Page 35 of From the Embers
Thankfully, Asher didn’t bring the phone up over dinner. We all sat at the table in the dining room, the girls’ highchairs pulled up at the ends.
Bree talked.
The kids laughed.
And I stared into space, that damn phone burning like a glowing brick of coal in my back pocket while a matrix of numbers rained through my head.
Not surprisingly, Bree could sense that something was up. Her gaze bored into me with a tangible suspicion that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. This was why people like me didn’t have second cell phones or mistresses. I wasn’t the cheater, but peeling out of my skin would have been more comfortable than bearing the weight of her scrutinizing gaze for a second longer. Luna was still chewing her last bite of pizza when I picked her up, offered curt goodnights, and then hauled ass out to the pool house.
Unfocused and distracted, I struggled through Luna’s bedtime routine. But God bless my daughter; she was half asleep before the end of Goodnight Moon.
Leaving me alone.
At last.
With that fucking phone.
“Okay, okay, okay,” I chanted to myself as I paced the small living room.
Long before I’d moved in, Bree had decorated the pool house in a beach theme. Tan furniture with teal accents set the mood. Black-and-white photos of starfish and coastal waters graced the walls, and multicolored blue stones on the kitchen backsplash topped off the modern ocean feel. Though, at the moment, as I stared down at Rob’s mystery phone on the coffee table, it was a lot like being trapped in shark-infested waters.
I still couldn’t believe he’d do that to Bree. That woman was his life, and over the last year of truly getting to know her, I completely understood why. An affair made no sense. My desperate need to understand grew by the minute. However, pacing wasn’t going to help me magically figure it out.
“Okay,” I said, lowering myself to sit on the couch in front of it. The next lockout was only five minutes. I could do it. I could totally do it.
He’d always been obsessed with cars. They weren’t my thing, but I’d listened to him ramble enough to know that a 1969 Shelby was his dream car.
1-9-6-9
Denied.
Fuck.
For the next five minutes, there was a hurricane of pacing, thinking, and cussing.
Maybe it wasn’t some code to crack. If he was stupid enough to be having an affair, maybe he was dumb enough to think he didn’t even need a code. Sucking in a deep breath, I went with the most generic sequence I could think of.
1-2-3-4
Wrong again.
Shit.
Defeated, I settled in for my fifteen minutes of purgatory.
There had to have been tens of thousands of different combinations, but only one opened the phone and I was running out of guesses. He was my best friend; it shouldn’t have been so hard. For fuck’s sake, I’d spent three months living in a minivan with him, where we shared ninety-nine-cent cheeseburgers for dinner and took turns standing guard when we had to piss in the middle of the night.
When I said I knew Rob Winters, I meant I fucking knew him. I’d titled my life’s work after that—
My body turned to stone. It was a summer we’d spent pooling change and trading clean clothes, but no matter how many times we’d doubled over laughing while telling those stories, it always came back to the Aerostar van.
There was a reason my album wasn’t Solstice in the ’07. We’d had a blast playing new bars, meeting women, drinking ourselves sick on whatever shots the bartender would slide our way when no one was looking. But it was the bond we’d forged inside the van that changed our lives.
Rob had told me all about his fears of never measuring up to others’ expectations for him. And I’d told him all about growing up with a narcissist who was too consumed with her own life to remember I existed. We confided in each other about shit two twenty-one-year-olds never should have had to experience. And in those captain’s chairs, leaned back, staring up at the cloth drooping on the roof, we’d promised to stick together and keep each other accountable.
Nineteen ninety-two. It wasn’t a place in time. It was an address where two broken kids had vowed to become men better than the world we’d been born into.
Holding my breath, I typed the numbers 1-9-9-2.
A rush of adrenaline crashed into me like a tsunami when the screen suddenly slid open.
I shot to my feet, victory singing in my veins. For a beat, I was so proud of myself that I’d forgotten about the betrayal and why I’d broken into the phone in the first place.
The home screen was set to default, the standard factory apps neatly stored in folders. The only icon on the dock at the bottom was for Messages and it snapped me back to reality. There was no turning back, but Bree deserved to know.
