to say. Annalise reached for the sugar, poured some into her coffee, and shifted gears. “So…is the big cruise still happening after Sanders retires?”

“I hope so,” Becky said, twisting her index and middle fingers together. “Fingers are crossed it doesn’t get put off.”

As they talked more about little things, the wheels in Annalise’s head started to turn, and she wondered what would defer Sanders’s retirement, and why Becky was so tense from the investigation. What on earth would they have to be worried about from an inquiry into an incident that happened eighteen years ago? Sanders was Thomas’s best friend back then. They’d worked together.

The wheels picked up speed. Wait a second. Did Sanders know something? Was he talking to the cops?

Her heart squeezed.

Oh.

The appointment.

Was it over the case? Did Sanders have something to hide? Did Becky? As the possibilities took shape, she cycled back eighteen years ago to a night when she’d slipped into the house late, lips bee-stung and bruised, hair a wild tumble, heart racing from being with Michael. Becky had been reading, waiting up for her, and they’d talked briefly in the living room.

“So, the young Michael Paige-Prince. You sure do like him. Is it serious?”

Annalise had nodded with a grin she couldn’t contain. “How do you say it? I am crazy for him.”

“Yes, that’s how we say it here. And I can see why. Smart, kind, and a handsome young man.”

“He is,” Annalise had echoed, feeling dreamy, the way she always felt when she thought of the boy she was falling in love with.

Becky had smiled dopily. “He gets his good looks from his father.”

At age sixteen, she’d barely registered the comment.

Now, years later, she lingered on the remark. He gets his good looks from his father. Surely that was nothing, right? There had been no secret affair between Becky and Thomas, no long-simmering desire? It was just a comment, wasn’t it? Hell, Annalise herself could tell at that age that Michael was “like father, like son” in the looks department. And she didn’t have any weird daddy issues or attraction to her boyfriend’s father, but empirically, Becky was right. Michael was handsome, and so was his father. That was all. Case closed.

Annalise quieted her skeptical side, telling herself that Becky’s comments from years ago couldn’t possibly have anything to do with her odd behavior today.

As Annalise said her good-bye at the end of the meal and slid into the backseat of a Nissan, her Uber ride waiting to whisk her to her shoot, she replayed last night.

The bar, the kiss, Michael’s hands. His mouth, teeth, tongue.

His name on her lips.

Her fingers between her legs.

Hot sparks rained down on her, and she shivered. She’d be seeing him this afternoon. The first man she’d ever loved, back when she hardly knew what that butterfly feeling was in her chest—flutters, wings and all.

First love was like that. Enchanting and light, stitched from an endless thread of hopes and dreams. It made you feel invincible and hungry for more all at once. She’d wanted to be with Michael so much when she returned to France. She’d tried so hard to fight the distance through letters. They’d attempted to stay together through the end of high school and on into college.

But just like proximity breeds closeness, distance kills it. Too many days apart, weeks alone, and years gone by. Paper and ink couldn’t feed their hungry hearts. Eventually, their love became unsustainable. Stretched too far, it collapsed under the weight.

They drifted apart after the first year of college. Even then, she’d clung to the distant possibility that someday, somehow they’d meet again. Hope powered her even in the years when they no longer talked. She took a job as a waitress at a local café during school, saving all her euros, thinking they’d fund a return trip to the United States. Like a piggybank for rekindled love.

But by the time she’d have been able to use them, she and her high school sweetheart had faded to memories. The fondest ones to be sure, and she’d kept a book of photographs of their days together, a record of her young love.

Besides, the euros had gone to something else.

She’d had to move on. He’d moved on too.

Annalise graduated from university, hunted for jobs across Europe, and eventually landed the gig of her dreams as a photojournalist. There she met Julien, a rival photographer, soon her lover, then her fiancé.

That was what Julien was the time she’d seen Michael ten years ago. He’d just sent her the most beautiful and heartbreaking love letter, and it had ripped her apart knowing she couldn’t respond in kind. Mere days after receiving it, chance had ushered her to the airport in Marseilles on a job, and she’d run into him on a layover. He’d just moved to Europe and was stationed there for his work in army intelligence. It was unexpected and God, the sight of him, a man then, had punched her in the chest. She was in love with Julien, but guilt still gnawed at her when Michael’s eyes traveled down her body and landed on her hand. Her engagement ring.

As if she’d broken a promise.

And for the briefest of moments that afternoon, she’d been tempted to break one to Julien. She hadn’t. She wouldn’t. Straying wasn’t in her nature. But had Michael sent that letter before she met Julien, her life might have taken a different course, back to him. As it was, she’d had to march onward, and she did. But with so much that had once been between them, perhaps it was no surprise, really, that the first man she’d ever loved would be the one to rekindle all that was dormant in her body. Last night had ignited something inside her.

Julien had said over and over that he didn’t want her to mourn him forever, or at all. “Love, I won’t be here always. You’ll need to move on. You’re young and beautiful and smart and vibrant.”

She’d laughed him off, shook her head. “Darling, you aren’t going anywhere. I won’t let you,” she’d said, then mimed digging her claws into her husband’s chest as they’d relaxed on a park bench watching the sunset by the Eiffel Tower one evening. But Julien didn’t toss back his sandy blond head, or smile his sweet, sexy grin at her. Instead, he’d tugged her close. “The odds, Annalise. The odds. Five years is much more likely than fifty.”

“Stop that,” she said. “Let’s not talk about this. The sun is falling. The lights are coming on.”

The odds were not in their favor. They never had been, and she’d known that before he got down on one knee. He had a lethal arrhythmia, a genetic condition that meant he could die of cardiac arrest at any moment. Well aware she’d likely be widowed young, she’d walked down the aisle anyway. She wasn’t blind. She wasn’t foolish. But her love for him was powerful. It couldn’t be quashed by medicine or odds or statistics.

“Fifty years or five years. I want whatever you have,” she’d said to him after he proposed.

She’d gotten eight.

A tear slipped down her cheek as she glanced out the tinted window of the Nissan. The car veered right onto the Strip, and the bright light of the sun pounded down from the sky. Las Vegas in daytime was exposed. Nothing hidden. Every trick, every mirror, every trap was starkly visible in the daylight.

She’d always been so good at spotting sleight of hand, at something out of place, at shining the light in a dark corner. But with Julien, she’d chosen to believe in the illusion—in the glass half-full, in the possibility of fifty years with him. Hope was more powerful than knowledge, love stronger than evidence. She’d loved him fiercely until the day he died in his sleep two years ago.

Knowing the odds had never prepared her for the wreckage of her heart when she found him that morning, unable to be roused. Over the next two years, the only things that got her through each day were routines. Work, walking, shooting photos, taking care of her mother, buying bread. Those simple acts had guided her out of the black hole of grief, as had the change in her career to fashion photography. Her heart had been too heavy for the weight of current affairs.

As the car pulled into the portico at Caesars, she glanced at her watch. A few more hours until Michael arrived.

Her stomach swooped, remembering last night, fast-forwarding to what might happen this afternoon.

Julien had wanted her to move on. Her sister wanted her to move on. She didn’t think she’d ever want to love again. It was too risky, too dangerous. What if she let herself, then lost again? She shuddered at the thought. Once was hard enough to find the man you love gone from this world.

But a moment, a snapshot of not feeling so goddamn empty and lonely? She’d experienced that last night. She’d held it in the palm of her hands, owned it deep in her chest.

That.

She wanted that. She was so fucking tired of denying herself everything good in the world.