Midnight Sommelier - Anne Malcom Page 0,38

And the smile full of love and heartbreak from my sister.

I wondered if that’s all I’d ever get. A smile peppered with pity, making it almost impossible to forget that I wasn’t whole.

“Of course I’m serious, Bridget,” she said.

She was. My sister was flat-out serious about me writing a book. The same sister that had watched my quick decline into casual alcoholism and abusing grocery store workers.

I thought about it a little more now. I was a good writer, wasting my talents on vapid social media captions, sure. They’d never sated my thirst to do something creative. Meatier.

I’d toyed with the idea of writing something. Heck, I had three half-finished romance novels banished to private folders on my computer. They weren’t anything grand, and I never considered doing anything like publishing them or even mentioning their existence. Somewhere deep inside of me, I’d always dreamed of being an author. Holding a book I’d written. But I’d never given much weight to such a dream. Never thought I had enough to say to fill all the pages of a book. My confidence may have looked unshakeable online and even in person, but it was largely fragile. Especially about things like that.

I’d let myself become smaller these past years. My identity squeezed into titles like ‘wife,’ ‘mother,’ and ‘blogger’. It wasn’t David’s fault. Or the boys. Just my own.

Now I was only one of those things and I felt empty. Lacking.

“Promise you’ll at least think about it?” Alexis asked, taking my silence as refusal.

I met her eyes. “I promise.”

I was lying.

There were two things taking up my mind space right now.

Longing for my dead husband.

Craving the very alive man in the house next door.

9

“You sure you don’t want to go to sleep?” Alexis asked, looking at me with her brows furrowed in worry. I’d be the one paying for her Botox if I didn’t get better at acting. “You haven’t been sleeping enough lately.”

I tightened my grasp around the stem of my wine glass. She meant well. Everyone meant well when they commented on your sleeping habits, your weight, the bags under your eyes. Not things it was usually socially appropriate to comment on, but apparently you get carte blanche when you’re talking to a widow and you ‘mean well.’

“I drink enough coffee to even it out,” I said. “Plus, I’m a mom to two weirdos—I’m never going to get enough sleep with those two around.” I managed a weak smile to accompany my weak joke.

She looked at me for a beat, inspecting me with soft, kind eyes. She nodded. “Okay, Sis.”

I looked out into the backyard, at the pool glistening with the lights I’d been so intent on getting. What a big deal I’d made out of fucking pool lights.

I glanced back to the house, knowing that Alexis likely was in her room, which meant I could blast my ‘self-pity’ playlist.

“SOS” by Graace came on, and all my sorrows slithered out of their hiding places. I remembered the first time I heard this song, when I was plagued by a bout of restlessness. Melancholy. It happened to me sometimes, for no real reason. I would just want to scream, cry, curl into a ball and hide from the world. Sink into the floor.

Of course, a mom and a wife couldn’t do that. So I’d put on my mask. Fooled the world. I’d cry quietly in the middle of the night for no reason. Sit and stare at nothing, listening to songs that spoke to me.

Like this one.

“What is this song?” David asked, surprising me.

I had been sure the house would be mine for another hour at least. The boys at their friends’ houses, David at work. I could safely let music filter into the air that I usually banished to headphones.

I glanced to David, shrugging. “Just a song. Why?”

His brow was furrowed. “Nothing, it just doesn’t sound like you.”

I had to take a long, slow breath so I didn’t scream at him. He didn’t mean anything by the comment, but it awakened a visceral fury in me. I was a little scared of how quickly it emerged.

“What does sound like me?” I wanted to ask. What songs did my perfect husband want to fit his perfect wife? I couldn’t listen to music about giving up, about sorrow, because that wasn’t the wife he had. He wanted the simple wife that listened to simple songs and fit right into the mold he’d created.

It wasn’t his fault. There wasn’t a malice in that