Chapter 8: Lucan's POV: The Usual

Lucan's POV

I woke up alone, and the drawer was open.

I did not need to look at it to know what she had seen.

I lay there for a while with my hand on the cold side of the bed, where she had been.

Then I got up, dressed, and went to see the dead.

The family graveyard sits on the bluff above the river, behind a low iron fence.

There are six white stones in a row, and an empty plot beside them.

My first wedding was seven years ago.

I stood at the end of the row with my hands in my coat pockets.

"I would like to report," I said, to nobody, "that I am confused."

The wind came off the water.

"She keeps a ledger. She priced a night at nothing and wrote it down anyway."

The wind did not answer.

I looked down the row of names.

The first stone was my first wife's.

She had been twenty-three, and she had laughed at all of my jokes.

The second had cried through the vows.

The third had made me promise to build her a library.

I had built it, and it sat empty on the east side of the house, with six chairs and no readers.

"I do not know why this one lived," I said. "I have a theory that I do not like."

My theory was that none of them had been unlucky.

I had never said that out loud, because the pack liked the word curse.

A curse meant nobody had to ask who walked each woman up to the altar.

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