No Time to Say Goodbye: A Heartbreaking and Gripping Emotional Page Turner

by Kate Hewitt

  No Time to Say Goodbye

  A heartbreaking and gripping emotional page turner

  Kate Hewitt

  Books by Kate Hewitt

  A Mother’s Goodbye

  The Secrets We Keep

  Not My Daughter

  No Time to Say Goodbye

  This Fragile Life

  When He Fell

  Rainy Day Sisters

  Now and Then Friends

  A Mother like Mine

  * * *

  Writing as Katharine Swartz:

  The Vicar's Wife

  The Lost Garden

  The Second Bride

  The Other Side of The Bridge

  Contents

  Part I

  1. Nathan

  2. Maria

  3. Nathan

  4. Maria

  5. Nathan

  6. Maria

  7. Nathan

  8. Maria

  9. Nathan

  10. Maria

  11. Nathan

  12. Maria

  13. Nathan

  14. Maria

  Part II

  15. Nathan

  16. Maria

  17. Nathan

  18. Maria

  19. Nathan

  20. Maria

  21. Nathan

  22. Maria

  23. Nathan

  24. Maria

  25. Nathan

  26. Maria

  27. Nathan

  28. Maria

  29. Nathan

  Epilogue

  A Letter from Kate

  Acknowledgements

  To everyone who has lost someone, and found a way to go on.

  Part One

  One

  Nathan

  I didn’t take the call. I’ll never forgive myself for that, even though I learned later it didn’t matter. It was already too late. I don’t even know who the call was from—the police? A stranger?

  I’d never know, but the time of the call still haunted me—11:42. Just minutes after the moment of my wife’s death, according to witnesses. Apparently, someone was checking the time on their phone while a lunatic drew a gun and shot my wife.

  I was in a meeting then, an important bid for a new build downtown; an eyesore of an office building from the 1960s was being demolished, and a European bank was moving their headquarters to Grand Street. They were shopping for an architectural firm, and they’d come to us—a smaller start-up, but with a handful of prestigious awards and a growing reputation for high-quality work.

  I wanted that job. Badly. And so, when the blocked number came up on my phone, the buzzing faint but insistent, I swiftly swiped it to silence the call. Just a telemarketer, I thought, someone trying to sell me life insurance or window blinds. I shouldn’t have even brought my phone into the meeting, but like most people in the New York business world, I took it with me everywhere, just in case the next big deal was a ringtone away.

  I smiled blandly at the bankers and I refocused on the presentation my partner was giving about how the building would be eco-friendly, sourced with sustainable wood and other environmental materials. We had this. We had to have this.

  I completely forgot about the call until half an hour later, after the meeting and the backslapping and the refills of coffee, the handshakes and the promises to be in touch soon. I glanced at my phone again as I headed back to my office, and I saw I had another missed call and also a voicemail, not from the unknown caller who hadn’t left a message, but from The Garden School, Ruby’s preschool.

  Like any father’s would, my heart lurched a little with alarm—not serious fear, nothing close to terror. Just that little needling of worry, closer to irritation than true panic, that Ruby might have got hurt, or had an allergic reaction. Perhaps she just needed Tylenol. They had to ask parents’ permission for everything these days, although Laura was usually the one they’d call. She was always the one they called.

  I listened to the voicemail in the elevator, registering the suppressed yet calculated irritation of Miss Willis, the lead teacher. “Mr. West? I’m calling you because no one has picked Ruby up from school today, and it has now been…” An ostentatious pause to check the time. “Twenty-five minutes since pick-up time.” A carefully let out breath. “Could you please call me back as soon as possible? As you know, The Garden School has a policy of charging for every ten minutes after pick-up time.”

  Yes, twenty bucks per. I knew. I’d signed the agreement, inwardly fuming that a preschool that cost eighteen grand a year still had the gall to charge per minute.

  Still, twenty-five minutes was a long time. Laura was never that late, and if she had been, surely she would have let them know? Let me know, although perhaps she wouldn’t have, since I couldn’t have done anything anyway.

  I checked my phone again, but I had no missed calls or texts from her. Briefly I thought of the missed call from the unknown number—but who could it have been? Surely not Laura, not from her own phone, anyway.

  The doors of the elevator opened and I strode to my corner office, brushing aside the cheerful greeting of my assistant, Jenny, as well as the curious stares of the dozen employees in our open-plan office; West and Stein Architectural had two floors in a building on Thirty-Fourth and Madison Avenue that was a bit too expensive for us, but we agreed appearances mattered, especially in our business.

  I shut the door behind me, the phone clamped to my ear as I called Laura. There was no answer. For the first time, I started to feel properly worried, and not just that little pinprick of doubt, the what if… or surely not… that we all feel, as parents, as people.

  The moment when you lose sight of your toddler in Target, or your wife is half an hour late coming home. You’re worried, but you’re not really worried. You don’t actually believe that something bad is going to happen, or already has. Life is going to continue on the same, because it must. The alternative is impossible to contemplate, even as your heart rate speeds up just that little bit.

  This felt different. This was an audible hitching of my breath, a frantic somersault of my heart, an icy plunging of my stomach. Twenty-five minutes.

  I called The Garden School back, half hoping that Laura would have already come and collected Ruby, sure that she must have, but when Miss Willis came on the phone, she sounded alarmed rather than annoyed, which made me feel even more panicked, although I tried to keep myself from it. There was an explanation, a reasonable one. There had to be.

  “No one has picked up Ruby, Mr. West, and it has now been nearly an hour.”

  “I don’t know where my wife is.” I blurted the words, like a little boy, ashamed and afraid, needing someone else to sort it out, tell me what to do.

  “Then can you send someone else?” Miss Wills’ alarm was seguing back into the more expected annoyance. This was the woman I knew—stern, a stickler for rules and details. “Your nanny?”

  We didn’t have a nanny, unlike just about every other family at the school, or even on the whole Upper East Side. Laura had never wanted one, although I’d always said we could use an extra pair of hands on occasion. On a lot of occasions.

  I blew out a breath, impatience creeping up on my fear, even now. If Laura had just spaced, or forgotten the time, I was going to be as annoyed as Miss Willis. But a whole hour…

  “I’ll come,” I said reluctantly, because there was no one else. I didn’t know Laura’s mom friends, not well enough to call anyway, and we had no family in the city. The babysitter we’d used was a student at Columbia who only did evenings, although more recently we�
��d let our oldest daughter Alexa be in charge on the rare occasions when we went out together, not that we did very often. “I’ll be twenty minutes.” More like forty, but everyone in New York pretended it only took twenty minutes to get anywhere.

  I had just disconnected the call when I saw Jenny in front of my office, gesturing to someone behind her. I frowned, putting my phone down, and then I saw the policewoman standing there, her navy uniform a stark contrast to the light colors of the office—blond wood, white walls, Jenny’s pink blouse. The policewoman looked like a streak of dark, a spill of ink. Wrong.

  In that moment, those few awful, suspended seconds, it felt as if everything inside me had frozen—my blood, my heart, my brain. I simply stood there and stared, unable to move. To think. Not wanting to, because I knew any thoughts I had would not be good ones; they would propel me into the next moment, and then the next, and I wanted to stay right there, in a state of paralysed ignorance. If I didn’t move, I didn’t know. And I didn’t want to know. Already, I realized that, with a bone-deep certainty.

  Jenny knocked on the door, a matter of form, and then edged into my office. She was only twenty-three, fresh out of college, with aspirations to be a graphic designer. This was her first “real” job. She looked terrified.

  “Nathan… there’s a policewoman here.” Her voice was soft as she bit her lip. “She… she wants to talk to you.”

  I think I nodded. I might have said something. Everything felt as if it were happening in slow motion, or underwater. There was a buzzing in my ears that made everything else sound muted, as if it were happening far away, to someone else. Please, to someone else.

  The policewoman came in, looking far too serious.

  “Mr. West?”

  “Nathan, please.” The words came out sounding oddly jocular, the verbal equivalent of a manly handshake. My professional voice that I used as a matter of instinct, or perhaps self-protection. This is just a business meeting. That’s all it is. “What can I do for you?” I asked in that same tone, even though it sounded ridiculous. I knew it did, and yet I couldn’t keep myself from it.

  Jenny closed the door behind her, her expression still anxious, eyebrows drawn together in a crinkle. The moment spun out, suspended, endless, which was fine by me because I knew, I knew I didn’t want to hear what this woman had to say, and as long as I could keep her from saying it…

  I had a sudden urge to put my fingers in my ears, or throw my arms in front of my face. Anything to keep from hearing whatever came next.

  “Mr. West, Nathan. I’m very sorry, but I have some difficult news to give you. Some very difficult news.”

  No. I didn’t speak; I couldn’t. I just stared at her, my body completely still and tense, my hands flexing into fists at my sides. I felt poised for action, as if I could start to sprint, but there was nowhere to go.

  “Would you like to sit down?’

  “No thank you.” I sounded weirdly polite.

  The policewoman nodded slowly, then spoke again, even though I didn’t want her to. “I’m afraid your wife was involved in an incident on the subway this morning.”

  An incident? What did that mean? “The subway?” I repeated blankly. I shook my head. Laura never took the subway, or at least very rarely. She stayed on the Upper East Side, where our apartment was, as well as the girls’ schools, the upscale supermarkets where she bought freshly ground coffee and organic everything, the gym, the library, the hair salons and nail bars—everything she could possibly want or need. She’d joked once that she hadn’t been south of Seventy-Second Street in over three months.

  “Yes, on the J Train, between the Bowery and Canal Street Stations.”

  A seemingly small detail, but such a crucial one. “Then it can’t be Laura.” I almost laughed with the sheer relief of it; I felt giddy with sudden, sure knowledge. “There’s no way my wife would travel that far downtown.” The Bowery? That was practically as far down as you could get, below Manhattan’s grid of numbered streets and avenues, heading towards Wall Street, miles from our home. No way had Laura been on that train.

  Yet even as I said the words, I felt their futility. Here was a policewoman, saying Laura had been in an incident, and only moments ago I had talked to Miss Willis, who had told me Laura hadn’t come to pick up Ruby as usual. Two and two usually made an understandable four, but not this time. Not this time.

  “I’m afraid we’re quite certain it was your wife, Mr. West,” the policewoman said. She was surprisingly slight for a law officer, with dark hair and gentle eyes. Had she been sent specially? She had the look of someone who knew how to break bad news, who would do it softly yet firmly… as she was now.

  “How are you certain?” I sounded aggressive, but I couldn’t help it. Laura could not have been on the J train in lower Manhattan. It was simply not possible. She didn’t go downtown. She would have told me if she was doing something so different today.

  In fact, she hadn’t said she was going anywhere this morning, when I’d taken the girls to school… she’d mentioned no plans beyond the usual preschool run. Those precious three hours she had by herself. What did she do during those hours? I’d never really given much thought to them—or any other part of Laura’s day—but I was as sure as hell that she didn’t go all the way downtown.

  “She had identification on her person that matched her appearance,” the policewoman said, “and your details were on her phone.”

  I swallowed hard, said nothing.

  “You are Nathan West, and your wife is Laura West?”

  “Yes.” Even this came out unwillingly.

  “And this is your wife?” The woman’s face was filled with compassion as she handed me Laura’s driver’s license. I stared at it disbelievingly.

  Laura. Light brown hair, smiling eyes, freckles across her nose, a slightly crooked front tooth. “Yes,” I said, and my voice sounded as if it were coming from a distance, from somewhere outside of myself, tinny and small. “Yes, this is my wife.” I looked up, reality slamming into me hard as my mind suddenly sped up. “What’s happened? Where is she? What kind of incident? What does that even mean?” The questions fired out of me like bullets, and I was too anxious, too terrified, to wait for any answers. “Well?” I shouted. “Can you please tell me what the fuck is going on here?’

  The woman blinked, taking my anger in stride. “I’m very sorry, Mr. West, but your wife was involved in an incident—”

  “You’ve said that already.”

  “She was shot by an unknown assailant in the subway car,” the woman continued steadily, softly. Each word fell on me like a hammer blow. Shot. No.

  “But she’s all right…” I began, before trailing off. “Is she is in the hospital?” I tried again. “Where was she shot? How bad is it?” But I knew. I knew from the look on her face, from the fact that she’d already said this was very sad news, the details she’d given without any assurance that Laura was okay, the complete lack of urgency about her, no need to get to the hospital quickly, no frightening addendum—she was taken by ambulance or even she’s in surgery now. No more to the story.

  Two and two made four again, and I couldn’t stand it.

  “Don’t,” I said abruptly, wheeling away from her. A pointless reaction, but I couldn’t help it. I didn’t want to hear. I wasn’t ready.

  The woman stayed silent, waiting for me to catch up.

  I took a deep breath, staring out the floor-to-ceiling windows that covered two walls of my office. Far below, people scurried up and down Madison Avenue, phones clamped to ears, paper coffee cups in hand, shouldering their way through the ever-present stream of humanity. Everyone was so busy and important. No one knew what was happening up here. No one realized this was the end of everything for me. I was trying not to realize it myself. If I could just stay in this moment of ignorance forever…

  The policewoman cleared her throat.

  “Well?” I turned around, bracing myself, everything in me tense and expectant, knowing wh
at came next.

  “I’m afraid she is dead, Mr. West,” the woman said quietly.

  I knew it was coming, but I couldn’t keep myself from crying out—a small, stifled sound—as I reached with one hand to grasp my chair and steady myself as if I might stagger. From the corner of my eye, I saw Jenny at her desk, looking pale and scared, her hands covering her mouth.

  I realized the whole office was silent, everyone watching and waiting, my grief played out as if on a silent screen, from behind the floor-to-ceiling window. Could they guess what was happening? Did they know?

  All I could think about was Laura, the fact that she was gone, just gone, a reality impossible to take in. My brain kept rejecting it, like a crumpled dollar bill from a soda machine. No. That didn’t happen. That simply didn’t happen.

  “What…” The word came out in a breath, but then I stopped because I didn’t even know what questions to ask, or if any of them mattered. Who shot her? Why? Why was she on the J train in the first place? What was somebody doing with a gun on the subway? Where were they now? Had they been caught? How had this happened?

  No, none of it mattered. All that mattered was that Laura was dead. Dead.

  “Do you have someone you can call?” the woman asked. “To support you…?”

  I stared at her dumbly. Who was I meant to call? Laura’s parents, so particular and polite, in Boston? We didn’t get along at the best of times. My hippy-dippy mother, out in Arizona, “living her best life” now? Our few couple-friends, the kind of people we had dinner with on occasion, drinking too much wine and promising to do it again soon, but then it was always another six months before we did? Who?