The Liar's Wife (Adam Levine Dark Romance)

A Brief Interlude

Flash Forward: July 2063

Jane strolled slowly down the sidewalk, inhaling deeply to cleanse her lungs of the staleness that had settled there from spending too much time in a stuffy, overcrowded room. She had slipped out quietly, in desperate need of a break from her role as the grieving widow. It wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate the hundreds of well-wishers filling the house in waves, coming up to her to share their condolences. Adam had been loved by so many people.  

It had gotten to be overwhelming, though – the sea of faces pressing in on her all afternoon. Some faces familiar. Some she couldn’t place. They were all so old. When did everyone get so old? There was one old woman Jane hadn’t recognized. She’d come up and patted Jane on the hand, murmuring the usual trite phrases. “He will be missed.”

“Thank you,” Jane had replied softly for the thousandth time that day, expecting the woman to move on as the others had, but she’d paused instead.

“You don’t know who I am, do you?”

Jane had only shaken her head blankly. “I’m sorry…”

“Stefani Germanotta,” the woman rasped, but still Jane hadn’t been able to place the name. “Better known as Lady Gaga, although it’s been a while since anyone called me that.”

Lady Gaga at his funeral, Jane thought with a chuckle. What would Adam have thought of that? There’d been no love lost between the two of them in life. They’d both blown up on the pop scene around the same time and managed to rub each other the wrong way every time their paths crossed. Jane had a dim notion that there was some feud between them at one point. Some slight, real or imagined. Some twitter war. God, how long had it been since anyone talked about twitter?

“Thank you for coming,” Jane had murmured to the woman, shaking her hand. “Adam would have been honored to know you were here.”

“Ha!” she laughed back. “Adam would have cringed to know I was here. Why do you think I came?"

Jane shut her eyes for a moment and shook her head slightly as if to clear it of all those faces. It came as a relief to be alone with her own thoughts for just a moment.

She started humming to herself as she walked and realized she had a song stuck in her head – an old Adele song, Rumour Has It.

She is half your age,
But I'm guessing that's the reason that you strayed.

What just put that song in her head? She hadn’t heard it in years.

It must have been the stories everyone was telling earlier that afternoon. They were all going around the room, sharing memories of the first time they’d met Adam. Adele had told her earliest childhood memory of her father. She had shadowy recollections of sitting in his lap or singing lullabies with him, but apparently the first event that stuck in her mind as a coherent memory was that dance routine to Rumour Has It. “He was so angry!” Adele had reminisced. “It was years and years before I understood why.”

 

You made my heart melt, yet I'm cold to the core,
But rumour has it I'm the one you're leaving her for.

Jane touched the palm of her hand to her forehead for a moment, wincing at the lyrics. Poor Adele, she thought. Poor Adam, too.

It was probably the worst possible song anyone could have chosen to sing to him just then, under the circumstances.