He coughed, interrupting me. “Listen, Hunter, I don’t know what’s going on, but whatever it is, I’ll pray for you. Like I said, you’re a good man, and you helped me through an impossible time. I’ll always have a job for you.”
I choked on tears—not really, but for theatre. “You do love me. You really do. Oh, Tony, maybe we should rethink this. Maybe we can give us another shot. What do you say? Take me back?”
“I say find the help you need. Learn how to process your emotions like a healthy adult.” With that, he disconnected the call and his chubby, beautiful face left my screen.
I cracked my neck. Seven years ago, my wife had died. Two nights ago, I’d lost my house, all the freedoms of a law-abiding citizen, and my magical powers—and then, my daughter was murdered. Now, I’d lost my job.
Dropping the phone into my lap, I rubbed my eyes.
All I had left was one-and-a-half beers, a spilled bowl of popcorn, and forty-five minutes of Serendipity.
I finished my sixth beer by the time the movie ended. A few pieces of popcorn remained on the floor, out of reach, and unless I mustered the gumption to get up and restock my forget-everything juice, I wasn’t going to take the initiative to clean the floor.
The hardest decision presented itself as the credits to Serendipity rolled. Did I spend thirty-seven minutes deciding on my next movie, or did I replay the one I’d just watched? Let me rephrase that. Did I want to watch another actress other than Kate Beckinsale? No. No I didn’t. I started the movie over.
Brace yourself, because the nightmare part of this beginning starts… now.
As the movie played and the beers settled into my system, a grogginess enveloped me. I struggled to keep my eyes open and absorb the romanticism of chance encounters—I wanted to know for the third time that morning if John Cusack and my girl would ever find each other again. As he scribbled his phone number onto a dollar bill and she used it to pay for mints, someone pounded on Xander’s door. Like a drowning victim swimming for air, I surfaced with intensity—sweating and panting—through the black ocean of sleep that had tried to suffocate me.
The knuckle-on-door assault continued. Picture frames trembled on the walls from the percussive force. The popcorn kernels that littered the floor bounced as if about to pop for a second time. Okay, maybe those descriptions are a little dramatic and untrue, but that’s what I believe happened.
I groaned and stood, adjusting my robe to cover myself—because sometimes, I am a decent person. “Shut up! I’m coming!” I shuffled across the living room to the front door, taking my candy-ass time. No one, no matter how aggressively they knocked, hurried Joseph Labrador—especially when their knocking expelled me from the comfort of the couch and a romantic comedy.
Peeping through the peephole, I saw…
“What the fuck?” I whispered, backing up a step. I did one of the things that people do in books and movies, but never in real life, where you rub your eyes and shake your cheeks and blink really fast before double-checking to confirm what you’d just seen. Believe it or not, I confirmed it.
My hands shook, fumbling with the security chain and deadbolt. I couldn’t open the door fast enough. I swung it inward, and the person I knew I saw in the hallway—because I’d cleared the fog from my eyes and made damn sure of it—had vanished. My heart echoed the pounding the door had taken. Chills broke across my skin.
“Callie,” I said in soft voice. I glanced to the left and right, but no one remained in the flickering hallway that reminded me of a low-budget horror movie. Strange, since Xander lived in a high-end complex with a motivated maintenance crew. “Holy Batmobile,” I whispered, trying to control my labored breathing.
Had I really just seen my dead wife through the peephole? I rubbed my face with open palms and slapped my cheeks. Serendipity had really jacked me up on pent emotion—well, that or recent events. Maybe both.
Deciding that I needed to turn the movie off, I pivoted, facing Xander’s neat apartment. Gasping from pure shock, I backed away again, this time into the hallway. My throat tightened to the size of a straw, making it hard to breath, and my eyes stung with tears.
“Callie,” I whispered again, disbelieving—but also hoping beyond hope—that my dead wife was really before me.
She stood in the entryway to Xander’s apartment. Her dark-brown hair fell over her shoulders in gentle curls, and her dark eyes beamed at me like moonlight reflecting off the ocean. The tip of her tongue rested on her upper lip, a nervous tic she had acquired at some point in her life. She used to poke it out whenever we hunted monsters, and when she aimed down the sights of her firearm. She made the same facial expression the first time we… well, you know. And now, back from the dead, she stared at me with that same, anxious look.
“Callie,” I repeated, now from the hallway.
“Hi,” she said. Her voice was small and quiet, but it belonged to her. It was her voice—unassuming and fragile and shy, at least until you awoke her hidden passions—then, it turned powerful.
I gripped the doorframe to keep from wavering as the building swayed and shifted around me. Words eluded me for the first time ever. Even if I had something to say, I doubted I could have worked sound around the massive lump in my throat.
I’d come home to her charred corpse seven years ago. How was it possible that she stood in the same room as me now? How had she found me?
