Better Than My Ex novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Public Story
On Thanksgiving night Mara watches the widow's beach stories with her boyfriend in them, books a flight, and finds the missing pendant at the widow's throat.
Lydia posted her beach videos at two o'clock on Thanksgiving afternoon, and by six, forty-one of Bryson's crew had liked them.
I knew the number because I was sitting on my couch with cold noodles and nothing else to do.
I was supposed to be in a cabin in the mountains.
I had booked it in September. Two nights, a mountain-facing suite, a fireplace.
I had bought the Merlot Bryson once called his favorite, and I had called his mother for the stuffing recipe.
At nine that morning, with my bag open on the bed, Bryson had phoned.
"Lydia's having a rough morning," he said. "It's the second Thanksgiving since she lost her husband, and it's harder than the first. She can't be alone."
"The cabin is paid for."
"I'll cover it, Mara. Don't make this a thing."
"It's a weekend, Bryson. It's the third one this year."
"I have to go. She's at the door."
He hung up before I could answer.
Five minutes later Lydia texted me herself.
"I'm so sorry about your weekend. I told him to go to you. You're an angel for understanding."
I sent her a heart, because I had been sending hearts for four years.
Now it was six o'clock, and the first of her stories showed blue water and a surfboard.
Lydia was laughing on it. Bryson stood waist-deep beside her, bare-chested, both hands on her hips to keep her upright.
A logo sat in the corner of the frame: Cala Mar Resort, Santa Barbara.
The second story was dinner on the sand, candles between two glasses, and her hand under his.
The third was the two of them dancing barefoot, her cheek on his shoulder, his fingers moving slowly through her hair.
Across the bottom she had typed: "Grateful for the man who always shows up."
Under the video the comments were piling in from his crew.
"Bryson is a saint." "Look at you two." "Our girl deserves this."
Nobody in that thread had ever met me.
In four years Bryson had never once brought me to a crew party.
"You'd be bored," he always said. "It's just shop talk."
I had believed him, and I had delivered the cakes to the back door.
I did not throw the phone. I did not cry.
I opened the screen recorder and played every story again from the beginning, slowly, and saved all three.
Then I opened Find My.
Bryson and I had shared our locations since our first year, and he had never turned his off.
His pin sat on a beach in Santa Barbara.
The last thing I wanted was to sit here for a day, waiting for him to come home with a speech.
He also still had my passport and my birth certificate in the safe at his condo.
He had taken them last spring "so they wouldn't get lost," and every time I asked for them back he said next week.
I looked at the groceries, the wine, and the blue silk slip at the bottom of my bag.
So I booked the first flight to Santa Barbara in the morning.
I put the slip back in the drawer, and I took out the black dress I had worn to a funeral.
The plane landed in the afternoon. Bryson's pin hadn't moved.
The taxi dropped me at the resort as the sky turned orange. The lobby smelled of citrus and candles, and I did not stop at the desk.
I followed the lit path down through the gardens to the sand, where torches stood in a line along the water.
I heard Bryson laugh before I saw him.
It wasn't the polite laugh he gave me with his eyes on his phone. It was loose and warm, and I hadn't heard it in a year.
Through the palms I could see one table under a white canopy, two glasses and a bowl of strawberries.
Lydia sat barefoot in a pale dress. Bryson leaned across the table toward her, completely still.
He had never looked at me like that, not once.
She lifted a hand to her throat, and something small caught the torchlight.
It was a diamond heart on a thin gold chain.
It was my pendant, the one Bryson had given me on our first anniversary, the one he said I had lost.
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