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December 20, 3:06 p.m. 19 seconds
(Lake St. Clair, Michigan)
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Immediately after making love, Kyle went to shower. He wanted to get away from Juniper. What he had just witnessed in her eyes scared him. When she called out his name, he saw in her eyes how she already loved him. Didn’t she know he was not worthy of love? He stared at the bathroom mirror. His image taunted him.
It spelled out that he was alone no more.
He was part of a couple now.
What had Juniper done to him? She had shredded his system in 3 days—a system that was 3 years in the making. A system that had taken 7 years of self-hatred to implement.
He turned on the shower. One more shower to wash off her musk before they left Cedar Cradle. In 3 hours, they would leave this strange place. It was so remote, it gave of an end-of-the- earth vibe.
The water swirled in the bathtub, and he saw a flash of wet blond hair. Chloe. She was lying there—floating just below the surface. He closed his eyes. For the first time since she had died, Kyle wanted her gone forever.
But she didn’t want to be gone.
Even after all those years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds ticking down in melted agony in his clockwork mind, Chloe blamed him. She always blamed Kyle. He had kept her at bay for the past few years, but Juniper had torn down his walls and Chloe had come tumbling down in the water.
Eyes shut, he stepped in the shower. He opened one eye to see the water pooling at his feet in the bathtub. Chloe was still there—lying immobile on a steel gurney, under a white plastic sheet. He shivered.
Seven years ago, when Kyle was 23 years old, he had had to identify Chloe's body at the Marin County Sheriff's office, where her autopsy and death notice were given. At the time of her death, her parents had been travelling and the ugly task had fallen to him.
It had been a warm, sunny May morning, but to Kyle it felt cold and dark as he had driven off the 101 to San Pedro Drive, north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Inside the gray cement coroner’s office, he was led to the autopsy lab.
It was a place he would never forget.
The white tiled room was full of empty gurneys and had a wall of steel refrigerator drawers set at 40 degrees Fahrenheit. It smelled of ammonia, urine and blood, and the air tasted like death, powdered bones, and misery.
Kyle had followed the coroner to a steel gurney. The sheet was removed and when he saw the body and the bleached skin, her smashed face, the dislocated jaw, the bits of bones poking through the torn cheeks, the black-ringed eyes, and the blond hair that had turned brown in a day, he had shaken his head.
Never.
He informed the coroner this was not Chloe. There was no way, no way in hell, this deader-than-death-creature had once been the livelier-than-life Chloe. But when the coroner uncovered the distended stitched-up stomach, which had once been Chloe’s flat waist, he saw the damning tattoos. The tattoos she kept getting, no matter how many times he had told her to stop.
And now, twisting in the shower, he touched his wet tattoo.
Elafri̱s.
Chloe always said she was his light. One tattoo for Kyle was not enough for Chloe. With her usual excess in love, she had gotten four.
When the coroner turned her body over, the tattoo on her back had made Kyle cry for the first and last time in his adult life.
It was a long ugly cry.
In black calligraphy spanning the dip above her hips, it said in curly letters, I belong to Kyle.
Silently cursing himself, Kyle boxed the shower tiles so hard his knuckles felt broken. The pain helped him focus. He thought about Chloe too much lately. He tried to focus on Juniper, who was waiting for him outside. But the two faces merged in the jetting waters until he could not tell who was who.
