He sighs, relief evident. “Thank you.”
“I have one question. I’m in the unique position of being able to talk to the person who broke my heart. The last one died before I could berate him for actions out of his control. Here you are, though. Live and in the flesh, breaking my heart, so humor me. It’s such a rarity for me to have the person responsible for my pain earthside.”
“Fuck,” Lincoln hisses. “Don’t do this right now. It’s not what you think, Maeve.”
“Answer me then. Why wasn’t I enough?”
My pulse is in my throat as I listen to shuffling on the other end of the line. His breathing is ragged as he moves or walks somewhere else, it’s hard to tell. “I’m not him, Maeve!” Lincoln yells, and then coughs, tripping over his own tongue. “I’m done competing with a ghost. It has nothing to do with you not being enough.” He takes in a ragged breath. “It has everything to do with him being too much.” The reckless anger melds around his words, making them that much more potent. “I can’t do it anymore,” he adds icily. “Competing with a ghost is impossible. You need to be with someone who can give you all of themselves all of the time. We’re over.”
I’m too stunned to cry, or even fight back at all. “I knew it was too good to be true. It went from it’s not what I think, to exactly what I’ve always thought.”
“I’ll call you when I’m on my way to get Turner. I’m so sorry, Maeve.”
The only thing he cares about. The only thing he’ll always care about. I end the call and sit in stupefied silence, staring at the mountains out the window. My favorite foster home comes to mind. The mother in that family had kind eyes and a soft wit that always made me laugh. I was a pre-teen and the way she handled her husband when he overreacted when he was shit-faced drunk was something to behold. She wielded humor as a weapon to defend against him. I admired the way she could turn his fist into a flower by making a crude joke. She weaponized wit and as an eleven-year-old who had been abused far more times than I could count, it resembled a superpower. How would she protect herself against this kind of heartbreak? What reaction would she have? Maybe it wasn’t that she was protecting herself from anything at all, she was just doing her job to shield her children from his misplaced fury. I never lumped myself into that category—as one of hers. I only belonged to myself, but I bore witness to the lengths a parent would sacrifice for their offspring. Is that really what Lincoln is doing? Shielding Turner from something he isn’t sure of? He assumes our relationship isn’t permanent.
He didn’t say that, no, of course not. He used Rexy and my feelings to make sure I wouldn’t fight back, that I would be complacent in being told our love wasn’t real. Why do I feel like it was scripted? Not a real argument? Because I’ve never made him fight against my past. When I made the decision to be with Lincoln, the line of delineation was clear and constant. He would not be judged against Rexy in any way, even if my heart warned me otherwise, and sometimes terror slipped through the cracks. I was steadfast in compartmentalizing the men. One love was past, and one love was present and future.
There’s a rarely used flat screen on the office wall that I turn on and pull the volume down to a hushed whisper. There’s no distracting me from the hollow place in my chest, nor is there any way that this can be fixed after the horrible things he said, but I can try to understand what my fatal flaw might be. I search for the movie I never would have considered watching before. The draw to learn about her story is strong. It’s the scandalous story of Autumn Glass, The most beautiful meteorologist in the world. A sex addict. A pathological liar. A murderer. My aunt. The story always starts out the same, and this one is no different. A well-adjusted little girl grows up in an upper middle-class home with plentiful love and money. No one expects her to do the things she does because she was such a pleasant girl with a good upbringing. She goes to therapy at a young age because something just doesn’t feel right, but she’s so beautiful and charming that it’s only a precaution for her mental health, not because something could actually be wrong. Autumn stays single, but admits she became addicted to sex when she was seventeen when she first became sexually active.
The story drags on through the written account of her life after she was arrested. After she gets married is when she really turns the unstable dial up to one hundred. My eyes are heavy and for a moment I forget why I’m watching this to begin with. It seems so fictional, something wild and out of a novel, too much of a stretch for it to actually be real life. I clutch my stomach when I see what her homicidal calling card is, what she leaves at a murder scene: lips on glass. Her lip print. I nearly jump out of my skin as I stand up, a chill prickling my spine. I lose my breath as I turn this around in my head every which way, and rewind to watch again in case my hazy brain is playing tricks on me.
Nope. That’s one-hundred percent an Autumn Glass thing. I tuck myself into my desk and turn on my desktop with a shaking hand. What are the odds that this is a coincidence? That all of this is unrelated? Turner should stay asleep for at least another two hours. I have that much time to go over the police reports,
