Unseen (Will Trent / Atlanta Series)

mark to Macon, the song got louder, and Sara’s brain started adding words to the melody.
    Jeffrey. Lena’s partner. Sara’s husband.
    Sara’s life.
    She had held him in her arms as he lay dying. She had stroked her fingers through his thick hair one last time. She had touched the rough skin of his cheek one last time. She had pressed her lips to his, felt his ragged last breaths in her mouth. She had begged him not to leave even as she watched the life slowly leave his beautiful eyes.
    Sara had wanted to follow him. Grief set her adrift, unmoored her from everything that mattered. Weeks went by, months, but the pain was a relentless tide that would not ebb. Finally, Sara had taken too many pills. She’d told her mother it was a mistake, but Sara hadn’t made a mistake. She’d wanted to die, and when she found that she could not die, the only thing she could do was start over.
    She’d left her family, her home, her life, and moved to Atlanta. She had bought an apartment that was nothing like the house she’d shared with Jeffrey. She’d purchased furniture that Jeffrey would not have liked, dressed in clothes he would never expect her to wear. Sara had even taken a job Jeffrey had never seen her do. She’d made her life into something that worked without him.
    And she’d met Will.
    Will.
    The thought of his name smoothed down some of the sharp edges. Sara wanted so badly to be with him right now that she almost turned around. She saw herself getting into her car, heading toward the highway, retracing her steps back to Atlanta.
    There was a clingy red dress hanging in Sara’s closet. She would wear it with the painfully high heels that made Will lick his lips every time he saw them. Sara would brush out her hair, wear it down around her shoulders the way he liked. She would darken her eyeliner, load up on the mascara. She would wear a touch ofperfume everywhere she wanted him to kiss her. And as soon as he walked through the door, Sara would tell Will that she was deeply, irrevocably in love with him. She’d never said the words to him before. Never found the right time.
    Time.
    A sharp, startling memory jolted Sara out of her plans. She was at her old house standing in front of the fireplace. What was she wearing? Sara didn’t have to think for long. She was in the same black dress she’d worn to her husband’s funeral. Days had passed before her mother managed to get Sara to take off the dress, to shower, to change into something that didn’t carry the stench of Jeffrey’s death.
    And still, Sara had kept returning to the fireplace. She could not stop staring at the cherrywood clock on the mantel. It was a beautiful old thing, a wedding gift to Sara’s grandmother that had been passed to Sara, just like the watch she wore on her wrist. That Sara had inherited two timepieces was not something she’d ever considered remarkable. What she remembered most from the days after the funeral was watching the second hand move on her grandmother’s clock, hearing the loud tick of the gears marking time.
    Sara had stopped the clock. She had put her watch in a drawer. She had unplugged the clock beside her bed—their bed that she could no longer sleep in. She had found some electrician’s tape in Jeffrey’s workbench and covered the clock on the microwave, the stove, the cable box. It became an obsession. No one could enter the house with a watch. No one could remark on the passage of time. Anything that reminded Sara that life was moving on without Jeffrey had to be hidden from sight.
    “Mrs. Tolliver?”
    Sara felt another jolt. She’d stopped walking. She was standing stock-still in the middle of the hospital lobby as if lightning had struck.
    “Mrs. Tolliver?” the man repeated. He was older, with a shock of white-gray hair and a well-trimmed mustache.
    As with Nell’s phone call, Sara’s memory took a few seconds to cull information from her past. She finally said, “Chief Gray.”
    He smiled warmly at Sara, though there was a familiar reserve in his eyes. Sara thought of it as the Widow Look—not the look a widow gave, but the one she received. The one that said the viewer didn’t quite know what to say because, secretly, all he or she could feel was so damn lucky it hadn’t happened to them.
    He held out his hand. “Lonnie.”
    “Sara.” She shook his hand, which felt solid and reassuring, just like the man. Lonnie Gray was an old-school cop, the type who could never really leave the