Before Ever After

by Samantha Sotto

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Samantha Sotto-Yambao

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,

  an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Crown and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sotto, Samantha.

  Before ever after: a novel / Samantha Sotto.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Marriage—Fiction. 2. Family secrets—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3619.O87B44 2011

  813′.6—dc22

  2011003327

  eISBN: 978-0-307-71989-8

  Jacket design by Jennifer O’Connor

  Jacket photographs: (book with flower) Cavan Images/Getty Images;

  (painted wood) Shutterstock

  v3.1

  For Nico and Cai

  While you may see only one name on the cover of this book, this is a gift from Mom and Dad to both of you—so that you will always believe that you can hold your dreams in your hands.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One - Eggs and endings

  Chapter Two - Sundays and surprises

  Chapter Three - Campers and caveats

  Chapter Four - Daughters and dragons

  Chapter Five - Girlfriends and guinness

  Chapter Six - Birthdays and bribes

  Chapter Seven - Pierre and pachyderms

  Chapter Eight - Barns and basilisks

  Chapter Nine - Sand and shopping

  Chapter Ten - Secrets and soup

  Chapter Eleven - Lists and longevity

  Chapter Twelve - Death and decisions

  Chapter Thirteen - Ghosts and getaways

  Chapter Fourteen - Monsters and men

  Chapter Fifteen - Gifts and gratitude

  Chapter Sixteen - Mex and apocalypses

  Chapter Seventeen - Hunger and homecoming

  Chapter Eighteen - Egg Salad and escape

  Chapter Nineteen - Choices and cholesterol

  Chapter Twenty - Beginnings and boathouses

  Chapter Twenty-one - Shears and silence

  Chapter Twenty-two - Shells and seasickness

  Chapter Twenty-three - Context and consequence

  Chapter Twenty-four - Failure and forever

  Chapter Twenty-five - Letters and lies

  Chapter Twenty-six - Tea and tomorrow

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  ATOCHA STATION

  MADRID, SPAIN

  Three Years Ago

  Jasmine.

  It was not Max Gallus’s top choice for his last thought, but it would have to do. He wondered if there was time to say it out loud.

  He had difficulty telling which came first: his phone shattering against his cheek, his skin tearing from his ribs, or the flames taking dibs on what was left. He was certain though that the Silence came last. It always did.

  Chapter One

  Eggs and endings

  A RENTED APARTMENT

  MADRID, SPAIN

  Earlier

  Eggs and engagements. Though slightly odd, they were a harmless pairing on most days, even with a greasy pile of bacon on the side. But today was not like most days, because in less than an hour, they would make Shelley Gallus a twenty-six-year-old widow.

  Shelley did not know this yet, so for now she was happy to listen to Brad’s eighth retelling of how Simon had proposed to him. This was, after all, why she and Max had driven down from London for a holiday with their friends. The last time all four of them had been together was two years earlier, when they had met on a budget European tour. Toasting the engagement was a good excuse for a reunion and excessive amounts of Rioja.

  The trip was also Max’s chance to continue his long-time pursuit of the perfect Spanish omelet. His passion for eggs almost rivaled his devotion to chickens, though generally he preferred the latter off a plate than on it. Max staunchly believed you could get through anything if you had a chicken, and the clucking kind, in his expert opinion, had far more uses than the ones nesting on warm mashed potatoes and gravy.

  Shelley never fully understood her husband’s ethos on poultry and chalked it up as just another item on his long list of quirks. His rabid love of the Bee Gees topped that list, while his two-year reign as strip Scrabble champion fell somewhere in the middle. (Shelley was, by default, first runner-up, being the only other contestant in their Saturday-night tournaments.) Still, she loved all of Max’s quirks equally, and the sum of them even more.

  Accompanying Max on his omelet excursion was to have been the first thing on Shelley’s morning agenda, but a rogue prawn from the previous night’s paella had other plans. Shelley insisted that Max go on his egg hunt without her, and Simon decided to tag along. She didn’t have a hard time guessing why Brad had opted to stay behind and play nurse to his captive, albeit slightly green, audience.

  Shelley flushed the toilet and drowned out the last lines of Brad’s latest blow-by-blow account from the other side of the bathroom door. She squirted bright pink soap onto her palm during the interlude of her gastric flamenco. The scent of strawberries, or rather what strawberries might smell like if they were made from melted plastic and disinfectant, filled the white-tiled room. She turned off the tap and stepped into the bedroom. “Simon certainly outdid himself. I will never look at cheesecake in the same way again.”

  “You didn’t think that he could hold out for long, did you?” Brad brushed his sandy blond hair from his brow and held up the large Nikon dangling from his neck. His permanent dimpled smirk peeked out beneath the camera. He focused its lens and chased the laughter sprinting across her face.

  Shelley’s laugh followed its familiar trail up to her aquamarine eyes, flitted through her dark lashes, and settled where the almond slant of her eyelids met the faint crinkles above her golden cheeks. This was the point where most people caught their breath and wondered from which continent she could have been so magnificently misplaced. Shelley was oblivious to the serendipity of her curious beauty and a lifetime on the receiving end of this involuntary half-gasp had left her convinced that everyone she knew was asthmatic.

  Shelley’s gut twisted. Intermission was over.

  “You really should take something for that, you know,” Brad said. “I’m sure Simon has some Tums tucked away somewhere.”

  “I’ll try my luck with some tea first. Chewing cherry-flavored chalk can be Plan B.”

  “Sure thing. One cup coming up.”

  “Thanks, but I think I’ll survive a trip to the kitchen. I’m tired of staring at the ceiling.” Shelley made her way to the sunflower-yellow kitchenette. The clicking of Brad’s camera trailed her, chronicling the swish of her wavy dark ponytail against her nape.

  She stood on tiptoe to reach inside the cupboard, then pulled out a tea-stained cup and set it on the counter. She scoured the pantry for a tea bag.

  Brad snapped a portrait of Shelley’s sole find, capturing the flutter of a cobweb on the ancient jar of coffee creamer sitting on the shelf.

  Shelley sighed, picked up her phone, and pressed the speed dial.

  Black coffee with a hint of gravel answered. “Miss me already, luv?”r />
  Despite the din of the Madrid rush hour in the background, Shelley could tell from her husband’s voice that he was grinning. After two years of marriage, she still got butterflies when that flash of mischief crossed Max’s dark and scruffily handsome features. Unfortunately for Shelley, butterflies and toxic crustaceans, as a rule, do not get along. She stifled a groan and grasped the counter. Her fingertips nudged the teacup closer to the edge.

  “Are you all right, Shell? You sound worse.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Max eyed the train door. The last of the passengers were filing in. He pushed through the crowd. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I just called to ask if you could get some tea on your way back.”

  “Simon and I can head back now,” Max suggested as he trampled on more toes.

  “No, don’t. It can wait.”

  Brad found his next subject. Two clicks immortalized his now empty pack of peppermint gum that Simon had, as usual, promptly polished off.

  “All right.” Max stopped squeezing between shoulders. The door began to slide shut just as he reached it. “I’ll be back soon.”

  “Oh, and Max, please make sure you get …”

  “Jasmine,” Max was about to guess correctly. Something grazed his foot as he stepped back from the door. It was a blue backpack. Or was it purple? Colors tended to look the same when they exploded.

  Shelley’s hand slipped from the counter.

  The teacup shattered on the floor.

  Click.

  Chapter Two

  Sundays and surprises

  LONDON

  Three Years Later

  Breathing is not an optional activity—but Shelley found the opposite to be true. To live without Max, she had to stop.

  Her final breath had been the gasp she had taken when the bomb shredded Max to pieces. It was the last lungful of air she would take as Max’s wife and in it was all she had left of him. If she exhaled, he would be gone. And so she didn’t.

  Shelley held her breath and mimicked the motions of life with a white-hot pain in her chest. Walking and reading the paper were activities that were easy to fake, carrying on a conversation, not as much. Eventually she learned that most people were satisfied if she logged in the appropriate number of nods as they spoke. With some practice, she became proficient enough to keep even her nosiest neighbor, Mrs. Pond, happy.

  Shelley’s ability to go through the motions wasn’t surprising considering that she had been schooled by the best. Her mom had never quite gotten over the death of her own husband, and Shelley grew up watching her paint on the brightest smile with a berry shade of Revlon lipstick. There had been days when her happiness had seemed so real, so genuine, that Shelley had almost believed it. In the months and years since Max’s death, Shelley’s mime repertoire had grown to rival her mother’s, expanding to include what in the beginning was too excruciating to even consider.

  Online Scrabble was far tamer than the strip version she and Max used to play, but a milestone nonetheless. Shelley had whipped off countless bras to reward her husband’s triple word scores and ruined several tiny metal clasps in the process. Surrendering her underwear had always been easier than challenging Max’s more obscure words and enduring his discourses on their definition, etymology, and Latin conjugations. She later discovered the wonders of Velcro. Regardless of who won, tumbling naked on a letter-littered floor was how their games always ended anyway, along with the loss of yet another vowel. E’s, in particular, were in dangerously low supply.

  Chicken and eggs were Shelley’s next hurdles to a semblance of normalcy. In her case, it was the egg that came first. She had banished eggs from her kitchen when Max was killed. It was how she had managed to survive Sundays without him.

  Sunday mornings had once been her favorite time of the week. It was only then that not waking up in Max’s arms made her smile. The sight of his empty pillow meant one glorious thing: Paris was bubbling in the oven.

  Shelley had fallen in love with Max’s baked eggs and cheese almost as soon as she had fallen in love with Max himself. They were in Paris when he first made the dish for her and the tour group she had hastily joined. Since then each forkful tasted like that morning—warm, buttery, and bursting with full-fat promise. But Max was gone, and now Sundays coated her mouth with ash and gritty bits of grief.

  She both dreaded and longed for the hour when sleep thinned enough to peer through. She would smile at Max’s empty pillow, believing its false hope with every half-asleep fiber of her body. The waking dream was less than brief, but it lasted long enough for the smell of sharp cheese melting into a layer of eggs and cream to crush her when it drifted away.

  She learned to cope by bypassing most of Sunday with the help of marathon nights of online Scrabble. But after countless days of rising at noon, she finally found the strength to wake up to the emptiness inside her. She found it, of all places, inside a box couriered to her home one Saturday afternoon. It was from Brad.

  Brad had told her that he would be sending a draft of his new project. Photography had always been a hobby of his, but he had only ever shown his work to Simon. After Simon was killed, Brad had wedged his camera between himself and a world that did not have his fiancé in it.

  Shelley realized that it was now a year since Brad had closed their wedding-planning business to see if his art could feed him (and still satisfy his occasional Prada cravings). She had helped convince him that he could always scrape by as a paparazzo if money ever got tight. Luckily for the celebrities of New York, Brad’s new career was keeping him well fed and fashionable.

  She tore the box open. Inside were pieces of a teacup scattered over a kitchen floor. The title of Brad’s new book was printed on the black-and-white photograph.

  MARCH 2010 MADRID

  One day before. One year after.

  A STORY TOLD IN PHOTOGRAPHS

  BY BRADFORD JENSEN

  The shards of porcelain cut into her hands, slicing open old wounds. Shelley dropped the book on the hourglass mosaic inlaid on her foyer floor. She slumped down beside it.

  Simon beamed up at her from the open book, his black mod glasses, as always, slightly askew. Shelley stopped herself from nudging them back into place. There was nothing she could do. Simon was dead and his glasses would remain sitting crookedly on his nose.

  Tears rolled down the page. She tugged at the edge of her sleeve and dabbed Simon’s face before drying her own. She stroked his damp cheek, lifted the corner of the wet page, and turned back time.

  Shelley was in Madrid the day before the world had changed. Her fingers trembled. She gripped the book tight as Brad’s printed words led her through frozen seconds of ignorant bliss.

  Max and Shelley’s battle-scarred luggage

  on the sofa bed

  Simon cleaning his glasses

  Shelley handing Max the dental floss

  Simon finishing the last of my mint gum

  Shelley lingered over the tiny nothings, worrying that the slightest breeze might blow them away. These were the mundane specks that leave yawning gaps in shattered lives; no matter how well you think you’ve put all the pieces back together.

  She turned the page to the last photo in the series. Her heart broke all over again.

  She and Max were asleep in each other’s arms on the sofa bed. The pale light streaming from the window told her that the moment was stolen at dawn, a few hours after they had collapsed in bed after a night of spicy tapas and one too many bottles of wine. They were lying on their sides with Max’s lean muscled form fused into the curve of her back. He was in his jeans, naked from the waist up save for a thin silver chain around his neck. A blank Scrabble tile hung from it and rested beneath his collarbone. She had given the necklace to Max on their first anniversary to celebrate all the vowels they had lost so far.

  Shelley slammed the book shut and lay back on the floor, staring at a ceiling that was falling upward and away. Liquid darkness closed around her as she sank
into a well of salty tears. The stale breath she had lived on bubbled from her lips. She curled into a ball, closed her eyes, and waited for the death of her body or her soul, wondering which would save her first.

  Max’s breath tickled the back of her neck. He pulled her closer to his chest. His skin was warm against her back, melting her into him like butter. He wove his fingers through hers and placed her hands over her heart. It stirred under her palms. Shelley felt it beat again.

  Max kissed the secret spot behind her ear. “Good night, luv.”

  Shelley closed her eyes and began to drift into sleep. “Good … bye, Max.”

  Wisps of sunshine swirled above her. Shelley burst through the surface of her dream and drew in three years’ worth of air.

  It was Sunday morning, her first real Sunday since Max had died. Brad’s book was in her arms, creased from a night in her embrace. She smoothed out its pages and carried it to the kitchen, driven by a long-lost though still familiar feeling: peace and a desperate craving for baked eggs.

  Without a sliver of an eggshell in her kitchen, Shelley made do with a breakfast of burned toast slathered with trans-fat-free disappointment. She went through the rest of Brad’s book with oxygen in her lungs and a chipped floral cup of jasmine tea nursed in her hands. The second half of the book was called “One Year After.” It was a diary of the healing humdrum Brad had fashioned from the old and the new.

  A full pack of mint gum

  Notes from last week’s support group meeting

  Simon’s framed photo by the bed