I Erased Our Marriage Timeline novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Two Hours
Marisol wakes two hours before the night that ruined three lives, sends Jocelyn to the bar to win Esteban back and flushes her diary, then sees the hallway camera turn to follow her with a remote viewer logged in.
The night I slept with Esteban Robles, he was drunk and heartbroken, and I was the one who brought him water.
He married me three months later because he thought he owed me.
Eight years of quiet dinners and separate alarms.
I really believed we'd grow old.
Then Jocelyn died.
At her funeral, her mother pressed an envelope into his hands.
Photos of that night, from his own hallway camera, mailed to Jocelyn the morning after.
That was why she left him without a word and moved to Portland.
That was why she never came back, even when the cancer was everywhere.
Esteban came home soaking wet from her grave and tore our house apart.
He found my diary at the bottom of a drawer.
Every page, since I was eighteen, was about him.
He decided I'd mailed those photos.
I hadn't.
He divorced me, kept the house, and made sure no firm in San Diego would hire me.
I died at thirty-two, in a rented room in El Cajon, with a cough nobody treated.
The last time he called, I could barely breathe.
"Your love makes me sick," he said.
Then he hung up.
I opened my eyes.
The ceiling above me had a water stain shaped like a rabbit.
I knew that stain.
It was the ceiling of the spare room in Esteban's house in Mission Hills.
My room, the one he'd given me the week I aged out of foster care and was sleeping in my Corolla.
I grabbed my phone off the nightstand.
Friday, October 9. 8:04 p.m.
I was twenty-three.
Jocelyn's birthday.
The night he forgot it, and she broke up with him, and he went to a bar on India Street and drank until midnight.
At ten-thirty he'd come home alone.
At ten-forty I'd knocked on his door with a glass of water.
I had two hours and twenty-six minutes.
I didn't stop to cry.
I grabbed my coat and my keys and ran down the stairs.
Jocelyn's apartment was eight minutes away in Hillcrest.
I made it in six.
She opened the door in sweatpants with mascara on her chin.
"Marisol? What are you doing here?"
"Can I come in?"
Her living room was a mess of wrapping paper and balloons that had started to sink.
Half a birthday cake sat on the coffee table with one slice gone and one fork in it.
She'd eaten her own birthday cake alone.
The first time around, I'd never known that.
"I came to apologize for Esteban," I said. "He forgot your birthday. That's on him. It's completely on him."
She pressed her lips together and didn't answer.
"But it doesn't mean he doesn't love you. He's just bad at saying it. Right now he's at a bar on India Street, drinking by himself."
"Good," she said. "Let him."
"Joss." I took her hands. They were cold. "Please go talk to him. Tonight. Not tomorrow."
In my first life, he drank himself sick every October 9 for eight years.
He never got over her.
Not for one day.
Jocelyn looked at me for a long moment.
Then she laughed, and started crying harder.
"How did a man that cold end up with someone as sweet as you in his house?"
"Luck," I said.
"Which bar?"
I told her.
She changed into jeans in two minutes and kissed my cheek on her way out the door.
I stood on her steps and watched her taillights turn the corner.
I could breathe again.
Back at the house, I went straight to my closet.
The diary was in a shoebox under my winter boots.
Black cover. Five years of pages.
The day I moved in. The day he taught me to drive the freeway. The night he sat up with me when I had the flu.
Every stupid, hopeful line.
I sat on the bathroom floor and tore it out one page at a time.
Then I tore the pages into strips, and the strips into squares.
I flushed it in four loads so the toilet wouldn't back up.
The last scrap of my handwriting spun around the bowl and went down.
At 10:35 the front door opened.
"Joss," Esteban was slurring. "Don't break up with me. I'm sorry. I know I was wrong."
Jocelyn had him by the waist. He was hanging off her.
"Fine," she said, half laughing. "I won't break up with you, you idiot."
She saw me in the kitchen doorway and her shoulders dropped with relief.
"Mari. Could you grab him some water? I'll get him upstairs."
"Sure."
I filled a glass at the sink.
My hand didn't shake.
I carried it up and handed it to her at his bedroom door.
Not one step farther.
"Thank you," she whispered. "For tonight. Really."
"Happy birthday, Joss."
She closed the door.
Through it I heard him mumbling and her laughing.
That was the right sound.
That was how this night was always supposed to go.
I turned to go back down the hall to my room.
Then I stopped.
At the end of the hallway, up by the ceiling, sat the little white camera from Esteban's company.
It had been there five years.
I'd never once seen it move.
Its red light blinked on.
The lens turned, slowly, and followed me.
On the wall below it, the hall tablet lit up by itself.
One line of gray text sat across the screen.
Remote viewer connected: admin.
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