Page 1 of The Love Thief

CHAPTER ONE Hell

My mother was right. Shit.

As I began my descent back into the real world, I wanted to laugh at this thought, but I wasn’t sure why.

Now, where am I?

I could hear rhythmic mechanical beeping.

My eyes were closed, and my mouth was so tight I couldn’t open it.

I must be dreaming.

I felt a heaviness as if I were stuck in some mucky quicksand.

Thoughts floated by and disappeared.

Am I asleep?

My mother was right.

There was that thought again.

Right about what?

“Holly, Holly, are you in there? Can you open your eyes? It’s me, Mom.”

Did I want to open my eyes? I wasn’t sure . . .

“Holly, you’re in a hospital. You had an accident. You are going to be okay. Please open your eyes.”

I willed my eyes to open. They felt sticky, but I slowly coaxed them to half-mast.

My mother’s face hovered above me . . . she looked terrible. Not a smidgen of lipstick.

This must be bad . She never goes out in public without her lipstick.

Something pulled me away, luring me to return to sleep. Whatever this was could not be good.

“Holly, please open your eyes. You’re going to be okay,” Mom pleaded.

Footsteps. Pushing through the grogginess, I opened my heavy eyelids enough to see a middle-aged woman in a white coat above me.

She said her name was Dr. Something. She explained that my jaw was wired shut because it had been broken in the car accident.

A car accident? She told me I had eighteen stitches over my right eyebrow and my right wrist was fractured and would be in a cast for four to five weeks and, if all goes well, my jaw would heal in six weeks. She said I was a very lucky woman.

It could have been much worse.

It could have been worse? I still did not understand. Worse than what?

This was all too much. I dove back into the comforting, safe, silky darkness of morphine-laced sleep.

I’m not sure how much time later, I came to again, sensing warmth in my left hand . . . it felt like something big was squishing it. Someone was holding my hand and I needed it to stop. I did my best to pull away.

“Holly, Baby, thank God you are alive! What happened? You scared me to death. Your mom is here, too. We’re here for you! Don’t worry about that big gash and stitches over your eye. We’ll find the best plastic surgeon and have you looking great in time for the wedding.”

It was Barry, my fiancé, talking at his usual over-caffeinated pace, not bothering to come up for air.

My addiction to playing online jigsaw puzzles seems to have paid off. Flashes of scenes rapidly clicked into place and the events that landed me here in this hospital bed became a string of memories.

All bad. Without wanting to, I visualized the last screenshot I took on my phone before the car crash. It was all I could see in my mind.

My stomach clenched and a zillion images suddenly tumbled into my head. Tears slid out of the corners of my eyes, and I felt crushed as if a jumbo jet had crash-landed into my heart. Once again that thought circled like a buzzard through the fog in my brain: Mom was right.

A half hour before my plane had landed in Phoenix, I looked in my briefcase to review my notes for the morning meeting and realized the hard copy of the Feinberg contract was missing.

I must have left it at home. Shoot! If Barry could scan the document, I could print it out before the meeting and all would be well.

While waiting in the rental car line, I called Barry multiple times; I kept getting voicemail. I recalled his mentioning something about his wanting to go to bed early, but all I needed was for him to scan the document and email it to me before morning.

As I got behind the wheel, I remembered the new security system we had installed recently. It came with a phone app for remote viewing. When I couldn’t reach Barry, I decided to see if I could locate the document in its red folder in the Great Room.

What I found instead shattered my world: Barry and Carly, my longtime friend and business partner, were sitting nearly naked at our dining room table.

Dinner laid out and candles glowing; clearly a prelude to sex.

My heart dropped like an elevator in free fall to the bottom of my soul.

Incomprehensible. I thought I must be hallucinating, yet somehow I had managed to snap a screenshot just in case this was all real.

I looked up from my phone just in time to see the back of the eighteen-wheeler I was about to plow into.

What is that awful guttural sound? It sounded like whimpering from a gravely wounded animal. Something in pain. Utter despair.

Where was it coming from?

Oh my God. It’s coming from me.

Mom panicked, calling for a nurse, something about my needing more morphine.

Barry still had a death grip on my hand, mumbling shit like, “Don’t worry, Babe, you’re gonna be fine. Just breathe. The doctor is on the way. Don’t worry about that nasty stitching on your forehead. I’ll get you the best plastic surgeon. You’ll look great for the wedding . . . it’s gonna be okay.”

Dear God , I thought. This is not just meaningless drivel. It’s repetitive , meaningless drivel.

I pulled back from his grip, opened my eyes as best I could, and tried to think.

I couldn’t talk. My jaw was wired shut. I couldn’t write. My wrist was broken and in a sling. And, more than anything, I needed to get this motherfucker away from me as quickly as possible.

The pain in my body wasn’t what was causing these horrible sounds. These were the tormented wails of the realization that my life was over. Not only was my body broken but my heart was also shattered. Every dream I had nurtured for my nearly thirty-eight years on Earth had been decimated.

I might as well be dead.

My eyes opened as a pretty young attendant walked in wearing peacock blueprint scrubs. She smiled at me and with a lilting accent I couldn’t quite place beyond possibly Caribbean, said, “Hi, Holly. I’m your nurse, Kiyana.”

She gently took my left hand and placed it on a small switch and pressed my thumb, which clicked while she instructed, “Okay, honey. You can control the pain medication dosage yourself. Just push this button.”

I was in a small private room. The walls were a comforting shade of steel blue.

I could see a whiteboard on the wall that said in big block letters, “Today is Sept. 15th. Your nurse is Kiyana. Your help call button is RED.” Barry was now on my right, Mom on my left, looking more stressed than I’d ever seen her.

Despite IV lines and other wires protruding from my left arm, I motioned to my mother that I needed my phone. She handed it to me and I fumbled, eventually finding a one-handed way to retrieve the screenshot and make it full screen.

I gave the phone back to Mom with Barry leaning across me trying to see the screen.

Her eyes widened. A look of disbelief, followed by horror, followed by a rage that transformed her face.

At that moment, I remembered what she was right about. In her own way, she had tried to warn me about Barry.

It was all too much, so I allowed myself to give in to the morphine haze . . . the last thing I heard before I disappeared into the comforting sea of nothingness was Barry pleading, “Babe, I can explain!”