The Abandoned Wife novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: No One
Dara wakes in a small-town Indiana hospital with a broken leg and learns her husband flew off to his first love without a call or a dollar; when the nurse asks whom to notify she says no one, then watches the TV announce her own funeral.
The nurse asked who she should call, and I said no one.
I was flat on my back in a bed that smelled of bleach.
My left leg hung in a cast from a hook above me, and my forehead throbbed under a square of tape.
Rain ticked on a window I couldn't see.
"Honey, we've been calling you Jane," the nurse said. "Your purse burned in the car. Do you know your name?"
"Dara," I said.
My voice came out like gravel.
"Dara what?"
I opened my mouth to say Kellerman.
It was the name I had signed for three years, on checks, on school forms for a dog we never got, on the guest list of a house I'd decorated.
Instead I closed my mouth and looked at the ceiling tiles.
The last thing I remembered was the wipers.
Tom had been driving us to Louisville for his mother's seventieth birthday.
His phone had lit up on the dash with Lena's name.
He had said, "I have to take this," in the soft voice he saved for her.
Then he had looked down, and a truck had come through the light.
"Is my husband here?" I asked.
The nurse didn't answer fast enough.
A tall man came through the door and she stepped aside for him.
He had hair cut close to his skull and gone completely white, though he couldn't have been forty.
His eyebrows were black, his fleece vest was green, and there was a coffee stain on his cuff.
"I'm Dr. Eckstein," he said. "I set your leg last night. Do you want the short version or the long one?"
"Short."
"Two breaks, one clean and one not. You'll walk. You'll limp for a while."
He pulled a stool to the bed and sat down so his eyes were level with mine.
"The paramedic who rode with you is a friend of mine," he said. "He told me something, and you should hear it from me."
I waited.
"A man in a suit stood on the shoulder while they loaded you. He had a phone at his ear."
"That's him," I said.
"He never asked which hospital. He never got in the rig."
The room went very quiet.
"He gave the trooper a statement, and a charter jet took him out of Indianapolis before midnight," Dr. Eckstein said. "That's all I know."
I thought of the phone lighting up on the dash.
I thought of the soft voice.
"He flew to Chicago," I said. "She called him. She said she was sick."
"Who did?"
"The woman he should have married."
Dr. Eckstein didn't say he was sorry, and I was grateful.
"Is there anyone we should notify?" the nurse tried again, gently. "A family member? A friend?"
My parents were dead.
My friends had all been his friends first.
The only person who would have come was two hundred miles away, and I hadn't called her in a year because I was ashamed of how small I'd made myself.
"No one," I said.
The television on the wall was muted, and the nurse reached for the remote to turn it off.
"Wait," I said.
A news anchor stood in front of a map of Indiana, and under her a red banner read FATAL CRASH ON STATE ROAD 46.
The nurse found the volume.
"Police have now identified the second victim," the anchor said. "She is Dara Kellerman, thirty, wife of Kellerman Freight chief executive Thomas Kellerman."
I stopped breathing.
"Mr. Kellerman was treated at the scene and released. He has asked for privacy."
Treated at the scene.
He had not so much as a scratch.
My wedding photo filled the screen, the one from the front hall, with my hair down to my waist and Tom's arm around me.
I was laughing in it.
I looked like someone who thought she was safe.
"Dr. Eckstein," the nurse said faintly. "That's her. That's our Jane."
"I see that."
"We have to call the state police right now. We have to call him."
"Wait," I said again.
They both looked at me.
"He told them I was in that fire," I said. "He pointed at the wrong car, or he didn't look, or he didn't care."
My heart was going so hard the monitor chirped.
"Either way, he stood on the road and let them write it down."
"Mrs. Kellerman," Dr. Eckstein said carefully. "Your husband thinks you're dead."
"Then he's about to find out what that costs him."
The anchor was still talking.
"Services will be held Thursday at eleven," she said.
Thursday.
Four days.
I turned my head on the pillow and made myself say it slowly, so no one would argue.
"Write me down as Dara Salter. That was my name before him."
"That isn't legal," the nurse whispered.
"It's my mother's name, and it's true."
Dr. Eckstein looked at me for a long moment.
He had dark, tired eyes that didn't once drift to the television.
"Give me one reason I shouldn't pick up that phone," he said.
"Because if he loves me, he'll call this hospital before Thursday," I said. "And if he doesn't, I want to watch what he does instead."
The nurse took a breath to object.
Dr. Eckstein held up one scarred hand.
"Four days," he said. "Then I call the state police myself, whatever you say."
"Deal."
On the wall, my face laughed in the wedding photo and slowly faded out.
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