CHAPTER 2
Frank Archer was three months into his retirement and already missing his former life. At 6:35 on a Friday morning, he should have been baiting a hook, hitting golf balls, or at his desk, anywhere but in his backyard planting begonias in his wife’s garden. His world had become chores, a routine not of his choosing but of his wife’s, and his thirty-year dream of retirement, of fishing and golf, was a fool’s dream. It was as if his life was over at fifty- five.
He wasn’t about to complain to Lisa. He loved her as much as the day they were married-most days, anyway. Frank always discounted the times she threw him out for drinking, for the biblical fights when she ran off to her mother’s, the weeks of silent treatment and no sex when he forgot her birthday. But all things being equal, she was his life partner and the one he had retired from a satisfying career to be with.
Finished planting the last flower, he stood up and examined his work of the past hour. He stood no taller than five and a half feet, but his wide shoulders and still powerful arms gave the perception of a taller man, a younger man by at least ten years. He continued to work out almost daily, as he had his whole life, running, lifting weights, whatever it took to forestall Father Time. He wasn’t about to become a cliche retiree.
The neighborhood was quiet at this peaceful hour, with life slowly returning to the world for another day. He looked at his watch and was surprised that he had yet to see Lisa. She was usually out there, giving direction, asking him in her sweet passive-aggressive way to rearrange everything he had just planted. While he did all the work, the garden was her design, something she took all the credit for when friends praised its beauty. It never bothered him, though, being the type to defer recognition. He required only nine holes in the afternoon in exchange for his sweat-inducing work.
With dirt-covered hands, he used his forearm to push back his salt-and-pepper hair and then walked in through the back door of the small Cape-style house, only to find Lisa sitting at the dining-room table, her eyes red with tears. A sour feeling formed in his stomach as fear began to fill his mind. He sensed, no, he knew, someone was dead. He didn’t need his wife to say a thing to know it was someone close.
He finally saw the newspaper on the table before her and closed his eyes in shock, the headline confirming his fears.
Then the cell phone in his back pocket began to vibrate, causing him to jump, startling him from his grief. Since he had left his job, no one called at this hour, and there was no one he wanted to speak to as he came to terms with the news of his friend’s death. He pulled the phone from his pocket to turn it off…
And his heart nearly stopped as he looked at the caller ID.
Jack put down his cell phone and stared at the newspaper-its headline proclaiming his demise-and he could barely focus as the gravity of the situation enveloped him. His hands were shaking; he was unsure if it was from somehow being shot and not remembering it or reading his own front-page obituary. With trembling hands, he finally picked up the paper and began to read.
Three times over, he read it, his agony growing with each sentence. The description of his death, of the wounds to his body, the strange markings on his arm, was but an afterthought as the words sank in. It was as if someone had ripped away the floor he was standing on. He had never imagined it, even with her line of work… the thought of such a tragedy had not entered his mind until now. Somehow, his worst nightmare had come to pass.
His wife, Mia, was dead.
Everyone knew Mia Keeler when she entered a room, even if they didn’t know her. Her dark brown hair was long and thick and flecked with natural auburn highlights. She had a dancer’s body, not that of a waifish ballerina but that of a Latin dancer, strong and lean, with perfect feminine curves. Her large, dark brown eyes were always alive and filled with expression, a trait she used equally well in her job and at home staring down her children when they did wrong. She possessed a classic beauty, a face lightly tanned, which had yet to know a wrinkle despite the worries her daughters had engendered.
Jack Keeler and Mia Norris had met at Fordham Law. It was their second year. Jack was a man in transition, a police detective hoping for a redo in life, seeking out a second career only four years after his first one began and ended with the tragic death of his partner. Mia, however, had always had a distinct, singular focus: the FBI. Like her stepfather before her, she felt the pull. She had a passion for law enforcement, a mind for puzzles, crisis, and problem solving, a Supergirl instinct for saving the helpless and fighting for truth, justice, and the good old American way.
Their first date consisted of gelato from an Italian street vendor and wandering around the Upper West Side of Manhattan, finally ending up in Central Park on the Bow Bridge, legs dangling over the lake, lost in conversation for hours. The following day, it was hot dogs along the Hudson and the next, a Friday, an actual formal sit-down date at Shun Lee Palace on 55th Street.
They laughed at how neither was really a serious student until senior year of high school, both preferring the joys of sports and socializing. They shared a passion for the Rolling Stones, Aretha, and Buddy Guy and would have flown anywhere in the world for a Led Zeppelin reunion.
As the weeks went on, they played baseball on Tuesday nights and spent weekends climbing the Shawangunk Mountains in New Paltz, New York, with ropes on their backs and pitons clipped to their waists. Jack taught her how to ride his motorcycle and win in mock trials, and they went head-to-head in skeet and trap shooting, neither one giving quarter.
After a month, they found themselves in Jack’s small apartment on Bleecker Street deep in conversation while the strains of Clapton’s “Layla” played in the background. Mia told Jack of her tough-as-nails mask. Opening up her soul, she told him of her fears of life and failure, of the expectations her parents had always placed on her to be nothing but the best. She had rebelled against them as a teen but by twelfth grade had made everything in her life about pleasing them, about meeting their ideals, about avoiding that all-too-common disappointed stare.
And as Clapton’s heartfelt guitar cried the song’s final notes, Mia told him of her life up to when she was a young teen, things she hadn’t spoken of in years, a pain buried deep down of an event no child should ever endure: the death of her father in her arms at the age of fourteen.
She allowed the memories to rise as Jack’s gentle words, his presence and warmth, conveyed an understanding she had never known. And as she spoke in soft whispers, it was cathartic, akin to confessing one’s sins. Mia told him of the pain, the horror that had forever changed her life and set her on a path that had been anything but linear yet had become at times an obsession.
Although she fought with everything she had to contain her emotions, the tears pooled on the lower lids of her eyes. He gently reached out, a simple brush of her arm, his touch conveying his heart, his sympathy. Their eyes locked, time slowing until a silent understanding flowed between them. He took her in his arms, allowing her pain to come up finally in quiet gasps.
And as her grief was purged, as her trembling subsided, a truth emerged. Her head rose from his shoulder, their faces inches apart, feeling each other’s breath on their skin, a near kiss that built in sexual tension. The moment hung there, their breathing falling into a synchronized rhythm, until the unspoken barrier finally dissolved away.
It was like nothing Jack had ever experienced in his life. Mia’s lips were full and warm, filled with passion. They inhaled each other’s soul until they were one. Tearing each other’s clothes off, they fell to the couch in a tangle of arms and legs, seeking and giving pleasure. It was animalistic yet heartfelt, sensual and honest, a moment of perfection that neither had dreamed of. Thoughts and worries drifted away. They were safe in each other’s embrace, complete in the moment. The music continued to play, growing ever distant as they fell into their own world, where the only sounds were their passionate sighs of urging and joy, their quickened breaths and pounding hearts.
And in the after-moments of silence, their beating hearts slowing, the sheen of sweat cooling their heat, they understood.
Without a single word necessary, they knew.
So often, as love takes hold, it sharpens the focus, the selflessness, imbuing confidence in one’s abilities,
