The Liar's Wife (Adam Levine Dark Romance)

Chapter 26: Back To Black, The Sun

Flash Forward: July 2063

“Wake up!”

Jane felt her daughter Avril shaking her by the arm. She forced her eyes open and sat up on the bed.

“Mom,” Avril said, “Adele’s going to take the kids back to her house now. Do you want me to stay with you?”

“Oh no, sweetie,” Jane responded. “I’ll be fine on my own.”

“Are you sure?” Avril was searching her face with a look of concern, and Jane made the effort to paste on a reassuring smile.

“I’m fine,” she said with a nod. “Right now I’d really just like to be alone.”

Alone, Jane thought, once all the well-wishers had left and she found herself enveloped in the silence of an empty house. She’d been craving a moment of solitude all afternoon. Now that she had it, she found her thoughts returning to the same memory she’d been replaying in her mind over and over since it happened – the night Adam went to sleep and never woke up.

He’d been quiet all evening, she remembered. They’d been out riding around in the car that afternoon, listening to the oldies station, and an Amy Winehouse song had come on. Back To Black. Jane had reached for the radio controls to turn it off, but Adam had swatted her hand away. “I want to hear it,” was all he’d said.

He left no time to regret.
Kept his dick wet
With his same old safe bet.

Me and my head high,
And my tears dry,
Get on without my guy.

You went back to what you knew,
So far removed from all that we went through,

And I tread a troubled track.
My odds are stacked.
I'll go back to black.

That evening she found Adam sitting up in bed when she came in. He had a picture frame in his hand. It was the photo he kept by the side of his bed – the four of them on some family vacation, back when the girls were still teenagers. Jane crawled under the covers next to him, and he reached out and took her hand, lacing his fingers through hers. She looked over his shoulder at the photo, following the direction of his gaze. He was looking at Avril. Your eye couldn’t help but go to her – the way that glorious burst of flaming red always seemed to cast the rest of her dark-haired family into shadow.

“Back to black,” Adam murmured. He looked at Jane and shook his head. “How could she do it? How could she dye that hair?”

Jane sighed. It wasn’t Avril they were talking about. “I guess she wanted to be someone else for a little while.”

He nodded. “Someone else,” he replied. “Did I ever tell you the last thing she said to me? Before she left Idaho? She said ‘I can be Amy if that’s what you need me to be.’”

“Adam—“

“I did it,” he continued. “I made her someone else.”

Jane took the photo out of his hands and placed it back on his bedside. “You’re tired,” she whispered. “You get morbid when you’re tired.”

“How could you still love me after that?”

“Oh Adam,” she sighed. “I’ve loved you for so long. I can’t even remember what my life was like before I loved you.”

A ghost of a smile crossed is face. “And I cannot remember what life was like from photographs, or trying to recreate images life gives us from the past.” He was humming softly, and it took her a moment to recognize the tune. An old favorite of hers. The Sun. It had been a long time since she’d heard him sing that one.