Single Lady Spy 01 - The End of Me

sacrifice they’re making.”
    My breathing picked up, I nodded, “Yes, I am a lucky girl.” She smiled and missed the heartache and sarcasm in my voice.
    He smiled, “You must leave here tomorrow and you may never come back. The Key must never come near here again. Your father was granted special privileges to come and live here, during his faked death, but that is not something we ever do. This whole mess is because we let him live.”
    I looked at Coop, Jack, and Luce; that statement didn’t sit well with me. Was she going to have us killed when our usefulness ran out?
    We walked from the circular room.
    “Did anyone else feel like we were just given a death sentence that we’re supposed to feel grateful for?” Jack muttered.
    I pushed the elevator button but my heart was burning, “Pretty much. Like this is a huge honor, they’re bestowing on us.” I felt all the floors above me threatening to come down on me. The avalanche of bad things was back. This time it was real. The elevator dinged and we all stepped in like mindless zombies.
    We left the next day.
    I didn’t remember the flight.
    I tried to accept the fact we had to be tortured and left in the hotel parking lot, where we were locked in the back of a van. We managed to escape and flee to another hotel where Coop called us in. We were brought in for questioning and cleared, when it became obvious whoever was the Master Key had killed James and Roxy, and possibly Servario. The commander came down and requested we start back after we all healed. We would be the Burrow task force, to stop this sort of thing from happening again. We needed to know what it was, so we could protect our country from it.
    It didn’t matter to me.
    I still needed to give myself the moment I had been denied at the temple.
    An agent drove me to my car, which was still parked at the Boston airport.
    He dropped me off and drove away. I lifted a bruised hand up into the midday sun and looked at it. It was real. I could feel the dam about to burst inside of me, so I got into the car and drove home quickly.
    When I got to my driveway, I looked up at my house. My family, what was left of it, came running out to greet me. They had been returned home from their lovely getaway in Thailand.
    After we hugged on the lawn, and my kids got past the bruising, my mom wrapped her arms around my neck and whispered, “He loved you so much.” She sobbed and walked into the house. I felt a sickness, I couldn’t let in. He had to be dead for her to act like that.
    I went directly to my room. I needed a shower. I needed to really cry in the shower.
    I opened the bedroom door and then the bathroom.
    I gasped and dropped to my knees.
    In Russian Red my bathroom mirror read, “ Best week of my life xoxo ”.
    The lipstick was on the counter next to a pair of black, patent-leather Christian Louboutin ankle-boot pumps.
    Had he done it before or after? Was he dead? I didn’t know.
    I sobbed into my carpet.
    What if he was dead?
    I had nothing…no feeling…I was numb.

Chapter Eighteen – The end of me

    His death was the end of me.
    The end of sad Evie Evans. The mom who made everyone more important. The hockey/soccer/every damned sport-under-the-sun single parent. The yoga-pant wearing, mortgage poor, stressed to the hilt, and sex-deprived wife.
    She died.
    She died the week her dad was shot down in Mexico. Her ex-husband and his girlfriend had been there as well. The house was torched and the helicopter pilot was murdered savagely.
    She died the week the only man she had ever been able to be a real woman with, was murdered. He died in a hotel room of a heart attack, but they suspected poisoning. Maybe potassium chloride pills. No one knew. His body had vanished from the ME’s office before they could be sure.
    In dead Evie’s stead, there was a new Evie. She was strong and fun, like a girl she once knew.
    She still cried sometimes at night, when no one was looking, but that stopped when she got a postcard in the mail from a stranger. All it said was “See you at Christmas”. She stopped crying then.
    She stopped being broken at night when no one could see. She started counting down the days till Christmas. And until the damned house sold, so she could stop looking over at the neighbors’ house and wanting to kill the home-wrecking slut that lived there.

The End

    Stay tuned for book two in the Single Lady Spy Series, The End of Games