at the hospital, at the funeral home, at the graveside service—though she wasn’t quite sure where there was.
“How are you holding up?” they asked. “How are you feeling?”
Disembodied.
That was the word that best described Claire’s feelings. She had looked up the definition on her iPad last night to make sure she had it right.
Existing without or separated from the body.
Lacking any obvious physical source.
Again, the second definition fit best, because Paul had been her physical source. He had given weight to her life, tied her down to the world when her natural inclination had always been to float above everything as if it were happening to someone else.
She had felt this intense disembodiment for the last four days, really from the moment the Snake Man had told them to turn around. And then the police, the undertaker, asking if she wanted to see the body one last time and Claire blanching at the word “body” and sobbing like a child because she had spent every single second since they had taken Paul from her arms trying to remove the image of her lifeless, murdered husband from her mind.
Claire Scott wanted to see her husband again.
She did not want to see his body.
She stared out the window. They were inching forward in dense Atlanta traffic. The funeral procession had been truncated two lights back. Only their limo stayed out ahead. This wasn’t like the country, where strangers respectfully pulled over to the side of the road to let mourners pass. They ignored the police officers riding ahead on their motorcycles. They ignored the yellow FUNERAL flags that people had stuck on their cars. They ignored everyone but Claire, who felt like the world was staring into the back of the car trying to catch a glimpse of her grief.
She struggled to remember the last time she’d ridden in a stretch limousine. Certainly decades had passed since she rode in any type of car with both her mother and grandmother. That last limo ride must have been a trip to the airport with Paul. The car service had given them an upgrade from the usual sedan.
“Are we going to the prom?” Paul had asked.
They had been on their way to Munich for an architectural conference. Paul had booked them into the Kempinski. For six blissful days, Claire swam laps in the pool, had massages and facials, ordered room service, and shopped alongside wealthy Middle Eastern wives whose husbands were in Germany for healthcare. Paul would join her in the evenings for dinners and late-night strolls along the Maximilianstrasse.
If she thought about it hard enough, she could remember what it felt like to hold his hand as they passed the darkened windows of all the closed shops.
She would never hold his hand again. She would never roll over in bed and rest her head on his chest. She would never see him come down for breakfast wearing those God-awful velour shorts she hated. She would never spend her Saturdays on the couch with him, reading while he watched football games, or go to another corporate dinner party or wine tasting or golf tournament, and even if she did, what would be the point if Paul wasn’t there to laugh with her about it?
Claire opened her mouth for air. She felt as though she was suffocating in the closed limo. She rolled down the window and took great gulps of cold air.
“We’ll be there soon,” her mother said. She was sitting across from Claire. Her hand was wrapped around the liquor decanters in the side console because the sound of the rattling glass was the proverbial fingernails on a blackboard.
Her grandmother, Ginny, buttoned up her coat, but said nothing about the cold.
Claire rolled up the window. She was sweating. Her lungs felt shaky. She couldn’t think beyond the next few hours. There were going to be over one hundred people at the house. Paul’s partner at the firm, Adam Quinn, had turned the guest list for the wake into a corporate event for Quinn + Scott. A US Congressman; several captains of industry and their trophy wives; a handful of hedge fund managers, bankers, restaurateurs and real estate developers, and countless blowhards Claire had never met before and, frankly, had never wanted to, would soon be tracking through the house.
Their house.
They lived in Dunwoody, a suburb just outside of Atlanta. The lot had a gentle slope; at its crest had been a small cottage with a tire swing in the back yard that the