Catskill, New York
September 2022
I MUMBLE AN EXCUSE to Kyle before shutting down my laptop and stretching my arms over my head. “I think I’m going to head out for a run.”
“Right now? After the big hike we just did, and all the wine?” He’s confused, and rightfully so. I should have come up with a better reason to leave, but we’re in the middle of nowhere. I shouldn’t be coming up with a lie at all.
“It’s getting dark,” he adds. Dusk presses against the A-frame’s huge glass windows. We chose this place for the unfettered views of the woods and open skies, but now, panic sets in as I consider how exposed we are. Someone was watching me in Prospect Park; someone was outside Grape Juice. Someone who looks uncannily like Josh. He could be anywhere right now.
“I know. I just feel like I need to get out for a bit.” I pull on a hoodie. “The food is sitting so heavy in my stomach.”
He motions to close his laptop. “I’ll come with you.”
I shake my head. “No, stay and finish your work. By the time I’m back, you’ll be done, and we can go in the hot tub.”
At first, I don’t think he’ll listen, but he nods and squeezes my hand, giving it a quick pulse, before returning to his screen. I suck in a grateful breath, even as I feel like the worst kind of liar, the one who deceives by omission. But the last thing I want to do right now is explain to Kyle what is unexplainable even to myself.
I slip into my shoes on autopilot, and when I’m outside, I break into a run, darting down the trail until my lungs feel like burning bags of fire. The wind whips my face. The temperature is dropping, this afternoon’s warmth receding, and the air I’m breathing in feels like something I could choke on.
I wish there were someone here with me who knew Josh, who I could ask for a second opinion. Maybe Andrew doesn’t look that much like Josh, and it’s my grief playing another cruel trick. I hold my breath and let it out slowly, trying to steady my heart rate and stop my imagination from careening away. They say everyone has a twin out there in the world, someone whose features look uncannily, inexplicably, like our own.
Yet Andrew Smith is a winemaker, in Napa Valley. Andrew Smith, identical—at least, in that photo—to my dead husband. Josh grew up on a winery in Napa and knew lots about wine. It was a mutual passion of ours, even though it sometimes felt like we were at odds. He hated the very thing I loved most about natural wine: that no two bottles were ever totally identical. He liked knowing what he was getting. Mostly, I didn’t mind our little debates. Inevitably, we’d end up tipsy and in bed together.
“How can you drink something that leaves this behind?” he’d once said, holding my glass up to the light, where sediment blotted the bottom.
“They’re wine diamonds,” I’d said, referring to the nickname for the tiny crystals of sediment. “They’re a sign there was very little intervention.”
“You and your intervention,” he’d said. “Wines need help to become better. They were designed that way. Same as people. The right person comes along, and then—” He lunged for my waist and his hands roamed up my rib cage as I giggled uncontrollably.
The winery where Josh grew up had been called the Golden Grape, and I’d googled it after we met, but it hadn’t turned up any discernable results—there were several wineries worldwide that shared the name, and it had been sold before having a web presence was the norm for wineries. Andrew Smith owns the Backyard, a different place, but also in Napa. I don’t know what that means, or if it even means anything beyond a coincidence.
As I run, my feet thudding on the trail, I mentally collect more pieces of information. Josh’s mother, Bev, didn’t approve of me. I only met her once before we were married, and she’d called Josh away into the kitchen, leaving me in the living room with Josh’s brother, Kieran, who had been around thirteen years old at the time, lanky and metal-mouthed. I could hear slices of their argument. I can still feel the teacup in my hand, the way I’d gripped the delicate handle for dear life.
“I love her, Mom,” Josh had said. “She’s the one.”
Bev’s response hadn’t been warm and flowery. They’d gone back and forth, their voices lowered so that I could hardly hear. I made out a snippet: “… barely know her, and she barely knows you.”
I hadn’t expected her disapproval. Usually, I got along great with parents. I’d been excited to meet Josh’s mother. He had told me shortly after we met about the shock of his dad’s death, and I’d felt his heartbreak acutely. I got the sense that he was holding something back, but I chalked it up to his sadness over losing a parent unexpectedly. It was clear how important Bev was to him.
I was near tears as we drove away, certain I’d blown it with my future mother-in-law. Josh had fed me reassurances, his fingers creeping up my leg.
“She’s just protective,” he’d insisted. “She’ll come around.”
She never did. It was the only time I ever saw her while Josh was alive. That day, we decided to elope, and a week after that, he was dead.
My eyes are fixed on the ground, my feet dodging the tree roots that curl up like bony knuckles. Endless questions and theories race through my brain. The night Josh and I met, he’d come to the party with a girl. She was blonde, and he’d told me she was just a friend. I never knew her name, and can’t recall her face.
I sense myself spiraling again, reading too much into one picture on the Internet, trying to create a connection that isn’t there.
I consider sending the photo to Phoebe, with a lighthearted caption: Doesn’t this look a bit like Josh? But Phoebe had been there for my darkest moments, my middle-of-the-night phone calls when I insisted I’d seen Josh on the street. She was so worried about me that at one point, she broke down in tears and called my mom. Now, she thinks I’ve finally moved on, and I don’t want to make her return to the pitch-black place I used to live in any more than I want to go back there myself.
There’s nobody I can ask. I haven’t spoken with Bev in ten years, not since the funeral. My behavior there erected a brick wall between us. My wild, guttural sobs were expected, as were my gaunt face and wrinkled black dress. But when the empty coffin was lowered into the ground, I lost it, launching into a long, rambling speech about Josh not being dead, about the fact that he was still out there. I lashed out, leveling accusations at the people around me that they’d given up on him. My mom rubbed circles on my back as the sky swirled above us, but I still remember the horror on Bev’s face as she hugged Kieran, shielding him with her body, like I was somebody she didn’t recognize and couldn’t contain.
I stop and lean against a rock, my body pressing into its coldness, and open a new window on my phone, then type Andrew Smith, Backyard Winery as I wait for the Internet to chug to life. The winery comes up in several search results: family-owned wineries in Napa Valley, boutique vineyard hotels, wine-tasting wedding destinations. But there are no image results for Andrew Smith himself. Social media doesn’t yield any results either. It’s the same for Sadie, like neither of them exists outside this one picture.
I became obsessed with drowning cases after Josh was classified as a drowning victim. In most cases, a body is found within two or three days. In almost all cases, a body is found at some point. It was a thought that haunted me, the idea that a swimmer or boater could come across Josh’s body in an advanced stage of decomposition, a gruesome picture that flashed through my brain in nightmares.
The police didn’t consider anything about Josh’s death suspicious, because to them, it was a tragedy, a man who’d got caught in a riptide. The sea had been rough that day, the waves churning up sand like browned butter. Under those circumstances, nobody thought it was unusual that Josh’s body wasn’t found. Nobody except me.
The concerned faces in the crowd at the funeral were just a blur. I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to take myself back to that day, the small gathering of family and friends who came together for Josh. An image invades my memory: a woman on the fringe who I didn’t recognize, standing just apart from everyone else, slight and blonde, hands in the pockets of her black trench coat. When she saw me looking at her, she’d turned and walked away, and she wasn’t at the visitation afterward. I try to conjure her face and see only the face of Sadie Smith, the smiling winery owner. Had it been her? Had she been there that day?
My therapist has talked to me about this, about the ways I project my guilt. I convince myself of things that had never happened. I feel responsible for Josh’s death because I let him leave that morning.
“I know you’re loyal to your eggs Benedict,” he’d said, pressing me against the white duvet, his hands clamping down on my wrists. “But I know this little café that makes these homemade donuts that’ll melt in your mouth.”
It was so early; the sun was only on the verge of rising. “Stay here,” I’d mumbled, trying to pull him down on top of me.
“They’ll be all sold out unless I go early,” he had said before kissing me on the cheek and hopping out of bed with a devilish smile. “Stay hungry. I’ll be back soon.”
But he wasn’t. And in the weeks and months after that terrible day, I found new ways to torture myself, coming up with new theories about what had really occurred. But eventually, I knew everybody else had to be right: Josh’s death was a tragedy, not a mystery.
Now, all the doubt comes rushing back. Maybe his disappearance was neither a tragedy nor a mystery. Maybe it was a carefully laid plan.
I dial the number for the Backyard and press the phone tightly to my ear, but the call doesn’t connect. I walk up the root-gnarled hill in front of me, holding my phone up to search for a connection. Finally, a bar of service appears, and the second time I call, a woman answers, her voice clear and light.
“Backyard Winery, how can I help you?”
I pause, my throat dry. Now that someone is on the phone—maybe even Sadie Smith—I have no idea what to say.
“I’m looking for Andrew Smith,” I say quickly. Once I hear his voice, I’ll know. There’s no mistaking Josh’s deep, almost slumbery baritone, the way it made all my nerve endings vibrate.
“I’m sorry, Andrew isn’t in right now. If you’d like, I can leave him a message.”
“No,” I blurt out. “Do you know when he’ll be back?”
The woman pauses, and when she speaks again, her voice has a slight edge. “I’m afraid I don’t.”
A crack sounds behind me, and I whip around, expecting a hiker, or possibly an animal. There’s nothing in sight, not even a squirrel. Josh, I think suddenly. Just like it was Josh in the baseball cap, Josh on the website, Josh so many times before today. Josh, who loved me so forcefully that I could feel it in every fiber of my being. He wouldn’t do something like this to me. He never would have left me.
“There you are,” comes Kyle’s voice as he appears on the trail behind me, making me jump and quickly end the call. “I got worried.” He surveys me, concern in his brown eyes. “Are you okay?”
I force a smile as I pocket my phone.
“Sorry,” I mumble. “I ended up having to take a work call. We were supposed to get a shipment of orange pinot grigio for a party and it didn’t arrive on time, so Trish was freaking out.”
I don’t know where the lie comes from, or why I feel compelled to tell it. I’ve always been honest with Kyle. He has the kind of face that makes people want to tell him things, the same way he’s truthful with everyone around him. I’ve told him all about Josh, and he has listened without pity or judgment. That’s a quality I appreciate about Kyle: unlike most men, he can simply listen without feeling the automatic need to fix.
“No worries,” Kyle says, wrapping his arm around my shoulders. “Should we walk back?”
I nod, falling into step next to him, hating myself for being stuck in the past. He’s content, worry-free, and I don’t want to spoil everything until I know exactly what’s going on with Andrew Smith. This is Kyle’s engagement too, Kyle’s upcoming wedding, the first and only time he wants to do this. He has been patient with me for years, taking every milestone at my slow speed and never guilting me over it. If I show Kyle the picture of Andrew Smith and mention that there’s even a chance he could be my presumed-dead husband, I know he will listen with an open mind, but I also know what he’ll say, albeit gently. It can’t be. And I don’t want to hear that right now, not from him.
The only way to figure this out and move on is to meet Andrew Smith in person. Up close, I’m sure it will be clear he’s not Josh. Then I’ll be able to fully let go of the past and focus on my fiancé and the life we’ve built together, the one full of easy laughter and hikes and wine on patios and cheesy reality dating shows.
Kyle brushes a piece of hair off my forehead. I want to put the past behind me as soon as possible, but I can’t exactly leave Kyle here to hop on a plane to Napa right this second. I need to come up with a different excuse, something that buys me time.
“When we get home, I need to head out to a few wineries on the Finger Lakes,” I say, the lie gaining shape as I recall the unanswered emails in my work account, a few winery owners who wanted to set up meetings. “I’ll just be a day or two. It’s a really underrated wine area but I think it’s about to have a moment.” My body tenses as I wait for Kyle’s reply.
“Sounds good. We’re supposed to have that meeting with the caterer on Wednesday, but I’ll see if we can push it off till when you get back.”
I feel a small pit of dread start to open in my belly, the idea that I may be risking my own wedding to take this trip. I tamp the panic down and try to sound casual. “Oh yeah, I forgot about that. I should be home in time anyway.”
“It’s no big deal,” he says, simple and sweet. “Hey, let’s get back to the cabin so I can kick your ass at Scrabble. That is, if you’re up for a rematch after last time…”
“If you’re ready to get crushed,” I say, managing a laugh. Kyle and I are far more competitive when it comes to board games than we ever were on the tennis court together.
I melt into his arms as we walk in sync, but I can’t stop thinking about Andrew Smith on a winery in Napa with his beautiful wife. I picture them holding hands and walking down endless green aisles, popping grapes into each other’s mouths like baby birds. My brain whirls like a broken compass. Do they have kids? Josh had wanted to be a young dad, young enough to kick a soccer ball and hoist giggling toddlers onto his shoulders.
I nuzzle into Kyle’s jacket, not wanting him to see the deceit written all over my face. The truth is simple: I’m not over Josh, and never will be.
I’ll always be a widow first and a wife second.