Every Promise Broken (Copper Lake #5)

PROLOGUE

Whit Bowman, Five Years Ago

P ulling up outside of my house, I put the car in park, but I don’t get out yet. It’s been a long, grueling day, and I need a minute of silence and solitude before I go inside and face the brick wall that’s erected between me and my husband. A wall I didn’t build, nor did I want in place, but it’s one I can’t penetrate either way. In the matter of a few months, I’ve watched my once-loving husband transform into somebody I don’t recognize. I’ve watched grief eat at him, destroy him from the inside out, and rip us apart. Sixty-seven days ago, my sweet, heart-of-an-angel husband lost his parents in a terrible, brutal car accident, and he hasn’t been the same since.

Grief is something I’m familiar with, having lost my own mother a few years ago, but where I leaned on him through it all, he’s pushed me away. He’s pushed everybody away. Losing a parent is a pain unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced, and you’re bound to come out of it a different person than you were before, but dammit, I miss my husband. I miss feeling his touch. His love. I miss sharing how our days were over dinner. I miss dancing in the kitchen late at night. I miss him so damn much, and the hardest part about it all is, physically, he hasn’t gone anywhere. When I finally work up the courage to go inside, he’ll be in there, quiet and closed off. Probably on his second or third glass of whiskey of the evening.