Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 106422 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 532(@200wpm)___ 426(@250wpm)___ 355(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106422 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 532(@200wpm)___ 426(@250wpm)___ 355(@300wpm)
Someone had stuck a small sticker to the wall just outside, of curving green against a black background.
One look and I was thrown back to my first local bushwalk with Diya. She’d pointed out the tight curving curl of a fern frond, said, “The koru design I showed you at the airport? It comes from these fronds. It’s a symbol of endurance and growth.”
A slow smile, her hand sliding into mine. “It’s peaceful here, right?”
I’d known why she was asking; she understood that her new husband was a man drowning in darkness who needed the embrace of such nonjudgmental silence. She didn’t know the why of my nightmares—how could I tell her what I’d done? What I’d been?—but she’d soothed me many a night.
It’s okay, Tavi. It’s okay.
It was only on that forest walk that she’d asked me the most important question: “Who’s Joss?”
The name I called out in the night over and over, the guilt that whispered to me like that heartbeat in the creepy Poe story we’d had to study in high school. Only this one was all vicious laughter and the scent of expensive tobacco.
Jocelyn “Joss” Wai had never smoked anything so cheap as a store-bought cigarette.
Diya had protected me from the storms since the very first night we spent together, Jocelyn’s vengeful ghost deciding to visit me on the day when I was the happiest I’d ever been.
Back then, far from this land that she called her own, far from the family that cherished and protected her, she’d been the stronger of the two of us. In those nighttime hours after a terror that woke me on a reverberating scream, my fears of her drifting away had seemed foolish, a fanciful whimsy.
Diya had been the most solid thing in the room.
It was only after we came to New Zealand that I’d realized my wife’s flame sometimes flickered so low that it came close to extinction. Not even a hint of a smile for days, a black cloud hanging over her head that seemed ready to suffocate her. She’d felt distant, even when she was in my arms, as if she’d gone somewhere I couldn’t follow.
It’s fine! I have enough!
Words I’d overheard when she’d moved into my Venice Beach condo after her original hotel booking ran out five days from that night on the rooftop where I’d fallen in love with my girl in the green dress. I’d thought her family was worried about her financial status after she’d impulsively decided to stay on in the city, and had told her she didn’t have to stress about finances.
“I have plenty of money,” I’d said, standing on the balcony of that piece of beachfront real estate I’d owned since I was twenty-two. “Please let me spend it on you.”
She’d given me an odd little smile then, this breathtaking woman from the other side of the world who’d captured me so completely that I wasn’t even mad about it—not when she loved me as hard as I loved her.
“I never thought I’d meet someone like you, Tavish. A man straight out of my fairy-tale dreams.” Her fingers on my jaw, the caress so light it was the merest whisper. “I feel so free with you, as if I’m truly seeing life for the first time. No filters, no restraints. I’m myself and I remember all of me.”
The pills, so innocuous in their brown plastic bottles…those I’d discovered later. I’d grown up in LA, the land of glitter and excess; my first thought had been that my wife had a party-pill habit. Then I’d seen the labels with complex drug names and started to understand that this had nothing to do with ecstasy or heroin, uppers or downers.
I was holding prescription medicine in my hands.
It didn’t matter; my wife owned my heart when she shone bright—or when she fell into the dark.
I shoved through the door into the toilets.
It was hospital clean and hospital cold, hard-wearing tile and icy white sinks. Unable to even look at my crumpled and bloody T-shirt after I pulled it off, I shoved it into the trash can meant for the paper towels used to dry hands.
It vanished in a soft rustle.
With the toilets still empty of anyone but me, I washed my hands and forearms to get rid of any traces of blood and soot, then threw some water on my face, using the paper towels to finish my cleanup. I noticed absently that I’d lost some of the hair on my arms—scorched by the heat from the fire. But no burns as far as I could see…until I turned and looked at my back.
A scattering of mismatched red spots across my shoulders and upper back, small indicators of my proximity to the flames, but nothing serious. Not like the lips sliced into my wife’s body.