The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2017 by Jamie Brenner
Cover photographs: woman © Guy Crittenden / Getty Images; hat © Tais Policanti / Getty Images
Author photograph by Laura Boyd
Cover design by Ploy Siripant
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ISBN 978-0-316-39492-5
E3-20180222-DA-PC
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Acknowledgments
Discover More Jamie Brenner
About the Author
Also by Jamie Brenner
This book is dedicated to all the brave men and women who serve this country and to the families who support them.
Chapter One
The warm winters still surprised her, every day a gift. But that particular morning, the heat was a problem. She didn’t want to wear a short-sleeved dress.
It seemed the entire city of Los Angeles had turned out, like it was the Super Bowl or the Academy Awards. The Staples Center arena was filled to capacity, with hundreds more left standing outside. Lauren looked out at a sea of silver-and-black hockey jerseys, military uniforms, and American flags, all the colors blurring together like a spinning pinwheel.
She had spent dozens of days and nights in that arena cheering on her husband playing ice hockey for the LA Kings. But today, she wasn’t part of the crowd. She was separate, up front and on display, sitting by the podium dressed in black and hiding behind dark glasses.
Surrounded by thousands of people, Lauren felt completely alone.
An hour into her husband’s memorial service, she was dizzy with nerves and exhaustion. Grief was an odd thing. It made you numb but exquisitely sensitive at the same time. She had to admire the emotion’s versatility; it now owned her completely.
She scanned the front row of the stands to find her parents. It was strange; for the first time in years she truly wanted her mother, and yet there was nothing her mother could say or do to make her feel better. She had almost told her parents not to come, and she certainly didn’t want to see her sister.
“This nonsense has gone on long enough,” her mother had said over the phone. “You just lost your husband. You need your family around you. Of course your sister will be there.”
But she wasn’t.
Now, under the glare of television lights set up for ESPN’s live broadcast of the memorial service, her parents looked lost. Lauren tried to catch her mother’s eye, but she was focused on the jumbotron showing the president’s tribute to Rory: “Our fallen soldier, a true American hero.” Her mother’s expression seemed to say, How did we get here?
Lauren hoped she didn’t have the same expression on her face. Not when the world was watching. Not when photos of her would appear everywhere. Would they see what she was thinking? That this felt like theater, a circus, a show that had nothing to do with her husband? That she was just playing her part, a role she hadn’t auditioned for and didn’t want?
Grieving widow. Just twenty-four years old. Such a tragedy. Such a loss.
And then the part of the show when a man she’d never met before handed her a folded American flag. She reached for it mechanically and placed it in her lap. She knew these ceremonies, the symbolism of the flag, were meant to give her comfort. But going through the motions just made her feel like a fake. It was useless; her world would never again have meaning.
Sitting there, she tried to deflect the waves of sympathy, thinking, This is my fault. If you only knew; this is my fault.
Just when she thought the moment couldn’t get any worse, it did. She started to cry, under the scrutiny of millions of eyes on her, the flash of cameras capturing every sob. It was unbearable to have something so private—losing her husband—play out so publicly.
Just get through today, she told herself. After today, all the attention would fade. The world would move on. And she could disappear.
As a war correspondent, Matt Brio had landed in some uncomfortable and even dangerous situations all around the globe: Tsunami-ravaged Thailand. Baghdad. Syria. For a few crazy years, he had worked in unimaginable conditions. He should have been prepared for anything, and yet landing in sunny LA after flying in from freezing New York somehow still managed to throw him off his game.
Drenched in sweat outside the Staples Center, thinking he would happily trade his Canon XF100 for a bottle of water, he willed himself to focus and panned the video-camera lens across the throngs of people outside. About a yard away from him, a grown man wearing an LA Kings number 89 jersey held his young son’s hand and sobbed. Matt wanted to get the man
on camera and ask, “What did Rory Kincaid mean to you?” but he didn’t have time. The real story was inside.
The question was, could Matt actually get inside? He wouldn’t know until he tried flashing his long-expired press pass, a relic from his days working in journalism.
His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he ignored it. No doubt it was someone from two time zones away wondering why the hell he’d canceled the scheduled shoot for the documentary he was in the middle of directing. But if there was one thing Matt had learned, it was that it was better to beg forgiveness than ask permission, and that went for both missing the shoot today and for crashing the memorial service.
Matt made his way to security and handed his press pass to the guard. If he’d thought the whole thing through better, he might have been able to wrangle a legitimate pass from an old colleague. But nothing about this day had been thought through. The flight to LA, the decision to show up at the service, all impulses. His entire career had started with an impulse, so why stop now?
But this wasn’t a career move. What drew him to the stadium on that hot and inconvenient day, the magnetic pull that he could no more ignore than he could stop breathing, was personal.
The guard waved him inside, either missing the expiration date on his pass or simply not caring. The service was half over, anyway. Matt followed a second security guy’s direction to the gate and escalator that would lead to the press box.
Matt jostled for a spot in the crowded pen, nodding to a few journalists he knew and then looking up at the video of the president eulogizing the hockey star turned soldier. Beside him, a woman wearing a CNN badge began to cry at the words “American hero.” Seriously? Matt thought. Okay, it was a tragedy. But was it more of a tragedy because Rory Kincaid had been a famous athlete? There were thousands of guys deployed overseas at that very moment.
The jumbotron screen went dark, and a three-star general stepped up to the microphone.
Matt was more interested in the woman seated just a few feet away from him, Rory Kincaid’s young widow. He adjusted his camera, watching her through the lens. Her dark hair was pulled into a low ponytail, her face obscured by large black sunglasses. She was the epitome of fragile grief, and for a second Matt felt a pang. He shook it away.
Matt understood grief. He understood loss. But his hero had died without fanfare, just a footnote in history. One of tens of thousands; no one cared about that story.
So Matt supposed the Rory Kincaid story would have to do.
Chapter Two
Beth Adelman tried to keep up a cheerful patter of conversation during the hour-and-a-half drive from Philadelphia to the Jersey Shore. Her daughter was having none of it. A month since Lauren had lost her husband, and she was only getting more withdrawn.
Lauren slumped in the passenger seat, staring out the window. Late January; the sky was gray and the trees bare. Beth turned on the defroster and glanced over at Lauren.
It was hard not to think of all the summer Saturday mornings when she and her husband and the girls had made this same drive. She would wake her daughters at the crack of dawn, and Lauren and Stephanie would climb into the backseat wearing bathing suits under their shorts and T-shirts. Still yawning, with butter-slick bagels in their hands, the girls squabbled. In those days, arguments over foot space and other backseat boundaries began before they even pulled onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike. If a foot or stray beach-bag strap strayed over the line to someone else’s side while the car was still in the driveway, yelling would ensue, and Howard, cramming their suitcases into the trunk, would call out, “I’m going to stick one of you in here!” Joyful noise.
Such a contrast to the current ride.
Beth knew she was looking at the past through rose-colored glasses, but even the eternal bickering between the girls was something she would gladly take in exchange for the current silence.
She turned off the Atlantic City Expressway, and Lauren lowered her window. Beth heard the call of seagulls, and she tried to convince herself that everything was going to be fine. That Lauren wasn’t making a mistake.
Beth didn’t usually think of the beach house that her parents had left her as secluded, but geographically it was out there. Absecon Island was a barrier island on the Jersey Shore of the Atlantic Ocean. Beth was afraid that it was the remoteness that attracted Lauren to the house, not just the comfort of family memories.
There was no traffic on Ventnor Avenue. In the winter, the Jersey Shore felt deserted. Beth was certain Lauren was underestimating how isolated she would feel all alone in that big house in the half-empty town under gray skies and with the chill of the wind off a cold ocean. But in the weeks since Rory had been killed in Iraq, there was just no talking to her. It was a tragedy, a god-awful tragedy. Of course it was. But her daughter had shut down, and for the life of her, Beth had no idea what to do about it.
“Lauren, look—there’s Lucy!” Beth said, pointing to the six-story elephant, a tourist attraction that had fascinated Lauren as a child. “You girls used to get so excited whenever we passed her. Remember?”
Lauren glanced to her left but said nothing.
Minutes later, Beth turned off Atlantic Avenue and onto a short cul-de-sac. The house her parents had left to her was a beachfront four-bedroom Colonial Revival, gray and white but somehow stuck with the name the Green Gable. In the old days, it wasn’t until hours after their arrival that the girls set foot inside. As soon as the car turned into the driveway, they pulled off their flip-flops and ran to the sand like they were “shot from a cannon,” as her father said every single weekend. It was still early, and the beach was empty enough for them to make an easy beeline to the ocean, Stephanie calling out, “Last one to the water is a rotten egg!”
“It’s not a race!” Lauren yelled, and yet she always dashed to keep up with her sister, her feet sinking into deep pockets of sand as she ran, stumbling but moving forward.
Beth sighed. Why couldn’t life always be that simple?
Now, the Green Gable was exactly as it had always been, except the wind- and sand-battered wood sign was more faded, the moss-green words almost indistinguishable from the gray background. Beth turned off the car and closed her eyes. How she wished her own mother were still around to tell her how to deal with this. But she was gone, leaving a beautiful house that was small consolation.
Lauren just sat there, zombielike.
“Come on, Lauren. Grab one of the bags.”
The house smelled musty and close. Beth cracked some windows despite the frigid wind. When she’d left in August, she hadn’t expected to return until spring. She couldn’t have imagined that a few months later, her handsome, vibrant son-in-law would be dead, leaving her younger daughter a widow, and that the Green Gable would beckon to Lauren with some false promise of peace.
“I’ll make a run to Casel’s for groceries,” Beth said, heading for the kitchen to take stock of what, if anything, she had left behind.
“No, Mom. Don’t worry about it. I’m fine.”
Lauren lugged the heaviest suitcase up the stairs. Beth abandoned the kitchen and followed her, surprised to see her turn into her old childhood bedroom.
“Why not the master bedroom? It has the better view.”
“That still feels like Gran’s room.”
“Don’t be silly, Lauren. If you’re going to be here for a few weeks, you might as well—”
“Not a few weeks, Mom. I’m staying here indefinitely.”
The bedroom was white and sea-foam green with a queen-size bed framed in antique cast iron. A bone-colored French pot cupboard served as her nightstand. There was a pen on it, and a framed photo of Lauren and her older sister. Stephanie had one arm draped around Lauren’s shoulders as they stood at the edge of the ocean, both of them sunburned, sandy, with long wet hair.
Beth sighed heavily. “Lauren, I love you, hon, but I’m really thinking this isn’t the best idea. I understand you don’t want to stay in LA but at least come home to Philly so w
e can be there for you. You need a support system.”
Lauren turned her back to her, opened her suitcase. “I need to be alone.”
Beth walked to the window, looking out at the overcast sky. “I don’t know what you expect me to do. Just leave you here? Just turn around and get back on the highway?”
“Yeah. And Mom, remember, if anyone contacts you about me, you don’t know where I am.”
“Who’s going to contact me?”
“I don’t know, Mom. A reporter? Just don’t say anything. Promise?”
“Of course. No reporters—got it. But you’re doing the wrong thing, isolating yourself out here.”
No response. Beth was overwhelmed with one of the worst feelings a mother could experience in the face of her child’s pain: powerlessness.
Four Years Later
Chapter Three
Lauren’s feet pounded the boardwalk in the final stretch of her morning run. With the ocean to her right, the beachfront homes of Longport to her left, she looked straight ahead. She ran without headphones so she could hear the ocean and the seagulls. Most days, they were the only sounds along her solitary twelve-mile run from Longport to Atlantic City and back.
Today felt different. It wasn’t just the changing early-morning light, though that was part of it. In the winter, she did her entire run in darkness. Lately, halfway through, the sun was up. Today, by the time she passed Ventnor, at around the ten-mile mark, it was bright enough that the path was dotted with cyclists. Mothers were pushing strollers. There was no use denying it; winter had turned to spring, and summer was right around the corner. The invasion was coming.
Longport in the winter was a recluse’s paradise. Some people called it a ghost town; Lauren had become quite comfortable in the company of ghosts. While most of the year-round residents gritted their teeth through the winter, waiting for beach season, Lauren felt the complete opposite. The summer was her time to grin and bear it, to endure. The bright long days, the crowds, the string of patriotic holidays.
Don’t think about it, she told herself. You still have time.
The Husband Hour Page 1
