I closed my laptop and turned off the light. My heart squeezed so tight remembering my sister that it physically ached. I’d been roughed up in and out of the dojo plenty of times, but no other pain ever hurt that much.

CHAPTER 10 THEO

CHAPTER 10

THEO

My sister-in-law’s words haunted me at the gravesite. Caro’s dead. Your first wife is dead. Isn’t that what police call a pattern? It had come out of the blue, her rage so sudden and swift that I couldn’t even process it.

She had caught me off guard. I wouldn’t allow that to happen again.

But her words followed me for the rest of the day. Even in my bedroom that evening, they echoed in my mind. I found myself staring at the framed photographs that covered one wall. There was one in particular I couldn’t take my eyes off: Caroline and me together on a boat. In the background was the sparkling deep sapphire of the Mediterranean and a cloudless azure sky. Caroline wore a mint-green bathing suit with a matching cover-up, disguising any hint of her pregnancy. I was barefoot but encased in a blue neoprene wet suit. We were both grinning, drunk on the blissful freedom of our honeymoon. Everything was perfect for a time.

Then it all changed.

I stared at that hopeful image, wondering where we had gone wrong. It had happened slowly and then very quickly, like a boulder picking up speed as it crashed downhill. When I ran our time together through my mind like an old newsreel, I could pinpoint the moments of crisis and bad decisions. I didn’t want to think about the ones I’d made; it was so much easier to be angry at Caroline for the harm she’d done.

The wall of photographs was the one element that distinguished my room from a trendy hotel, and I attempted to distract myself with them. There was one of a newborn Teddy, and another of my son building a sandcastle on a beach. One was of my mother in costume for a West End production of Antigone, her black hair coiled in ancient Greek style and held back by a gold diadem; even in a black-and-white photo, her eyes were piercing. There should’ve been photographs of us together before she divorced my father, but I’d never found them. Instead, my childhood was represented by a lone shot of my sister and me on skis, when I was five and she was nine, and another of us around the same time with my father and stepmother at their wedding. In both shots, Juliet scowled at the camera, while I looked dazed. There was a blank space where there had been a photograph of Caroline and me on our wedding day. I’d cut my right hand when I’d smashed the glass and broken the frame.