Chapter 1: The Widow in the Front Pew
“My son never married you,” Eleanor Sterling said, loud enough for the whole church to hear. “I don’t know who you are.”
I was standing in the center aisle of St. Luke’s in Kennebunkport with rain still dripping off my coat. Behind me, three hundred people in black had stopped whispering. In front of me, on an easel beside the altar, was a giant photograph of my husband, smiling into the wind on the deck of his sailboat.
Adrian Sterling. Founder of Sterling Maritime. Missing at sea for thirty-four days, presumed dead.
I’d found out eleven days ago. I was on a research ship in the Labrador Sea when the satellite phone finally got a message through, two weeks late, because nobody from his family had bothered to call me. My department chair had seen it on the news. I flew from Nuuk to Montreal to Boston and drove the last hour with my hands shaking on the wheel, and I made it to my husband’s memorial just in time to watch another woman sit in my seat.
She was in the front pew. Black designer dress, glossy dark hair in a perfect low bun, a diamond on her left hand the size of a sugar cube. When the minister said “Adrian’s beloved wife, Vanessa,” she pressed a tissue under her eyes, and Eleanor squeezed her hand.
That’s when I stood up.
“I’m sorry,” I said now, to Eleanor, to the church, to the photograph. “I’m Adrian’s wife. We were married three years ago in Portland.”
The woman in the front pew turned around slowly.
She didn’t look surprised. That was the first thing I noticed. Everyone else in that church looked shocked, or embarrassed, or thrilled the way people are when a funeral turns into a show. She looked like someone checking the time.
“I’m so sorry,” she said in a soft, sad voice. “Grief does strange things to people.” Then she opened her black clutch and took out a folded document, cream-colored, with a gold seal. “Adrian and I were married on June fourteenth, three years ago. Cumberland County. It’s all right here.”
June fourteenth.
That was our date. Our courthouse. Our seal. I knew because I’d watched the clerk press it into the paper while Adrian laughed and said, “Now it’s official, Dr. Brooks. You’re stuck with me.”
“That’s not possible,” I said.
“Ma’am.” A man in a dark suit had appeared at my elbow. Adrian’s head of security, Pete. I’d met Pete twice. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I’m going to have to ask you to step outside.”
“Pete. You know me. I was at the lake house at Christmas.”
“Mrs. Sterling asked me to remove you,” he said quietly. And he didn’t mean me.
Then another voice from the front, smooth and careful. “Eleanor, I’m so sorry about this.”
Colin Reyes. Adrian’s chief of staff for nine years. Ginger hair, wire-rimmed glasses, the man who’d stood beside us at the courthouse as our witness and cried a little and blamed allergies. He was standing next to Vanessa now, one hand on the back of her pew.
“Colin,” I said, and my voice cracked. “Tell them. You were there.”
Colin looked at me for a long moment. Then he looked at Eleanor.
“I’ve never seen her before in my life,” he said.
The floor tilted under me. Someone in the back row actually gasped.
Pete’s hand closed around my arm, gently but firmly, and he walked me back up the aisle. I could feel every eye on me. A woman near the door pulled her little girl closer, as if I might be dangerous.
At the very last pew, I turned around once more.
Vanessa had stood up. She was walking toward me, slow and graceful, her heels clicking on the stone. She reached out and adjusted the collar of my wet coat, like a friend would, like a sister, and leaned in close to my ear.
Her breath smelled like peppermint. Her voice was so low only I could hear it.
“You should have stayed on your boat, Natalie.”
She knew my name.
I had never told her my name.
