Getting Even

“Ooooh, I see dead people!”

“That’s exactly the problem!” Veronica said. “I do see dead people. At least, I want to see dead people. Correction, I want to see dead person. Just the one.” Pausing, she thought about Felicity beneath Rafael’s protective arm back at the chapel. “Okay, maybe two.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I want to kill him! Obviously.”

“Okaaay, take a breath.”

“I’ve taken so many breaths I’ve used up half the oxygen in Yorkshire!”

“Well, take another and try to remember what I said about using a catastrophe scale to keep things in perspective.”

“Oh, on the catastrophe scale this is a ten!”

“No, Veronica, it’s not a ten. There are worse things than seeing your ex at a wedding, so take a moment now to think about them.”

“Um, like...say...a typhoon ripping through the estate and killing all the guests?”

“Yeees. Although somewhat unlikely, if that makes you feel better, relatively speaking, then—”

“All the corpses in this mausoleum rising up as zombies and swarming out to kill all the guests.”

“That’s a little macabre but—”

“A sudden blizzard—”

“In July?”

“—snap-freezing the moors and killing all the guests.”

“I’m sensing a theme here, Veronica.”

“Sharknado. Herd of trampling bison. An invasion of serial killers. Everyone dead.”

“Don’t you think killing all the guests is a little extreme when you only really want to kill one?”

“Yes!” Veronica agreed. “And all I need to do is go back to my cottage and get a knife from the kitchen. It’s close enough that I could be back in under five minutes. He’d probably still be kissing Romy and hugging Matt and shaking Teague’s hand and holding on to Felicity and do not—do not!—tell me ever again how good she is in This Time Forever—and it would all be over with one downward slice.”

“Okay, enough, Veronica! Nobody has to die!”

“Castration, then. I’ll find a rusty knife.”

“Can’t you just castrate the voodoo doll?” Scarlett said, and started laughing. “I can’t believe I’m telling you to castrate a voodoo doll like it’s an actual solution!”

“Don’t joke about my doll!” Veronica said. “Sticking pins in him has helped me a lot.”

“Okay, I surrender! Kill Rafael! Go ahead! Do it! Just don’t leave any DNA ’cuz Mom will freak out if you get caught. And if we’re talking catastrophe scale... Well, let’s just say I’d back her over the typhoon. The sharks, as well. Definitely the bison wouldn’t stand a chance.”

“Zombies?”

“Pfft. Child’s play. And she’d out-frost the July snap-freeze. I’m pretty sure she’d even give the serial killers a run for their money.” Pause. “You know, you really could just give up on achieving closure—or at least postpone it—and keep your distance.”

“Downside?”

“Being bitter and twisted forever.”

“You’re not being very helpful.”

“Okay then, how’s this? Don’t stab Rafael or castrate him, unless you want to be either in jail or in therapy for a thousand years! Maybe try going up to the guy exactly as you’d planned and talking about his books and being civilized and burying the hatchet somewhere other than in his skull and moving the fuck on.”

“We were never civilized before, what made me think I could be now?”

“That was then, this is now. College kids—mature adults. Get it?”

“Okay, but I haven’t read the books. His books. You know why.”

“So read his damn books! Who knows, you might learn something that will help you consign him to the past—or the devil—whichever. Now hang up before I need therapy!”

“Not. Helpful.”

“I’m hanging up, Veronica,” Scarlett said, singsong style—and the line went dead.

“Read his damn books,” Veronica muttered as she all but threw her phone into her purse. “As if!” She’d read the damn blurbs—they were enough to tell her she shouldn’t read his damn books. Rich girl/poor boy. Bitch girl/proud boy. Romeo/Juliet. Unhappily-ever-after. She was a book editor—she knew how to read between the lines of a blurb. She knew he was writing about her, even if nobody else did.

Well, she guessed that counted as a forever—immortalized in literature. Just not the Till death do us part kind of forever she’d envisaged when he’d said Te amaré por siempre, Verónica that day in the garage of their DC town house.

“Till death do us part,” she said softly, thinking of the souls inside the mausoleum who were traveling into eternity together. She’d heard there was a married couple laid to rest in there who’d been together sixty years and died a day apart. That was what forever was.

She’d felt envious hearing Romy and Matt repeating the “till death do us part” vow in the chapel today. She’d hadn’t made that vow at either of her weddings—appropriately, as it turned out, since one marriage had lasted a mere twelve months and the other only twenty months. The idea of being interred with either Piers or Simeon for eternity in a place like this would never have entered her head. That kind of commitment belonged to a different kind of love. A consuming love. A Wuthering Heights kind of love. The kind that made Heathcliff bribe the sexton to remove the side of Cathy’s coffin so that when he was buried beside her, in a coffin identically opened, their remains would mingle in death.

“‘I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free...’” she murmured, and the wistfulness of that quote from Wuthering Heights had her eyes rolling. “Get out of my head, Cathy,” she called out to the moors, “and take Heathcliff with you!”

She listened for an echo but instead she heard a gravelly voice with the barest hint of an accent say behind her, “Rereading Wuthering Heights, Veronica? Again?”

She turned...and there he was.

CHAPTER THREE (#ud4cf92d5-f66d-5682-8d96-80b2d2ca9591)

RAFAEL NOTED THE way her eyes went wide, the way her nostrils flared, the uptick in her breathing, the tension that ran through her, the flare of rage.

And then she drew herself in, tipped up her chin, arched her eyebrows and controlled the flame. She was like ice water drip-dripping onto hot coals—a hiss, a sizzle, no more. “You know what a sucker I am for a doomed love story,” she drawled.

“I’m sorry Piers and Simeon didn’t live up to your expectations,” he said, out-drawling her, “but ‘doomed’ seems a little harsh.”

Drip, drip of ice—but the steam was rising from those coals and it was only a matter of time before the ice melted. “Hmm, yes, I suppose it is a little harsh,” she agreed. “At least they had the courage to try, right?”

“Try...but fail.”