My eyes snap open. My head is pounding, a rhythmic beating like a tribal drum making the room vibrate. I roll over in bed and glance at my alarm clock. Ten forty-five. How the hell did I sleep this late?
I sit up in bed and rub my temples, squinting at the brightness of our bedroom. When I had moved in here—back when it was my bedroom, not our bedroom, a house, not a home—I had wanted everything to be white. Walls, carpet, bedspread, curtains. White is clean, pure, safe.
But now, white is bright. Way, way too bright. The linen curtains hanging in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows are pointless, I realize, because they do nothing to mask the blinding sun that’s now beating down on my pillow. I groan.
“Daniel?” I yell, leaning over to my bedside table and pulling out a bottle of Advil. There’s a cup of water sitting on a marble coaster—it’s new. The ice is still frozen, the cubes bobbing on the surface like buoys on a calm day. I can see the cold sweat dripping down the side of the glass and pooling at the base. “Daniel, why am I dying?”
I hear my fiancé chuckle as he walks into our bedroom. He’s carrying a tray of pancakes and turkey bacon and I immediately wonder what I did to deserve someone who actually brings me breakfast in bed. All that’s missing is a handpicked wildflower propped inside a tiny vase and this scene could be torn from a Hallmark movie, minus my raging hangover.
Maybe this is karma, I wonder. I got a shitty family, so now I get a perfect husband.
“Two bottles of wine will do that,” he says, kissing my forehead. “Especially when you don’t stick to the same bottles.”
“People just kept handing me things,” I say, picking up a piece of bacon and biting down. “I don’t even know what I drank.”
Suddenly, I remember the Xanax. Popping that little white pill seconds before being shoved drink after drink. No wonder I feel so terrible; no wonder the edges of the night are so fuzzy, as if I’m rewatching the events
of the evening through the bottom of a frosted glass. My cheeks burn red, but Daniel doesn’t notice. Instead, he laughs, running his fingers through my tangled hair. His, in comparison, is perfect. I realize now that he’s completely showered, his face clean-shaven and his sandy blonde hair combed and gelled, his part a razor-thin line. He smells like aftershave and cologne.
“Are you going somewhere?”
“New Orleans.” He frowns. “Remember, I told you last week? The conference?”
“Oh, right,” I say, shaking my head, although I don’t actually remember. “Sorry, my brain’s still foggy. But … it’s Saturday. Is it over the weekend? You just got home.”
I never knew much about pharmaceutical sales before I met Daniel. Really, the only thing I knew about it was the money; specifically, that the position made a lot of it. Or at least it could, if you did it well. But now I know more, like the constant travel the job requires. Daniel’s territory stretches halfway across Louisiana and into Mississippi, so during the week, he’s almost always in the car. Early mornings, late nights, hours on end driving from one hospital to another. There are also a lot of conferences: sales and training development, digital marketing for medical devices, seminars about the future of pharmaceuticals. I know he misses me while he’s away, but I know also that he likes it—the wining and dining, the fancy hotels, the schmoozing with doctors. He’s good at it, too.
“There’s a networking event at the hotel tonight,” he says slowly. “And a golf tournament tomorrow before the conference begins on Monday. You don’t remember any of this?”
My heart lurches in my chest. No, I think. I don’t remember any of this. But instead, I smile, pushing the plate of breakfast aside and throwing my arms around his neck.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I remember. I think I’m still drunk.”
Daniel laughs, like I knew he would, and tousles his hand through my hair like I’m a toddler up to bat during a game of peewee T-ball.
“Last night was fun,” I say, diverting the conversation. I rest my head on his lap and close my eyes. “Thank you.”
“Of course,” he says, the tip of his finger now drawing shapes in my hair. A circle, a square, a heart. He’s quiet for a second, the kind of quiet that hangs heavy in the air, until finally he speaks. “What was that conversation with your brother about? The one outside?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean,” he says. “The one I walked in on.”
“Oh, you know,” I say, my eyelids feeling heavy again. “Just Cooper being Cooper. Nothing to worry about.”
“Whatever you guys were talking about … it looked a little tense.”
“He’s worried you’re not marrying me for the right reasons,” I say, lifting my fingers up to make air quotes. “But like I said, it’s just my brother. He’s overprotective.”
“He said that?”
I feel Daniel’s back stiffen as he pulls his hand from my hair. I wish I could swallow the words back down as soon as I say them—again, it’s the wine, still buzzing through my bloodstream. Making my thoughts spill over like an overpoured glass, staining the carpet.
“Forget I mentioned it,” I say, opening my eyes. I’m expecting him to be looking down at me, but instead, he’s staring ahead, straight at nothing. “He’ll learn to love you like I do, I know he will. He’s trying.”
“Did he say why he thinks that?”
“Daniel, seriously,” I say, sitting up in bed. “It’s not even worth talking about. Cooper is protective. He always has been, ever since I was a kid. Our past, you know. He kind of assumes the worst in people. We’re similar in that way.”
“Yeah,” Daniel says. He’s still staring ahead, his eyes glassy. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“I know you’re marrying me for the right reasons,” I say, placing my palm on his cheek. He flinches, the touch of my skin seeming to wake him from his trance. “Like, for example, for my tight Pilates ass and orgasmic coq au vin.”
He turns to me, unable to keep his lips from cracking into a smile, then a laugh. He covers my hand with his own and squeezes my fingers before standing.
“Don’t work all weekend,” he says, patting down the creases in his ironed pants. “Get outside. Do something fun.”
I roll my eyes and snatch another piece of bacon, folding it in half before sticking it in my mouth whole.
“Or get some wedding planning done,” he continues. “It’s the final countdown.”
“Next month,” I say, grinning. The fact that we booked our wedding in July—twenty years to the month from when the girls first went missing—is not lost on me. The thought flashed into my mind the moment we walked into Cypress Stables, the oak trees dripping over a gorgeous cobblestone aisle, white painted chairs perfectly aligned with four massive farmhouse columns. Acres and acres of untouched land spanning as far as the eye could see. I still remember setting my sights on the restored barn at the edge of the property that could be used for a reception space, giant wooden pillars decorated with string lights and greenery and milky magnolia flowers. A white picket fence corralling horses as they grazed across the pasture, the plane of green broken only by a bayou in the distance, winding gently across the horizon like a thick, blue vein.
“It’s perfect,” Daniel had said, his hand squeezing mine. “Chloe, isn’t it perfect?”
I nodded, smiling. It was perfect, but the vastness of the place reminded me of home. Of my father, covered in mud, emerging from the trees with a shovel slouched over one shoulder. Of the swamp that surrounded our land like a moat, keeping people out but also confining us in. I glanced over to the farmhouse, tried to imagine myself walking across the giant wraparound porch in my wedding gown before descending the stairs toward Daniel. A flutter of movement caught my eye and I did a double take; there was a girl on the porch, a teenager slouched in a rocking chair, her leg outstretched as brown leather riding boots pushed gently against the porch columns, moving the chair in a lazy rhythm. She perked up when she noticed me staring at her, pulled her dress down and crossed her legs.
“That’s my granddaughter,” the woman before us said. I peeled my eyes from the girl and looked in her direction. “This land has been in our
family for generations. She likes to come here sometimes after school. Do her homework on the porch.”
“Beats the hell out of a library,” Daniel said, smiling. He lifted his arm and waved at the girl. She dipped her head slightly, embarrassed, before waving back. Daniel directed his attention back to the woman. “We’ll take it. What’s your availability?”
“Let’s see,” she said, glancing down at the iPad in her hands. She rotated it a few times until she could get the screen upright. “So far, for this year, we’re almost completely booked. You guys are behind schedule!”
“We just got engaged,” I said, twirling the fresh diamond around my finger, a new habit. The ring Daniel had given me was a family heirloom: a Victorian-era jewel handed down by his great-great-grandmother. It was visibly worn, but a true antique, old in a way that couldn’t be replicated. Years of familial stories scratched into the oval-cut center stone surrounded by a halo of rose-cut diamonds, the band a buttery yet slightly cloudy 14-karat yellow gold. “We don’t want to be one of those couples that waits around for years and just delays the inevitable.”
“Yeah, we’re old,” Daniel said. “Clock’s a-tickin’.”
He patted my stomach and the woman smirked, swiping her finger across the screen as if flipping pages. I tried not to blush.
“Like I said, for this year, all my weekends are booked. We can do 2020 if you’d like.”
Daniel shook his head.
“Every single weekend? I can’t believe that. What about Fridays?”
“Most of our Fridays are booked as well, for rehearsals,” she said. “But it looks like we do have one. July 26.”
Daniel glanced at me, raised his eyebrows. “Think you can pencil it in?”
He was joking, I knew, but the mention of July sent my heart into a flurry.
“July in Louisiana,” I said, twisting my expression. “Think the guests can handle the heat? Especially outside.”
“We can bring in outdoor air-conditioning,” the woman said. “Tents, fans, you name it.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It gets pretty buggy, too.”
“We spray the grounds every year,” she said. “I can guarantee you bugs will not be a problem. We have summer weddings all the time!”
I noticed Daniel staring at me then, quizzically, his eyes burrowing into the side of my head as if, if he stared at it hard enough, he could untangle the thoughts tumbling around inside. But I refused to turn, refused to face him. Refused to admit the completely irrational reason why the month of July morphed my anxiety into something debilitating, a progressive disease that worsened as summer stretched on. Refused to acknowledge the rising sense of nausea in my throat or the way the sour smell of manure in the distance seemed to mix with the sweet magnolias or the suddenly deafening sound of flies I could hear buzzing around somewhere, circling something dead.
“Okay,” I said, nodding. I glanced at the porch again but the girl was gone, her empty chair rocking slowly in the wind. “July it is.”
