“Just look through the last few months or so,” she instructed her. “See if there’s anything I should know about.”
Savannah hesitated. “I’m not sure that’s something I’m comfortable doing, Liv.”
A punch of dread tightened Liv’s throat. “Well, I can’t. So I need you…” She fluttered her fingers at the laptop.
Savannah entered the password. She scrolled and tapped for a few minutes, moving methodically through pages of junk mail. Then she frowned.
“What?” Liv was hovering, unable to stay away.
It was their attorney, emailing Eliot the updated will. Two weeks prior to his death. It was the last line of his otherwise formal email that’d caught Savannah’s attention. I am sorry to hear of the reason for the requested change and truly wish you all the best.
Liv read it, and read it again. “Did he mean, like, our marriage?”
Savannah pressed her teeth into her lower lip, thinking. “What other reason might there be?”
Something strange and frightening edged into Liv’s mind.
She searched Eliot’s in-box for their doctor’s name.
Three appointment confirmations. Three appointments she definitely did not remember Eliot attending: she had to bug him to get a checkup. Nothing more from the doctor’s office in his email. No further clues.
Liv sat back in her chair. Her fingers were numb.
She’d never gotten a copy of Eliot’s autopsy.
It had to be requested from the medical examiner’s office, and at the time, it seemed pointless. It was a garden-variety heart attack—what else was there to know?
I am sorry to hear of the reason for the requested change.
Liv watched herself with calm detachment as she followed the steps to officially request Eliot’s postmortem exam. Days later, she was alone in the front office when she received an email with an attached PDF. It was a cloudy Friday afternoon. Savannah was doing some returns. Ben was at school. The house was very quiet.
Too nervous to sit, she paced the front office, willing the courage to click the PDF open.
The patient was a forty-nine-year-old Caucasian male…
Liv inhaled a jagged breath and looked away. It took her a few minutes to ground herself and return to the report. She skimmed the cold prose, fast, too fast.
heart showed asymmetric as well as concentric hypertrophy
blood vessels were fixed in 10% formalin
hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.
patient was high risk for sudden cardiac death
Liv sank, legless, into the pale pink sofa.
High risk. Sudden cardiac death.
In the coming hours, Eliot’s past would catch up to the present. His strange behavior in the months prior to his death would all make a horrible new kind of sense. The furtiveness. The whiplash between overly doting and prickly distance. The doctor’s appointments. The affair.
Eliot had been careening through life with a ticking time bomb for a heart. And he knew it.
73
The audience at Zinc Bar was shoulder to shoulder as Darlene began the trusty set closer. “ ‘They tried to make me go to rehab, I said, No, no, no.’ ” And while the students and the tourists and the locals sang along, swaying with their glasses of inexpensive wine, something was missing.
Electricity.
Chemistry.
Zach.
Zach was missing. No one was dancing on tables or making out or doing shots. The Dionysian energy he brought to this, to everything, was gone.
Darlene finished the song. The capable if not particularly charismatic session musicians took a quick bow. The audience clapped. They didn’t cheer. Or holler. Or stamp their feet. Darlene couldn’t blame them. It was painful to admit, but it was true: Zach made her a better musician. He made her a better person, period. But he’d disappeared. Removed himself, entirely, from her life. He’d embedded himself with her for so long, she didn’t think absence was possible. Except, it was. He didn’t reply to her texts, didn’t return her calls.
As she was packing up the equipment, the bartender waved her over, offering her a shot. She shook her head: it wasn’t fun getting drunk without Zach. The bartender shrugged and did it himself.
“Hey, I heard about Zach,” he said. “Pity.”
Adrenaline kicked her ribs. “What do you mean?”
“Didn’t he quit music or some crap?”
Quit music? Quit music?
When Darlene visited Zach’s apartment, the smiling concierge recognized her and called up. Then the smile faded.
She tried to lose herself in her EP, which all this was supposed to be in service of. In lieu of Zach’s twenty-five grand, the check for which she definitely wasn’t cashing, she paid for the producer’s deposit with all her savings, telling herself that when she got a record deal, she could pay it all back.
But that was another avalanche of disappointment.
She submitted ten songs to the producer. They listened to them all in his Harlem studio. Her initial excitement morphed into panic as song after song received only reserved acknowledgment, no real enthusiasm. “Dark Secret” was last. It took every ounce of her strength to keep it together as the lyrics played.
He’s my dark secret; I think he’s a keeper.
I like to run, but he makes me stand still.
When it comes to keeping secrets
I’m nothing but the best
I’m a locked box, baby, I’m a treasure chest
But boy you’re breaking down my defenses
Making me mix up all my tenses
You were the only one who made me feel like coming home.
“That,” the producer said. “That has potential.”
“Oh,” Darlene said in pained surprise. “I sort of cowrote that. With a… former friend.”
The producer asked if her “former friend” had signed a cowriting agreement, for the song they legally owned half of.
Of course the former friend had not. He, apparently, had “quit music.”
Without it, the producer was not willing to work on “Dark Secret,” and without that, Darlene was of no interest to him.
Darlene left the studio in a daze, stepping onto a street messy with car horns blaring, a woman arguing into a cell phone, music playing from a distant window, dogs barking. A rhythmless jumble of random noise.
74
Alone in
