Chapter 49 Willow Morrow
Willow Morrow
“I did some work for Mark Morrow, after Willow left. Trash removal, mostly. He was cleaning out their basement and had dozens of trash bags filled with stuff. Normally, I just take stuff to the dump, but he actually followed me there and watched as I threw each bag into the incinerator. It was weird. Made me wonder what he was hiding in those bags.”
Willow woke up to the smell of coffee. She lay there for a long nostalgic moment, savoring what it used to be like, living in this house. The mornings had always been the best, their time together before he had gone off to work and she had gone back to bed.
She rolled onto her back and listened, trying to hear whether any voices were coming from the kitchen. Not hearing any, she sat up and swung her legs over the side of the guest bed.
She pulled on a baggy Kurt Cobain shirt and cut-off jean shorts. She’d forgotten to charge her cell phone last night, so she plugged it in, then wandered down the hall to the kitchen. Mark was sitting at the island, reading glasses on, in a suit, the newspaper in hand.
She stopped just before the doorway and took a secret moment to watch him. The reading glasses, they were new. Her love for him swelled at the outward sign of imperfection.
“Morning,” she said quietly, stepping into the room.
He looked up at her greeting, a warm smile stretching over his face. Moving his glasses up to the top of his head, he stood and gestured to the stool next to him. “Come and sit. I’ll get you a cup of coffee.”
She took the seat, watching as he hurried around the island toward the espresso machine. “Remember how I like it?”
He scoffed. “Come on, now. I’m older, not dead. And we even have almond milk.”
“Nice.” She hooked her heels on the rungs of the stool and looked around the kitchen. From this spot, it was easy to pretend that nothing had changed and that it was a half decade earlier. Even the familiar twinges of a hangover headache . . . it was all there. “Put a shot of Baileys in there.”
He raised his brows but didn’t comment, and he wouldn’t. She could swig Baileys from the bottle until she fell off the stool, and he’d just pick her back up and ask if she wanted anything else. That was Mark for you. He’d enable you right into a coma.
“Where’s Katie?” she asked, her voice dropping in volume.
“Asleep.” He glanced at his watch, then fit the espresso portafilter into place. “Her alarm goes off at seven.”
Thank God for Willow’s internal alarm clock.
She crossed her arms and rested her elbows on the counter.
“I had a nice chat with Sara last night. The police don’t have a cause of death for David.
He was all bones, so it’s hard to do a majority of the tests, but they can look for things like blunt force trauma, broken bones, stuff like that. ”
He opened the cabinet and shifted through the cups. “Makes sense. But I guess that means that they can’t really know much, then? About what happened?”
“Right. Oh, you still have that mug.” Her heart tripped at the elephant cup in his hand. It was all hand painted and thrown, the handle made from the animal’s trunk. They’d gotten it in Africa, on a safari they’d taken for their eight-year anniversary.
“Of course.” He set it on the counter before her, and she picked it up, turning it over in her hands. “You can take it with you if you want.”
She studied the designs on the large mug. It was crazy how such a small item could hold so many memories. “No, but thank you.” She set it down.
“You didn’t take anything with you when you left,” he said quietly, pulling out a bottle of Baileys from the cabinet and breaking the seal on the lid.
Twisting off the cap, he poured a generous amount into the cup.
“I looked, but I could never find anything that you took. It was like you just walked out of here one day and didn’t come back. ”
“I took a few bags. We just had so much stuff that it was hard to miss any of it.” She stopped him before he returned the bottle to the cabinet. “You can leave that out.”
He paused, then set it down. “You’re drinking too much.”
“I thought you liked it when I drank,” she flirted.
He looked at her, and her heart tripped at the concern in his eyes. No one had looked at her like that in . . . well, in five years. She had forgotten what it felt like to be in the grip of Mark’s love. She’d found it suffocating, but now her throat yearned for it.
We got things from each other. Unhealthy things.
Mark liked to antagonize her and she liked to push back.
A pushback that often turned the situation violent.
It was why she’d had to leave. If she hadn’t, Mark would have taken it too far.
Neither of them had the self-control to stop the fight from progressing.
She had to leave, otherwise one of them would have ended up dead, the other in jail.
“Willow . . .” he pleaded.
“Stop.” She shook her head. “Don’t. Don’t remind me why I left.”
“I miss you. I need you. You know I do.” He put his palms on the counter and looked at her as if he could pull her into his soul with his stare, and in a weak moment, he could have.
She picked up the cup and chugged the Baileys, then slammed the mug on the counter so hard the ceramic cracked.
Dammit. She pushed herself up off the stool. “I’m going back to bed.”
He didn’t say anything, didn’t stop her, didn’t block her path, or grab her arm so tightly that he left bruises.
And she didn’t react, didn’t whip around, scream at him, or lunge for his throat.
Still, the possibility hung in the air, and she walked quickly back to the room and avoided looking toward the basement door.