this is the darkest moment of my life. All those days of wishing she would find someone to love again were false; I’d be a fool to deny I wanted anything other than for her to find me, to love me. Though for all the darkness, I am awash in relief, in knowing the safest route was taken: Now I know she’s happy and full of hope, embarking on the best moments of her life, with a man I hope and pray will protect her and please her and allow her to open up, to survive.
Sean should understand this, too; his comment makes no sense. “Wrecked?” I say.
Sean backs up, walks down the hall, and peeks through the classroom windows until he finds an empty room, then waves me down. I follow him inside and he closes the door behind me.
“Guess who she’s married to?” Sean asks.
That I could possibly know the answer is troubling. She’s supposed to be dead, meaning everyone I’ve ever known would think the same thing—except…
I can barely speak it: “You?”
He chuckles. I stare at him for a few seconds before I sit down in one of the classroom chairs. Sean leans back against the instructor’s desk, narrows his eyes, and says, “I knew you didn’t kill her. I knew you couldn’t. Even before I read your sappy journals. Mr. Sensiteevo.” I rest back and fold my arms, comprehend the magnitude of Sean knowing she’s alive. “You’re a lying sack, Bovaro. You lied about killing Melody and you lied about that list.” He lowers his voice. “I would’ve rolled the dice and called your bluff.”
“Yeah, keep that dream alive, Sean.” I wave him off with the back of my hand. “How did I wreck her? She looks happy to me.”
He sighs and rubs the stubble on his chin. “I found her eventually, some time after reading your journals.”
I close my eyes and shake my head. It feels like I’ve spent years climbing to the top of Mount Everest only to have someone tell me I’ve topped the wrong mountain. I keep my eyes shut as I say, “So Justice knows where she is? That she’s alive?”
“Not Justice. Just me. Locating her was more of a pastime than a mission.” I look up just as he brings his hands to his hips. “I… reluctantly agree she’s better off outside the program, and the program is better off with her not in it. As much as I hate to admit it, you did give her her freedom, no matter how risky and poorly thought out it was. But it really didn’t take that long to find her. I didn’t even have to use any resources at Justice. I left no trace that I ever looked for her, found her the old-fashioned way. She could’ve been located by any half-wit detective. I caught sight of her shortly after she purchased that wedding ring at a jeweler just outside of UCLA.”
“She purchased it?”
Sean nods. “Jeweler said he thought it was quite unusual as well, but she’d told him such a story of sentiment about why she was buying it that it stuck with him; he’d already retold the story a half dozen times before I got to him.”
“Which was what?”
Sean takes a long look at me. “She’s not married to me,” he says, then points his finger at me like a gun. “She’s married to you.”
I open my mouth, try three times to form a question; I’m not sure what to ask.
Sean shakes his head and sneers at me, struggles to utter the truth, hates having to speak it at all. “She told the jeweler that she ‘can’t be with the one she really loves, but wants to remember him forever, be faithful to him forever’… and partly to send the message to other men that she’s not available.”
Sean looks away and bites his cheek. I try to twist down a smile; he likely doesn’t know that Melody told me how he once confessed to her that this is the exact reason he still wears his wedding band, and that she was impressed by this side of him—apparently impressed enough to emulate his actions.
“Now,” I say, “where would she get an asinine concept like that?”
“Screw you, Bovaro. My wife and I were married for eight and a half years, she succumbed to cancer and suffered miserably for two of them, died in my arms. I’ve earned the right to live out this little peculiarity.” He turns back my way. “But