New Husband. Old One Gone novel · Chapter 22 of 32

Chapter 22: The Phone in the River

Then she did one more thing.

She hooked the toe of her loafer under what was left of my phone and kicked it off the edge of the river walk.

It went over the iron rail, spinning, and dropped into the Cape Fear with a little plip.

I watched the rings spread on the brown water.

Then I started to laugh.

I couldn't help it. It came up out of me.

Lauren stared at me.

"Now we're even on the Pyrex," I said.

Her face went white with fury.

She turned and walked off up the river walk fast, past the coffee window, past Sawyer coming the other way.

He didn't stop her. He came straight to me.

"Are you hurt?"

"No."

"She threw your phone in the river."

"I saw."

"Why are you laughing, Ro?"

I grabbed his shirt with both hands.

"Every ten seconds," I said. "The kid said every ten seconds."

It took him a second.

Then he dug his own phone out of his pocket so fast he nearly threw it in the river himself.

We sat on his bench with our heads together.

I logged into my cloud on his phone, and my fingers kept hitting the wrong letters.

Third try, it opened.

There it was, at the top of the list.

A recording from 12:04 p.m. Six minutes and twenty seconds long.

I pressed play with the volume all the way up and held the phone between our ears.

Gulls. The coffee window. A chair scraping.

Then Lauren's voice, clear as a bell, saying the number Bryce had worked out to the penny.

Sawyer's hand closed on my knee.

We listened to all six minutes and twenty seconds.

Every word of the river walk was there, down to the crack of my phone on the bricks and a man yelling "Hey!" over it.

And at the very end, small and far away, a threat in her own voice.

Nothing else.

Sawyer turned his head and looked at me.

"Gwaltney," he said. "I'm buying that kid a truck."

I emailed the file to the NCIS agent off the card in my wallet, with Sawyer's number at the bottom, since mine was in the river.

I emailed it to Mama. I emailed it to Corey.

Then I put my head down on Sawyer's shoulder on a bench on the river walk and shook for a while.

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