Page 13 of Stay Away from Him

“All good,” she assured him. “The only people I’ve talked to are people who care about you. Who are on your side. But yes. I’ve heard some things.”

“Then I guess we’ll have plenty to talk about.”

The car slowed, and Melissa looked up just as Thomas pulled off the road into a parking lot.

The building was a gray box with tall windows looking into a sleek, gleaming dining room inside.

A pergola of stained wooden beams wound with climbing vines overhung a stone patio with tables and umbrellas, sandy lanes tracked with the paths of scattered bocce balls, an unlit brick firepit sunk into the ground.

A few small parties of people sat sipping at glasses of wine under the late afternoon sunshine, flights of reds and whites laid out on paper cards, with charcuterie boards of cheese and prosciutto sweating in the heat.

A sign above the door read, simply, Veritas , and Melissa felt a shiver, recalling the aphorism: in vino veritas . In wine, there is truth.

It felt like a sign of another kind: a manifestation, an omen, a portent. A message from the universe, clear as a fortune cookie or horoscope. Truth. She needed to know the truth.

***

Inside, most of the tables were empty, and a host with a close-shorn beard greeted them a little too eagerly.

“Welcome!” he said, flashing his teeth. “Are you here for our singles event?”

Thomas groaned. “You’re kidding.”

The host blinked, his smile dimming only slightly. “Every third Monday is singles night.”

Melissa laughed, glancing around the dining room and understanding something about the sparse crowd. It was pretty good for a Monday, actually—there were a little more than a dozen people there, and they were all sitting alone at tables or at the bar, carefully eyeing each other.

“You wanted to keep your options open, Thomas?” she asked. “Play the field a bit if we didn’t hit it off?”

“I swear, I had no idea,” Thomas said. “Do you want to go somewhere else?”

“Hell no. This is hilarious. A first date on singles night? How can we possibly pass that up? Maybe I’d like to keep my options open too.”

Thomas smiled grimly. “Oh, I’m sure you would. Very wise.”

The host’s face brightened again. Maybe he was the owner, desperate for more customers on a quiet evening.

“You’ll take a name tag, then?”

“Hell yes we’ll take name tags,” Melissa said, grabbing for the sticker and marker the host slid toward her on the stand. “I’ll do his too.”

She scribbled out a couple names, then put her name tag on first. Thomas squinted as she pressed it onto her shirt.

“Xena?” he said. “Seriously?”

“That’s right. The warrior princess. Ever heard of her?”

She stepped toward him and placed his name tag over his lapel pocket, letting her hands linger on the hard bulge of his chest as she spread it flat. When she withdrew her hand, he glanced down at the name she gave him, took a moment to read it upside down.

“Biff,” he said. “Very nice.”

The host grabbed some menus, tapped them twice on the stand. “You ready?”

“Biff?” Melissa asked.

He grinned, then bowed and extended his arm. “After you, Xena.”

They got seated at a high-top and ordered a couple glasses of wine.

Thomas went through the whole ritual when he got his glass of Malbec, swirling the liquid in the glass, holding it sideways to examine it, then sticking his nose in the glass to give it a sniff.

Finally, he took a slow, thoughtful sip.

As he went through all this, Melissa glanced around the room and took note of the women casting glances toward their table.

“We’re being watched,” she said.

“The men are looking at you. Waiting for their opening to come chat you up.”

“They’re not,” Melissa protested, though now that he mentioned it, she noticed several of the men looking their way as well.

They weren’t looking at her , though—they, too, were looking at Thomas.

Jealous that their prospects, the women they came here to meet, all seemed to be attracted to someone else.

It was hard to compare to Thomas, with his beautiful eyes and smile, his perfectly fitting shirt falling straight over his stomach but pulling tight at the shoulders, chest, and arms, hinting at a lean, muscled body beneath.

Melissa couldn’t help but feel sympathy for all of them, the men and women both, the vulnerable hope embodied in the careful way they’d done up their hair, their makeup, the outfits they’d chosen—nice but not too nice, trying but not too hard.

It was hard and scary and embarrassing, looking for love.

“Shall we make it interesting?” Thomas offered. “How much you want to bet that if I left the table and went to the bathroom right now, by the time I came back there’d be at least two men at the table, trying to get your number.”

He shifted his weight on his chair and put a foot on the ground like he was about to get up, and Melissa reached forward to seize his hand on the table.

“Don’t,” she said. “Stay.”

The other women in the room might have been staring at Thomas, but he was only looking at Melissa, gazing intently across the table with an expression so warm it might as well have been the sun.

Thomas turned his hand over and grabbed at hers, preventing her from pulling it back—but she didn’t want to anyway.

She let her hand lie there in his, glanced down at it as he ran his thumb lightly up and down her forefinger, her skin tingling at his touch.

“So,” Thomas said. “Melissa Burke.”

“That’s me.”

“I finally got you to come out with me.”

“Finally?” Melissa asked. “We met each other, what? Barely twenty-four hours ago?”

“An eternity,” Thomas said. “That’s what it’s felt like. Would you believe me if I told you I’ve basically spent every waking hour since then thinking about you?”

She shrugged. “Why don’t you give it a try?”

“I’ve spent every waking hour since we met thinking about you.”

Melissa flashed him a sly grin. “I don’t believe you.”

Thomas laughed, a surprised and delighted bark. “Well, it’s true.”

She lifted her hand out of Thomas’s but didn’t withdraw to her side of the table. Instead, she curled her fingers around Thomas’s wrist and ran her hand up to his forearm, tracing the lines of his veins, his bones, the tendons and sinews of muscle.

“I bet you say that to all the women,” she said, resting her chin against her other palm and looking him in the eye.

And she couldn’t be sure—but there might have been a hitch in his breath, a reaction to the touch of her fingers on his skin, inching under the fabric of the sleeve rolled almost to his elbow.

“What women?” he said softly. “There’s been nobody, Melissa. Not since Rose.”

Rose. The name of his first wife, his dead wife, fell out of his lips and dropped on the table like a stone.

Melissa had almost forgotten about her— almost —in the brief awkwardness of walking in on the wine bar’s singles night, and the light banter that ensued.

Biff and Xena, arguing about which of them was drawing stares.

But the mention of his wife was a reminder of the specter hovering over the table, the unspoken thing shading every touch, every look, every word.

Melissa took her hand away and set it in her lap, sat back in her chair.

“Did I ruin something just now?” Thomas asked. “I shouldn’t have mentioned her.”

Melissa shook her head. “You didn’t ruin anything. And you shouldn’t avoid mentioning her name. She’s part of you.”

“And how she died? What about that?”

“That’s part of you too. And we can’t avoid talking about it forever. We shouldn’t.”

“Oh, why not?” Thomas sighed. He poked at the table, scratched the nail of his forefinger against a knot of the varnished wood surface, then folded his arms and propped them on the surface.

“All right, look. I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about this since we met yesterday.

I figured someone would tell you about—well, about everything that happened.

And that you’d have questions. But to be honest, I still haven’t figured out what to say.

The only thing I can really say is what I’ve been saying all this time. I didn’t kill my wife.”

Melissa breathed out, a tension she didn’t realize she’d been carrying releasing from her body.

It wasn’t much. A simple denial. He’d say it even if he was guilty.

“It was so unfair, everything that happened,” he said.

He was no longer meeting Melissa’s eyes, looking instead at the table.

“So terrible . First, Rose disappears without a trace. That was bad enough. I was sick with worry, actually physically sick. Frenzied with it. But I had to be strong, for Rhiannon and Kendall. They were scared, and so was I—but I had to put on a brave face, tell them everything was going to be all right.”

Thomas’s fingers fidgeted nervously on the table, and Melissa reached forward to place her hand on his. His eyes cut up toward her with some mixture of surprise and relief.

“That must have been hard,” Melissa said.

“It was. I was barely keeping it together.”

“You’re a good dad.”

Thomas sighed and shook his head, dismissing the compliment.

“But then the police decided to declare Rose dead, presumed dead, and suddenly they started looking at me as a suspect, and…I don’t know.

It broke me, Melissa. Into a million pieces.

To be looking for someone, to be as desperate as I was for her to be okay—and then for the world to take it into their heads that I’d killed her?

That I was capable of that? I kept on trying to imagine it, to imagine doing what they said I’d done.

To…to stab her to death with a kitchen knife.

To roll her up in a tarp, my beautiful wife, like she was nothing more than some trash I was hauling away, to take her to a field and—”