The Sunday Wife: A Lockdown Thriller Read online

  There are some fates worse than death. I began my first article. It’s dark inside the belly of the beast. I know, I’ve been there.

  The first time I met Senator Charles Garrison I was eight-years-old.

  I paused my typing, thoughts lingering over my next sentence like déjà vu.

  If I had it to do over again, would I?

  I swallowed, thinking back on the last time Bradley had visited, his warmth welcome on the Arctic cold nights that were my reality most of the last year on Deception Peak. I wasn’t just surviving in the chalet, I was thriving. I’d started my own blog detailing pieces of the puzzle as I found them under an anonymous moniker. I had a steady following of readers that subscribed to my bi-weekly posts, and a growing number that sent donations to an anonymous payment account that I’d created in Bud’s name.

  We used the money to buy supplies, and split the difference for a rainy day.

  Bud still made regular Sunday supply deliveries, but now instead of hurrying off like a stranger, I brewed coffee and we sat on the front porch and talked about the things that had happened to both of us in the previous week.

  We’d developed a casual friendship, my survival buddy and me.

  I imagined my generous mountain neighbor even knew my most precious secret: that Bradley had been visiting me at the chalet once a month for most of the past year. He never asked, but I knew he could see everything at the top of my mountain. The only secrets I had in this world were the ones I carried in my heart.

  Bradley thought he knew my everythings, but there are some things best left unspoken, especially among lovers.

  Bradley still asked me to marry him almost every time he visited the chalet, and rain, snow or sunshine he brought the engagement ring he’d purchased long ago and asked me on bended knee.

  I never said no.

  The truth was that I wanted with all of me to marry him, but I couldn’t put his life in danger more than it was. I let him think what he chose to about my life, but I refused to reveal any of the details I’d come to discover in all of my months of digging into the history of my own past. The secrets that lived and breathed within families struck me in a new way. The secrets among the powerful existed at an entirely new level.

  I was determined to have my revenge on my captor, word by word I would reveal with excruciating detail what I knew about my mother’s existence before and leading up to the night of her death. One handwritten note and scribbled calendar date at a time.

  Revenge is a plate best served cold, and I had the patience to dole my scandals out slowly.

  I’d been off all of my traditional prescription medications for a year, my solace turned inward as I wrote my memories and nightmares out furiously on the page. Every day felt like a trauma-inducing rollercoaster of déjà vu until I inevitably found myself knee-deep in my mother’s personal items in search of answers. Instead I found more questions. Medical records and journals filled with fastidiously written accounts of abuses she’d encountered over her life, some the drafts that would later become some of her most-read articles online. She was a sensation in women’s rights circles, and I’d been none the wiser.

  Maybe my own life would end this way, a dizzying array of questions and false leads so confusing that even those that loved me would wonder who I’d been. Sometimes it takes dying for people to start listening.

  I thought of the baby that’d taken it’s first and last heartbeats inside of my body. Tears hovered at my eyelids as I thought of what could have been, if only. Tav went to every prenatal appointment, held my hand through each and every teardrop I’d shed when I lost my child, but Bradley also believed my baby was his.

  The truth was my mind had blacked out the memories. I’d struggled with regressive therapy to beckon them back, but I’d locked away every intimate interaction after coping with so much loss. I’d started new medical therapies and counted every breath as I feared I might die of grief if I didn’t.

  I hated life.

  Steph had brought me out of the darkness when she’d invited me out to dinner and drinks, Bradley stopping over to handle the lawn maintenance each week gave me a moment of lightheartedness to look forward to. It took all of them to bring me back to life, and now I suffered alone without them most of the days.

  I’d thought of calling Steph a hundred times, but I couldn’t bring myself to involve her in my upside down world.

  Instead, I stayed busy with investigating my mother’s accident. Choosing to pour over the details in the medical examiner and crime scene investigator’s reports one sentence at a time. According to the crime scene report her blood alcohol level was high, the accident that caused fire to ignite in her front living room was preventable and tragic.

  But the medical examiner’s report told a different story.

  My mother’s body was saved from the flames by a mattress. It seemed plausible that the ceiling had collapsed in her small bungalow after the flames ate away at the structural beams, but the medical examiner also found a bullet wound. A small knick in her neck from a .22 caliber firearm that indicated an assassination-style fatal shot.

  The mattress protected her from the fire, the bullet had already stolen her life.

  She hadn’t lit the fire that consumed her home, it was only meant to destroy evidence. Destroy the past. A history. A life.

  My mother’s life ended under a mattress, a fate we shared—mine at the beginning of my life, and hers at the end.

  I moved back to my keyboard and considered my next words, knowing I would reveal the discrepancies in the police report. It was only a matter of time.

  Before I could form my next sentence, a beep alerted me to a new message on my encrypted messaging app.

  I smiled, Bradley’s warm smile on my mind.

  I opened my phone screen, ready to find Bradley’s daily message when a message from an unknown Colorado number popped up.

  Freya, can we talk? It’s me.

  A chill ran through me. Bradley had been calling me Shelly for over a year now, never once had he faltered and used my old name.

  Just then a voice message lit up my screen.

  I sucked in a breath and hit play.

  “Hey, Freya. It’s me.”

  Tav.

  His warm voice weakened my knees, even after all this time.

  “Hi,” I breathed into the app’s recorder.

  “It’s good to hear your voice again.” It was him, there was no way I was mistaken. I would never forget my dead fiancé’s voice, not in a million years.

  I almost sobbed into the phone. I dropped to my knees, tears heating my lids.

  “I’ve missed you.” Came his next voice message.

  I nodded, relief flooding my system that he was alive and safe after all this time. His voice was just as I remembered, its effect on me clear down to the marrow of my bones.

  Just like always.

  Gone was the obligation to Bradley, just because he was the only other witness to my secret. Forgotten was the past that used to bind us in favor of the danger that was woven into my life now. I was living my life anonymously every day, only existing through the small lens of the outside world when I hiked down the mountain for a day and uploaded my next article at a cheap internet cafe in Seaport.

  I even stopped at The Seaport Roadside Motel once, but ownership had changed hands already. So life goes.

  “I never thought I’d hear your voice again,” I admitted.

  “God, I can’t tell you how much I’ve missed talking to you.” I heard the crack of emotion in his voice. “I had to go into hiding, there was a threat on my life—on both of our lives. What I did, I don’t know if it was ethical, but I’d do it again if it kept you alive. Did you get the lockboxes?”

  “No, I changed my number and never looked back,” I confessed.

  His rich laugh filled the recorder. “Typical of you. My estate lawyer is probably shitting himself trying to find you, he doesn’t get paid until you sign the bank paperwork tran
sferring ownership of the lockboxes.” His tone turned serious. “Ah well, it probably kept you alive.”

  “I would have turned it all over to your friends at the fed if I'd received it anyway.”

  “I don't have friends, Frey, never mistake anyone for a friend. People are always connected in surprising ways. I don't know any feds, I only know that a stranger contacted me and knew more than I expected about things no one should know. I escaped with my life at that hotel in Maine just barely. After I pulled the needle out of my arm that you left me with I went down the fire escape—I figured they must have set you up to take me out. I thought maybe it was the Ecuadorians at the time, but now I realize you were framed, Frey. Not by the opposition, but by the home team.”

  The voice message went silent.

  The implication in his words surged through me like a shockwave. “It sounds like you mean a coup or...treason.”

  “I took a few phone calls from a very powerful man. I promised him nothing, and they deposited millions of digital currency into an electronic wallet. I never struck a deal, they were attempting to offer me a bribe. There’s millions of dollars on the computer chips locked in those boxes and I don’t care, I'm safer this way. I’ve never felt more alive. The Rocky Mountain air is good for me, come visit, Freya. Stay. It’s been hell without you.”

  “But, I’ve never felt safer at Deception…”

  “Jesus—you’re still on that mountain?”

  “Yes, Bradley said it was the safest for now—”

  “Bradley is a mole. Since the moment I caught him trying to put a GPS trace on your car last year I’ve been working to figure out his angle. I knew whoever was involved with your mother’s accident had to be close—must have known and had access. I saw the crime scene, Freya. From the trajectory of the wound, I would say she knew the person that took her life.”

  “W-hat?! Why, how? How could you think...why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Why didn’t I tell you? Because then I’d have to explain why I already had a trace on your car. I never trusted him, now I know why. I stayed away, tried to give you freedom until it became clear that your freedom stood at the cost of your safety. I had to get you out of there, had to get you somewhere he couldn’t find you.”

  “You stole me away for my safety?” I huffed. “Do you really think my oldest friend would have harmed me? And why did you have a tracker on my car?”

  “The therapist suggested I do it after she suspected you were having dissociative fugue states.”

  “The therapist thought I was dissociating? I don’t recall any of what you’re saying.” My head pounded with his words.

  “She wasn’t sure. You seemed so confused and you’d been through so much. When I mentioned I’d found receipts of places you’d claimed to never be...well, we thought it was the safest option for the days I worked in the city and couldn’t be with you physically.”

  “So how does Bradley tie into all of this?” Disbelief laced my words.

  “I’m not sure but I know he’s connected more than he lets on. I don’t think he’s the man you knew before. He escalated to special forces pretty quickly after he enlisted, but that’s all I can find of his time serving. I couldn’t find any details of training missions or deployments. It’s like his record was wiped clean. I have a hunch someone important used him to gain access to you and your mother. I wish I knew more.”

  “The more questions I ask, the more I have. About her life and mine. About everything I thought I knew.”

  “I’m with you, Freya. Even when I couldn't be with you, I was. I’ve been working the possibilities over in my head a thousand different ways. I can’t keep living this way, on the run and without you too. The only thing missing on this mountain is your smart mouth. I saw the look of shock and hurt on your face when you saw me with V on the campaign trail. I knew you assumed I’d left you for her. It killed me that you thought that, but it was safer if you did. It wasn’t true—I’ve loved you from the beginning—I could never be with anyone else, but as long as it kept you safe I needed you to believe it.” A new voice text popped up immediately after the previous one. “Find your way to me, Frey, we have forever to get to.”

  I imagined Campaign Barbie at his side with her clipboard and a smile. The soft angles of her face and the way her cheeks lit easily as she watched my Tav. Was she the same woman that’d listened to me through my darkest moments last year, therapist’s notebook in her lap and an array of prescriptions at the ready?

  I tried to compare their features in my mind’s eye, but the more I did, the more they bled into one. Was this the usual trick my memory played on me? Dissolving reality in the mirage of my mind to fit my own deceptive narrative? Had I only been looking to create an enemy out of Tav, while all of this time my safety had been his sole priority?

  “What about the chalet? The department?”

  “Fuck the department. There is no department, there are only bad guys. Very, very ruthless men that will chase greed and power at any cost. Some are from far away places and some are from right in my own backyard. Yours too—your lawn guy for chrissakes—you never thought that maybe…” he huffed. “Well, I wish I’d never left you alone. I wish I'd never taken that contract, that I’d walked away from my father a long time ago. You and me, Frey, you’re the only thing that’s ever mattered to me.”

  “What about the gun? You left me alone in the wild without a gun.”

  “You didn’t even know it was there until you stumbled across it in the closet. I knew you weren’t comfortable with it, and I knew if I told you the real reason why I had it so soon—because there was a chance we’d been followed up there by some very bad guys—well, I wanted you safe, that’s all I could think about. I knew you were safe locked up in that chalet after I left. I knew Bud would take care of you—if he’d refused to help you, I would have returned. I trusted him more than Bradley, and I also paid him a helluva lot to make sure you were taken care of up there.”

  “Tav...I—I wish you would have told me everything. I felt so vulnerable every moment.”

  “And now you’ve found your strength. We’ve been through so much. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you more when you lost our baby, but I can be now. I left that life. My father was a pawn to powerful people for as long as I can remember, I won’t be that too. I left to stop a cycle before it consumed us both. ”

  Tears sprung to my eyes at his frank admissions. “Maybe it already has.”

  My mind lingered on his words about the baby. Our baby.

  I knew in my soul that baby was a part of me and Tav, and whatever I’d let Bradley think was only to avoid upsetting him. Tav and I were real, we’d always been real.

  But if he brought up our baby now, did that mean I’d made up all of the memories I had of his hushed whisper in my ear then?

  I know the baby isn’t mine.

  I cringed, unable to shake the darkness those words cast over me.

  Like a cloud, the implications hung.

  “When you come, be discreet. They’ve been waiting for me to contact you, that’s why I didn’t want to raise alarm bells and do it before now. I’ve been on the move for months, never staying more than a few days in a place. I’ve been living a life on the run, but it sounds like you have too. Let’s do it together.”

  I fingered the dark shadow in the background of my photo, moving quickly to tear the section that included Bradley and then zeroed in on the other half of the image.

  My smiling face, Tav forever keeping watch over my shoulder.

  “What would I call you now?” I finally asked.

  “Whatever you want,” Tav replied.

  I didn’t answer, the idea of uprooting Bradley so quickly settled over me like a cloud of guilt.

  “So there’s no going back for us?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “And there’s no other way?”

  “Not that I can see.” He affirmed.

  “We were just born int
o this random excuse for a life?”

  He sighed over the recorder. “If there was another way, I would do it for you.”

  I nodded, even though he couldn’t see. “Okay.” I finally confirmed. “So I guess I’ll see you in a few days.“

  “If you come, that’s it. No looking back. No contacting anyone from your previous life. ”

  My previous life had already tried to kill me. It’d been locked on the mountain where I’d stumbled into my true freedom, the veil lifted from my eyes just in time before I suffered a fate like my mom.

  “I know,” I confessed, “but nothing could kill me as much as being without you did.”

  “I mean it, Frey. I know it’s hard for you to say goodbye. His love would have killed you.”

  “And yours doesn’t?” I countered.

  His raw chuckle filled my ears then. “Maybe. But I can’t wait to find out.”

  Warmth filled my senses as I thought of packing up my things and leaving the chalet for the last time. The last year of solitude like a strange fugue state that would soon be a distant memory. From that point on I would think on my time here with a passing sense of déjà vu, lost to the murky mist of my mind before the memory could fully materialize.

  Had it ever really happened at all?

  Tears of relief filled my eyes. Tav and I could finally get back to normal. “I never thought I’d hear from you again.” I wiped my eyes with my shirt hem. “It feels like you’re a figment of my imagination.”

  “Maybe I am, Frey. Maybe everything is.”

  Second Epilogue

  “Colorado, huh?” I muted the audio feed from the chalet and pivoted to my search screen. I pulled up an airline website and searched for the next available flight to Denver, Colorado. I’d bought a house on the same side of town just to be near Freya in Lancaster, and I’d been locked down there for the last two years as I monitored all of Freya’s conversations, even installing higher definition and much more discreet hidden cameras in the office where she was conducting much of her research into her mother’s past.

  I recognized the excitement in Freya’s expression when she’d first heard Tav’s audio message. I’ll admit, after all of this time it surprised me that he reached out, but then again, nothing should surprise me anymore. Since being tapped for special security clearance after basic training I’d surveilled hundreds of targets, both foreign and domestic.