Damn, I was out of touch. Not a single one of these names or faces looked familiar to me, except...
Daniel Thorne out walking with his wife and baby daughter -
Of course I'd heard the name before, although I never saw a picture of the guy. It was his wife who caught my attention.
My jaw dropped as I stared at her.
Maddy?
Chapter Two
Ben
I had a hangover.
Not in the traditional sense of the word. I hadn't been drinking. Much. I'd certainly had more ice cream than I'd had booze. But I felt bleary and exhausted, my stomach tied in knots and a faint taste of regret and failure in the back of my mouth.
It took me a while to remember much of anything.
The wall calendar was the first reminder of why I'd run off the rails last night.
God damn it.
Daria always kept a wall calendar. God only knows why. I kept telling her to use the stupid app on her phone, and she wouldn't need a wall calendar with a Sharpie tied up next to it, because this was the fucking future and she was being insane. I hated the grimy string that held the thing in place, just like I hated the little valance curtain that hung above the kitchen window.
But it was still there.
I rolled over, violently punching the accent pillow on the sofa. Sometimes I still slept on it, for old time's sake.
Certainly not because I fell asleep after watching some Lifetime movie about sadness and death and cancer.
Certainly not that.
Daria's mother was the kind of person who kept fluffy seat covers on toilets. That should have been my first clue. Nothing made of fabric belongs in the bathroom or the kitchen - the two dirtiest rooms in the house. Unless it's a floor mat or an oven mitt, I want it out of my sight.
And Daria was gone.
Every once in a while, it hit me fresh. Like it had just happened. There was no escaping these days, although they came less and less frequently with time. I just had to get through them. Weather them somehow, with the help of my good friends Ben and Jerry.
I didn't even care about her anymore. The Daria I loved as a concept was long gone, and I knew that. I was finished mourning her. It led nowhere, and accomplished nothing. Why bother? Why waste my energy? It was like loving a ghost. Except more pointless, because my concept of Daria couldn't even make pottery with me while the Righteous Brothers played in the background. She was beyond ethereal. She was completely nonexistent, in every possible iteration of every universe.
Here's a fun fact: space and time are the same thing. I know you know that already. You've heard of "the fabric of space-time" or "the space-time continuum." But have you ever thought about what it really means?
Time is just how we conceptualize our movement through space. To put it another way: you already know you can't move through space without moving through time. But did you know that you can't move through time without moving through space?
You might think you're standing still, but you're never really still. The earth is rocketing through the vast emptiness of the universe so quickly you can't even conceptualize it. It's beyond your understanding. Beyond your ability to perceive. Everything we see, everything we feel, is all based on a tiny grain of sand in the vastness of everything we know.
This should be comforting, I suppose. But it's not.
When I meet them, I always think it's going to be different. Every time, I fool myself. That was one of the reasons I lashed out at the girl at the store. I hardly remembered it - I just remembered the exhaustion, the red creeping into the corners of my vision. But the very sight of her made me angry, because of the spark of emotion inside. Look at her. She's different.
Like a hero in a Regency romance, I would inevitably fall for the first girl who showed a hint of spirit. Whatever that meant. These days, it hardly meant anything anymore - it was harder to tell who was truly a free spirit in an age like ours.
But I always knew.
There were women who treated me like I was rich, and women who didn't.
Not that it mattered. Not being an idiot, I understood it was inescapable. People would always consider my money when evaluating my personality. If it was down to a decision between me and another man, and I was the billionaire, he certainly wasn't going to win out. To some extent, I'd never really know what any woman thought of me.
And that was all right. It was hardly a true burden, considering where it came from. I'd been rich, and I'd been poor. Rich was better. I just wished I had landed a girlfriend before I had money. It would have made my love life a whole hell of a lot easier.
Instead, I married a woman I hardly knew. When she cheated on me with her friend from work, part of me was shocked, but the other part felt the crushing inevitability of this. Had been feeling it for years. We met when we were teenagers. There was no chance for us.
There would've been, if she'd tried harder.
But I was insufferable too. I knew that. As much as I knew I wasn't supposed to blame myself, I couldn't really do anything else. Daria wasn't a degenerate when she married me. I'd turned her into someone lonely and desperate. That was my gift.
I groaned, leaning back on the sofa. The girl at the store was nothing like Daria. But there was something that flared inside me nonetheless, an attraction, a desire that was immediately met with anger and disgust. How could I still let myself start to fall for a woman, when I knew how it would end?
Four years since Daria left. Almost two years since our divorce was finalized.
I was running out of time.
***
Work went by in a blur. I tried to pay attention, I really did, but it was nearly impossible. All I could hear was the oppressive tick, tick, tick of the clock in the corner of the room. Why the hell did we have a clock? Everyone knew what time it was. There were a thousand electronic devices programmed to the atomic clock, self-updating, self-adjusting for daylight saving. Never needing their stupid AA batteries replaced.
Time was my worst enemy now. I gritted my teeth through every meeting, every phone call, trying to sound normal. Probably failing.
Nobody knew my secret. Not even the partners, the biggest shareholders, my CFO - no one. I'd been too ashamed to admit it. Thinking back, I couldn't remember what possessed me to sign that settlement.
You had to prove something. You didn't want her to think...
Being at work was awful. I paced like a caged animal until five o'clock, only because I liked to set an example for my employees. If people saw me fucking off in the middle of the day, they'd resent me for holding them to a normal schedule. Most days, I didn't need to be here at all. It was about appearances.
Every time my phone buzzed, I nearly jumped out of my skin. It was exactly four months, to the dot, until she came to collect her prize. Or so she thought. We hadn't spoken in so long, but I was sure she'd contact me. Just to gloat. Just to remind me - as if I could forget.