Apocalypse Stockpiler: My Ex-wife gets nothing

Chapter 5

Jayden watched the message until the screen dimmed.

I know you came back.

His blood turned to ice. He grabbed the phone and called the number back, but it rang four times and went to a robotic voicemail with no name.

He raised his eyes to the hotel.

Trevor was gone. Summer was gone. The sidewalk was empty except for a pigeon pecking at a crust of bread.

It could be nothing. A wrong number. A prank.

He searched the number online, and nothing came up. No name, no address, no social profile. He tried reverse lookup apps and two directories. The number had been activated that same morning.

He sat very still, running through the possibilities.

One. A coincidence. Somebody else's mistake.

Two. Trevor Russo, who had studied him far too long.

Three. Someone else who had died and come back, and who was now watching him the same way he was watching everyone.

He did not like any of the three.

But the words had been precise. Came back. Not "came home," or "came to the hotel." Came back.

He pressed his forehead against the steering wheel and forced himself to breathe.

Someone else knew.

The thought made the hair on his arms stand up. For one wild moment, he almost hoped it was true. After everything, the idea that he might not be alone in this was almost a comfort.

Almost.

Or someone was guessing very well.

He started the car and drove away. He did not know where he was going until he found himself on the old riverside road, in the long shadow of the bridge.

He parked and got out.

The air smelled of wet stone and diesel. A couple on a bench shared a sandwich. A jogger passed with earbuds in. A child on a scooter shrieked with laughter.

Every one of them would be gone in a year.

Jayden gripped the cold iron rail and made himself keep watching them. If he was going to do what he had to do, he could not afford to avert his eyes.

The river was green and calm. In his last life, it had frozen solid by the second week, and he had watched a man try to walk across it. The man had not made it to the other side.

I will not be that man again, Jayden thought.

His mother had warned him once, before the end. She had held his hand in the hospital and whispered, "Son, kindness is a gift. But some people only know how to take."

He had nodded politely and forgotten it.

He took a notebook from his glove compartment and wrote a single line at the top of a blank page.

WHAT I GAVE HER.

Then he began listing.

The deposit for her parents' restaurant, twenty thousand dollars, gone in four months. A second deposit, fifteen thousand. Her sister's tuition. Her brother's car repairs. A vacation to the coast that she had called "the least you could do." The apartment she had insisted on, three blocks too expensive. The promotion he had refused because she did not want to leave her mother.

He filled the page, then flipped it over and filled the back.

When his hand finally ached, he read the list from top to bottom.

It was not a love story. It was an invoice.

And in all those lines, she had never paid a single thing back.

He tore out the page and folded it into his pocket. He had expected to feel rage. Instead he felt tired, and underneath the tiredness, something steady.

A decision.

"I'm not saving this marriage," he murmured aloud.

The words sounded strange in the open air, but they did not hurt.

"I'm not saving her."

Nothing. No grief. No guilt. Only clean, quiet air, like a window finally opened in a room that had been shut for years.

In his first life, he had believed that love meant giving everything. He had been wrong. Love was supposed to go both ways. What he had endured was a long, slow robbery.

His phone buzzed. A message from Summer.

Did you decide about dinner?

He held it in his gaze. Then he typed, I have to work late. Go with Dana.

Her reply was instant.

Fine. But I'm putting it on the card.

The old Jayden would have answered, Of course, sweetheart.

The new Jayden typed, No. Use your own money.

He studied it for a long time. Then he deleted it.

Not because he regretted it, but because it was too early. If she started to suspect, she would watch him, and a watched man could not prepare.

He typed Okay instead.

Let her think he was the same. For the next year, he would be exactly the man she expected.

On the outside.

**********

He spent the afternoon driving through the city, and he saw it with different eyes.

Every grocery store, every pharmacy, every gas station was a target. The warehouse district where he would one day stand in a ration line. The hospital with its tidy lawns and its automatic doors. The streets that would soon be buried under snow and silence.

He did the math in his head. His savings were small. His car was decent but not special. He had no connections to anyone who could give him what he needed. Food for a year. Fuel. Medicine. Water. A place that could hold.

He needed a miracle.

Or an advantage so unfair that it felt like one.

When he got home that evening, the apartment was dark. Summer had left a note on the fridge.

Dana's. Don't wait up.

He crumpled it and threw it away.

Then he walked down the hallway to the closet, pushed aside the winter coats, and pulled a dusty cardboard box off the top shelf.

He knew what was inside. He had not touched it since his mother's funeral. Old photographs. A cracked radio. A bundle of letters tied with string. Her sewing kit and her little jewelry box with its tiny brass lock.

In his last life, he had never opened it again. He had been too busy giving everything to someone else.

He sat down on the carpet and lifted the lid. The smell of cedar and old perfume rose up like a ghost.

Under the first layer of photographs, wrapped in a faded red cloth, something small and heavy shifted.

And for a moment, it glowed.

A pale green light, no brighter than a firefly, flickered through the cloth.

Jayden froze.

Because he suddenly remembered his mother's voice from a hospital bed, hoarse and whispering.

"Keep this close, my son."