When Never Comes

by Barbara Davis

Her whimpers turn to tears, turn to wails, turn to shrieks. She is awake but not awake, flailing one moment, rigid the next, stalked by a terror she can neither see nor name. The dreams have come again, her almost nightly companions. But no one is coming to comfort her tonight. Mama has passed out again on the bathroom floor.

He . . . didn’t survive the accident. I’m afraid we’re going to need a next of kin to come down and identify his body.”

Bestselling crime novelist Stephen Ludlow was dead, and she needed to go identify his body. But first, she needed to get dressed.

At ten, she learned that no address was permanent, at twelve, that no promise was sacred, and at sixteen, that there was no such thing as safe.

Tragedies sell, and the media’s going to eat this one up with a spoon,

then blindly raked the contents into her purse: insurance policies, investment records, passports, birth certificates, and the envelope containing Stephen’s emergency cash—in case of a zombie apocalypse, he had once joked.

schadenfreude

Defoe nestled beside du Maurier. Longfellow beside Kerouac.

Town & Country ponytail.

But then, she knew better than most that the face a person chose to show the world wasn’t always the real one. Everyone had a story. Not everyone wanted to share.

Tom Hanks said in You’ve Got Mail—we’re a piazza—a place for people to mix, mingle, and be!”

Integrity isn’t something you have in some parts of your life and not in others. You either have it, or you don’t.