Scarlet Lies and Diamond Tears

Chapter Two

Claudia

I don't remember taking off my heels.

At some point between the church parking lot and the bridge, I must have stopped and pulled them off because when I became aware of myself again — really aware, like surfacing from underwater — I was holding them in one hand, walking barefoot on concrete, and the soles of my feet were hurting in this distant, unimportant way that I kept meaning to care about and couldn't.

The letter was still in my other hand.

I don't know how long I walked. It was the kind of May evening that doesn't know what it wants to be — warm enough for a wedding, cool enough to remind you that summer hasn't fully committed yet. My dress dragged a little behind me. A car slowed down once, the driver probably trying to figure out what a woman in a wedding gown was doing walking along a roadside at six in the evening, and then sped up again.

The bridge wasn't special. I want to be honest about that because sometimes people describe these moments like the place chose them, like the universe arranged something poetic. It wasn't like that. It was just the bridge I'd driven over that morning on the way to the church. The Delray overpass. Ugly, honestly — grey concrete railings, a rusted city maintenance sign, a stretch of water below that always looked brown in summer.

But it was there. And I was there.

I climbed up onto the railing awkwardly, with too much focus on not falling before I was ready. The metal was cold against my palms. The wind coming off the water was stronger than I expected and it lifted the skirt of my dress and I remember thinking, distantly, Kenny always said this dress was too much. Too dramatic. Too big.

Maybe he was right.

I looked down.

The water was a long way below. Dark. Still, mostly, except for a slow current moving through the center that caught the last of the evening light and threw it back up in pieces.

It looked quiet.

I closed my eyes.

I thought about the baby. About how it wasn't its fault, any of it. About how I was already a terrible mother because the first feeling I'd felt when I saw those pink lines wasn't love, it was terror, and what kind of person feels terror when—

A car pulled over.

I heard it before I saw it — tyres on gravel, a door, footsteps. Fast ones.

"Don't."

Just that one word. Low.

I opened my eyes.

Raymond

I was twenty minutes from home and I was already thinking about the scotch I was going to pour the second I walked through my front door.

The Hargrove meeting had run three hours over. Three hours of sitting across a table from men who smiled with their mouths and watched you with dead eyes while their lawyers tried to dismantle everything I'd spent eight years building, and I had sat there and I had been perfectly calm and I had taken their best shots and I had walked out with exactly what I came for. As always.

I don't lose.

My driver had the evening off so I was behind the wheel myself, which I preferred when my head was full. There's something useful about driving. It requires just enough of your attention to keep your mind from eating itself.

I came over the Delray bridge and I saw her.

White dress. No shoes. Standing on the wrong side of the railing.

I pulled over.

I don't know exactly why. That sounds strange to say — that I don't know why I did something I did — but it's accurate. I am not impulsive by nature. I have built an entire life on the discipline of not acting until I understand the full picture. And yet I was out of the car and moving before I'd consciously decided to move, which was, in retrospect, the first sign that this woman was going to be a problem for me.

I stopped about four feet away from her. Far enough not to startle. Close enough to matter.

She had her eyes closed. Her dress was moving in the wind. She was holding a letter in one hand and a pair of heels in the other and there were tear tracks on her face that she didn't seem to know about.

She was the most quietly devastated thing I had ever seen.

"Don't," I said.

I didn't dress it up. I didn't say please or miss or everything will be okay because I don't make promises I can't guarantee and I had no idea if everything would be okay. Probably not, statistically. Life doesn't tend toward okay.

She opened her eyes.

Claudia

He was not what I expected.

I don't know what I expected — someone frantic, maybe. Someone who would yell or cry or reach for me immediately. That's what they do in films.

He just stood there. Tall, dark suit, hands loose at his sides, watching me with this expression that wasn't quite concern and wasn't quite detachment. Somewhere in between.

"I'm not jumping," I said, which was a lie, but it came out automatically, the way you say I'm fine when someone asks.

"You're on the wrong side of a bridge railing in a wedding dress with no shoes," he said flatly. "What would you call it."

It wasn't even a question. He said it like a statement. Like he was just noting facts.

"A bad day," I said.

"Get down," he said calmly

"You don't know me," I told him. "You don't have to do this. You can just go."

"I'm aware," he said. "Get down anyway."

I looked at him for a long moment. The wind was picking up now and the water below was darker than it had been a minute ago and my arms were getting tired from holding the railing and I was — I was so tired. In a way that went way beyond physical. The kind of tired that lives in your chest.

"Why?" I asked. Genuinely.

He was quiet for a second.

"Because it's a Tuesday," he said. "Nobody should die on a Tuesday. It's an ugly day for it."

I stared at him.

Of all the things a person could have said to me in that moment — beautiful things, reasonable things, logical things, kind things — that was the most ridiculous, and something about the ridiculousness of it cracked something open in me that I hadn't expected, something that hadn't cracked through the whole long nightmare of a day, and I started laughing.

It was a terrible laugh. Wet and broken and not really a laugh at all but my body didn't seem to know the difference.

And then I was crying.

Actually crying, not the dry stunned kind from the parking lot, but the real kind, the kind my mother had promised me for my wedding day, finally arriving four hours too late and all wrong.

"Okay," he said quietly. "Come down now."

He took a step toward me.

I let go.

Not dramatically. Not like in films where people spread their arms and fall backwards like they're surrendering to something beautiful. I just released the railing. Stepped forward. And the bridge was gone and the air was rushing and the water came up so fast it didn't feel like falling at all, it felt like the world lunging upward, and then—

Cold.

A full-body slam of dark water closing over my head and the wedding dress dragging immediately, all that fabric becoming weight, becoming hands pulling me down, and I thought — distantly, almost peacefully —

oh.

oh, this is what I wanted.

And then something grabbed me.

Raymond

I was already moving before she hit the water.

I don't remember making the decision. I remember her hand releasing the rail and I remember the half-second of watching her drop and then my jacket was off and I was over the railing and falling and the cold hit me like a wall, like punishment, like the worst idea I'd ever had in a lifetime of calculated ones.

The water was black. Completely black under the surface. I opened my eyes and it told me nothing.

I reached. Swept my arms wide. Felt fabric — yards of it, waterlogged and heavy — and I pulled toward it and found her arm and then her waist and I hauled upward with everything I had because the dress was fighting me, the current was pulling south, and she was completely limp.

Don't be dead , I thought, which was not a prayer exactly because I don't pray, but it was the closest thing to one I'd managed in about fifteen years.

I broke the surface.

Gasped. Got my bearings. The bridge support was six feet to my right and I kicked toward it, one arm around her chest, her head against my shoulder, her face turned up out of the water.

She wasn't breathing.

~

Getting her up the embankment was the hardest physical thing I have done, and I have done difficult physical things. The dress weighed more than she did by that point. I dragged her onto the concrete slope, rolled her onto her side, and did what I knew to do because I am the kind of man who makes it his business to know things that other people assume they'll never need.

Three compressions. Tilt. Breathe.

Nothing.

Three more.

She coughed.

Water, a lot of it, and then she was gasping, that horrible desperate sound of a body arguing its way back to itself against its owner's wishes, and I sat back on my heels and pressed my hands against my knees and breathed.

Just breathed.

She was unconscious again almost immediately — not gone, just — under. Exhausted. Her chest was rising. Shallow but rising.

I looked at her face.

Even soaking wet, even with mascara running in dark lines down her cheeks, even crumpled on a concrete embankment in a ruined dress — she looked like someone worth pulling out of a river.

I picked her up.

She was lighter than I expected, which made me unreasonably angry at her fiancé, whoever he was, the man from the letter, the man who'd driven her to this bridge as surely as if he'd carried her here himself. I carried her up the embankment to the road, to my car, and I put her in the passenger seat as carefully as I knew how and I pressed two fingers to her neck and counted.

Pulse. Steady enough.

I got in the driver's side. I was soaked through. I didn't care. I drove.

Claudia

Somewhere in the dark there was warmth.

It was pressing against my side, moving, and there was sound — an engine, I thought, and wind, and a voice saying something low and urgent that I couldn't make out because everything was muffled, like hearing the world through water.

Through water.

I tried to surface. Tried to find my way back to the top of myself. My chest hurt. My throat hurt. The cold was deep in my bones in a way that felt permanent.

The car stopped.

And then I was moving without moving — lifted, carried — and there were lights, too bright, and voices that weren't his, and somewhere very far away someone was saying she's not responsive, what happened and I heard him answer, close to my ear, his voice the only solid thing in a world that had gone entirely liquid.

"She went into the water. She needs help. Now. "

Doors. Corridor. The squeak of shoes on a floor.

And then the lights got very bright and very white and I stopped feeling the cold and I stopped feeling anything at all.

The last thing I was aware of, before everything went dark properly, was that he hadn't let go.

Not until they made him.