THE HUSBAND WHO DIED TWICE

Chapter2 - Proof

"Look at it, Lydia! Now!"

George tore the white glove off with his teeth and thrust his bare left arm toward her, while two of Henry Vandermere's men dragged him backward by the shoulders. His cuff ripped to the elbow. A guard's hand closed over his mouth, and he bit down on it hard enough to make the man yelp.

"Look!"

She looked.

Across the inside of his wrist ran a thin pale scar, jagged at one end where the stitches had never healed straight.

The chapel disappeared.

She was twenty-four again, standing in a tiny apartment that smelled of burned garlic and smoke. She had been a gallery assistant then, and he had been a man who asked her to dinner and somehow ended up in her kitchen. She had ruined the pasta, the smoke alarm was screaming, and the window above the sink was painted shut. She was coughing and laughing and waving at the air when George said, "Hold on, Lyd," and put his fist through the glass.

He came out of it grinning, with blood running down his arm onto her only good dress.

At the hospital she cried from pure fright while the nurse stitched him up. He held up the bandaged wrist and said, "Don't cry. Now I'm unique. If I ever get lost, you'll know it's me by this."

She had hit his arm for saying it, and a year later she married him.

"George," she whispered.

The word barely left her mouth, but it was enough. The man in front of her closed his eyes as if she had touched an old wound.

"Hello, Lyd."

Her knees gave way, and he wrenched free of the guards and caught her before she hit the pew. For one second she was pressed against a chest she knew, with a heartbeat she knew beneath the beard and the stranger's cologne.

Then she remembered the funeral, and she shoved him away with both hands.

"Don't. Don't you dare say my name."

The guards had gone still, as if even they understood that something had broken that they weren't supposed to touch. Then Henry's calm voice drifted down the aisle.

"Gentlemen, take Mr. Reeve to the vestry. The lady can be seen to by the doctor."

The guards tightened their grip, and Celeste Vandermere screamed.

It was a perfect scream, sharp and terrified, and it rang off the stained-glass. The bride swayed with one hand to her forehead and collapsed in a heap of ivory silk at the altar steps, and four hundred guests surged to their feet shouting for a doctor.

In the chaos, one of the guards glanced back, and that half second was all George needed. He drove his elbow into the man's ribs, grabbed Lydia's wrist, and ran.

---

They burst through a side door into a stone corridor that smelled of candle wax and cold. The door slammed behind them and muffled the uproar.

Lydia tore her hand free. She stood there shaking in a green dress that wasn't hers and looked at him properly for the first time. He had a beard and a limp that was worse now that he had run, and a thin gray streak at his temple that hadn't been there three years ago. He looked like her husband after a war.

She slapped him, and the sound cracked down the corridor.

George didn't move. A red mark rose on his cheek, and he let it.

"I buried you," she said, and her voice shook. "I stood in the rain and watched them lower an empty box into the ground. I sold my wedding jewelry to pay your debts. I stopped setting two cups out in the morning, George. Do you know how long that took?"

"Lydia..."

"Three years. You let me grieve for three years, and you watched me do it, didn't you?"

His jaw tightened. For a long moment he said nothing, and she realized he was working out how much to tell her. That was what undid her.

"You're deciding," she said slowly. "Right now, you're standing there deciding how much I can handle."

"That's not..."

"It's exactly what you're doing."

His hands dropped to his sides. "Then I'll say it plainly. I didn't die in that crash. Someone cut my brakes, and I wasn't meant to survive. The only reason I did is that nobody knew. If I came home now, they would finish the job, and they would start with you."

"Who?"

"I can't tell you that yet."

"Yet."

"If I say a name in this building, it won't stay safe."

She laughed, a short, broken sound. "So that's what the invitation was. Your idea of safe."

"I didn't send that invitation."

Lydia stopped. Somebody had addressed an envelope to *Mrs. Keating*, a name she hadn't used in three years, and somebody had wanted her in that chapel. "Then who did?"

"Celeste." The name hung in the corridor. "Three days ago, Henry gave a quiet order. He was going to make you leave Port Meridian permanently." He said the word as if it had cost him something. "Celeste found out, and she sent the invitation because she knew I would never let it happen if you were standing in front of me. She was right."

"Why would the bride help the groom?"

"Because I'm not hers. I never was."

"Then why were you marrying her?"

His eyes dropped. "I'll tell you everything, but not here."

"Of course not." Lydia pulled the chain from beneath her collar and held out the plain gold ring, and her hand trembled. "I kept this for three years. I talked to an empty grave. And you stood in that chapel and said you couldn't hurt one more woman."

His eyes lifted, and they were wet. "You were the first. That was the only way I could say it in front of them."

Her breath caught. In the chapel she had thought he meant Celeste, or someone she'd never met, and she hadn't understood that he meant "her".

"You were the first woman I ever hurt," George said. "I've been trying to stop for three years."

The corridor was very quiet. Somewhere beyond the stone walls a man was shouting orders, and Lydia felt her anger waver. She hated that it wavered, because she had always known her flaw was forgiving too quickly and resenting it later.

"I'm not going to forgive you," she said. "Not today."

"I'm not asking you to."

"Good."

He nodded slowly, as if he was receiving a sentence he had earned. "Then come with me anyway. Please. Henry's men are searching every door in this building."

A door slammed at the far end of the corridor, and a woman's voice called out, breathless. "George!"

Celeste Vandermere came around the corner still in her wedding dress, with her veil gone and her hair half down. Her cheeks were streaked with tears, and for the first time she looked like a real person. She didn't look at George. She looked at Lydia.

"I'm so sorry. I had no right to drag you into this."

"You sent the invitation."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because if you hadn't come tonight, you would have been gone by Friday." Celeste pressed a small brass key into Lydia's palm and folded her fingers around it. Her hands were ice-cold. "Keep this, and don't show it to anyone. You'll know where it belongs."

"What does it open?"

"Something George was never going to tell you." Her voice shook. "Go, now. My father will be here in two minutes."

Voices were echoing down the corridor, closer now. George took Lydia's elbow. "Please."

For one long second she stood between a husband she had mourned and a bride she barely knew, holding a key she didn't understand.

Then she ran.

---

A black car was waiting in the alley behind the chapel with its engine running. George pushed her into the back seat and slid in beside her, and the driver pulled away before the door had finished closing.

Lydia sat rigid with the key biting into her palm. Through the rear window she watched the chapel shrink and vanish behind the rain-dark buildings, and neither of them spoke.

Then her phone buzzed. The screen lit up in the dark car, and she saw the name.

Gideon Hart.

She answered without knowing why.

"Lydia." His voice was soft and cracked with something close to grief. "Listen to me carefully. I don't have much time. Whatever he told you in that corridor, don't believe it yet. Ask him one question. Ask George whose body is in the grave you've been visiting for three years."

The line went dead.

Lydia lowered the phone slowly and looked across the seat. George was staring straight ahead at the rain on the window. His face had gone gray, and his scarred hand was clenched on his knee.

He had heard every word.

"George," she said, and her voice was barely there. "Whose body is in that grave?"

He didn't answer, and he didn't look at her. As the car turned onto the highway where he was supposed to have died, she understood with a cold, sinking certainty that he wasn't searching for the right words.

He already knew them.