“Did he check into the hotel?” Ted says, but in a tone that says he’s humoring me.
With shaking fingers, I find the Post-it where I scribbled the number and punch it into my phone. I can tell that Ted’s holding out little hope, that he thinks this exercise is a futile waste of time, and the blatant mollification that lines his face is too much for me to bear. I stare down at my desk instead, concentrating instead on the marks and scratches that crisscross its surface. The phone rings, then rings again.
After an eternity, a perky female voice answers. “Good afternoon, Westin Universal Boulevard. How may I be of service?”
“Will Griffith’s room, please.” The words tumble out of me, jagged and raw and way too fast, like an auctioneer hyped on crack.
“My pleasure,” the receptionist chirps in my ear. I’m sure she gets crazed spouses on the line all the time, women hunting down their wayward boyfriends or philandering husbands. Westin probably has an entire training manual on how to deal with callers like me. “Griffith, you said?”
“Yes, Will. Or it could be under William, middle initial M.” I drag a deep breath and try to calm myself, but my leg is bouncing, and I can’t stop shivering.
Ted shrugs out of his jacket and drapes it over my shoulders. I know he means well, but the gesture feels far too personal, and the fabric smells like Ted, fragrant and foreign. I want to rip the jacket off and chuck it out the window. I don’t want any man’s clothing touching my body but Will’s.
The woman clicks around a keyboard for a few seconds. “Hmm. Sorry, but I’m not finding a reservation for Mr. Griffith.”
I choke on a sob. “Check again. Please.”
There’s a long pause filled with more clicking, more humoring. Dread begins to burrow under my skin like a parasite, slow and steady, eating away at my certainty.
“Are you positive it’s this Westin property? We have one in Lake Mary, just north of the city. I can get you the number, if you’d like.”
I shake my head, blinking away fresh tears in order to read the hotel information at the bottom of the flyer. “I’m looking at the conference flyer right now. It says Universal Boulevard.”
Her voice brightens. “Oh, well, if he’s here for a conference, then perhaps I can get a message to the organizer’s point of contact. Which conference?”
“Cyber Security for Critical Assets: An Intelligence Summit.”
She hesitates only a second or two, but long enough that bile builds in my throat. “I’m very sorry, ma’am, but there’s no conference by that name at this hotel.”
I drop the phone and throw up into my wastebasket.
* * *
Claire Masters, a colleague from the admissions office across the hall, drives me home. Claire and I are friendly enough, but we’re not friends, though I don’t have to ask why I’m here, buckled into the passenger’s seat of her Ford Explorer instead of someone else’s car. Early last year, Claire lost her husband to Hodgkin’s, and now, whether she volunteered to drive me home or Ted asked her to, the reason is clear. If anyone will understand what I’m going through, it’s another widow.
Widow. I’d throw up again, but my stomach is empty.
I turn and stare out the window, watching the familiar Buckhead strip malls fly by. Claire drives slowly, her hands at ten and two, and she doesn’t say a word. She keeps her mouth shut and her gaze on the traffic in front of her, and as much as I detest being lumped into her tragic category, at least she knows that the only thing I want is to be left alone.
My phone buzzes on my lap. My mother, calling for what must be the hundredth time. Guilt pricks at my insides. I know it’s not fair to keep avoiding her, but I can’t talk to her right now. I can’t talk to anybody.
“Don’t you want to get that?” Claire’s voice is high and girlish, and it slices through the silence like a serrated knife.
“No.” It takes all my energy to speak around the boulder on my chest.
Her gaze bounces between me, my phone and the traffic before us. “Take it from me, your mother is losing her mind right now.”
I wince at her knowing tone, at the way she’s putting the two of us on the worst kind of team. “I can’t.” My voice cracks the last word in two, because talking to Mom would mean saying those awful words out loud. Will is gone. Will is dead. Saying the words would make this thing real.
The phone stops, then two seconds later, starts again.
This time, Claire plucks the phone from my lap and swipes the bar to pick up. “Hi, this is Claire Masters. I’m one of Iris’s colleagues at Lake Forrest. She’s sitting right beside me, but she’s not quite ready to talk.” A pause. “Yes, ma’am. I’m afraid that’s correct.” Another pause, this time longer. “Okay. I’ll make sure to tell her.” She hangs up and places the phone gently back onto my legs. “Your parents are on their way. They’ll be here before dark.”
I’d thank her, but I can’t muster up the energy. I stare out the window and try to picture it, my Will in a field of smoking wreckage, with luggage and debris and charred, twisted chunks of metal scattered all around, but I can’t. It seems incomprehensible, as abstract to me as a concept from Dr. Drukker’s AP physics class. Will was going to Orlando, not Seattle. He can’t be dead. It just isn’t possible.
Claire turns onto the ramp for Georgia 400 and floors the gas, and we roar south in blissful, blessed silence.
No matter how many times I assure her it’s not necessary, Claire walks me up the flagstone path to my front door. I dig through my bag and pull out my keys, sliding them into the lock. “Thanks for the ride. I’m going to be okay.”
I open the door and walk through, but when I go to close it, Claire stops me with a palm to the stained-glass panel. “Sweetheart, I’m staying. Just until your parents get here.”
“No offense, Claire, but I want to be alone.”
“No offense, Iris, but I’m not leaving.” Her high-pitched voice is surprisingly firm, but she softens her words with a smile. “You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to, but I’m staying, and that’s that.”
I step back and let her pass.
Claire glances around the foyer, taking in the honey-colored walls, the gleaming pine floors stained almost-black, the carved railings on the original staircase. She cranes her head around the corner into the front parlor, empty save for a tufted beige sofa we’re still paying off—our Christmas gift to each other from Room & Board—then points toward the back of the house. “I assume the kitchen is that way?”
I nod.
She drops her bag by the door and heads down the hallway. “I’ll make us some tea.” She disappears around the corner into the kitchen.
As soon as she’s gone, I latch onto the newel post, this morning’s memories assaulting me. The weight of Will’s body on mine, heating me with his hands and hot naked skin. His lips in the crook of my neck and heading south, the scratch of his morning beard against my breasts, my belly, lower still. My fingers twining in his hair. The water sluicing down Will’s muscled torso as he stepped out of the shower, the brush of his fingers against mine when I handed him a towel. His smooth, warm lips coming in for just one more kiss, no matter how many times I warned him he was in serious danger of missing