Free The Girl in the Window by Valerie Douglas

better.
    Just the idea that she’d had to sacrifice him to gain her inheritance made her want to curse God or burn down the house.
    It was madness, it was simply too cruel.
    He’d been coming to meet her at their apartment for dinner.
    She was going to meet him there once she had the keys.
    They were going to have dinner and then they were going to come to the house. He was going to walk with her through it, through all the rooms she couldn’t face alone. Of all her foster siblings and friends, she’d only ever told Matt what had really happened. He’d been going with her to hold her hand so she could.
    Her head against the wall, she sniffed, and her mouth twisted.
    When she’d heard the sound of tires in the driveway that terrible day, somehow she’d known something was wrong. That whatever was coming was not just bad news, but terrible news. Fear had burned through her.
    They’d knocked, but she hadn’t answered, she hadn’t wanted to know.
    If she stayed still, just stayed still, it wouldn’t be true.
    With the front door open the sheriff’s men had come in anyway, dark shadows standing in the doorway of the room that had once been her bedroom.
    “I’m so sorry,” one of them said afterward.
    After they’d delivered their terrible news.
    Matt had been walking to their apartment by the county road because it wasn’t that far and their car was on the fritz. It sat in the garage until they could afford the parts because they were saving money. They were planning to open a bed and breakfast with a tiny restaurant attached, just a few tables, only open on weekends. She would run the restaurant and the B&B while Matt did accountant work on the side. He would manage the finances until the B&B was financially stable.
    Someday they would expand. Maybe. If all went well.
    Late into the night they’d discussed plans, curled up around each other.
    They would find an old house and renovate it with the skills Matt was learning at his summer job in construction.
    Handy at anything, Matt had been going to fix the car on the weekend rather than pay a mechanic for the labor.
    So he’d been walking.
    It was too easy for her to picture, knowing Matt as well as she had. As he’d walked he’d picked flowers to bring to her. He was like that, always doing small thoughtful things for her.
    The driver of the car had been drunk.
    Matt had had no place to run, had probably not even seen the car coming from behind him, save for that last moment. He’d been dead almost instantly they said. He hadn’t suffered, they said.
    Perhaps it had been the bright bunch of wildflowers in his hand that had drawn the driver’s eye they said in court.
    The thought had been stunning, but what had been utterly shocking had been discovering that her grief didn’t matter.
    Apparently promises weren’t enough. The two years she and Matt had been together didn’t matter and their engagement didn’t matter. Only marriage did. She couldn’t have loved him enough…in two years…four years…for the rest of her life. It only mattered to the rest of the world if that promise had been met and kept.
    His family closed ranks. Somehow they blamed her, or at least it felt as if they did. If he hadn’t been going to see her…
    In the face of their own grief, they had no room for hers. She wasn’t part of their family any more, wouldn’t be part of it.
    Everything that had been his, theirs, no longer was. They hadn’t meant to be unkind she knew.
    She hadn’t been supposed to grieve so much for her loss, after all they’d only been engaged, not married. But she did. Her heart had been like a stone in her chest, but in the face of all those eyes, she hadn’t dared to weep, even when it felt as if she would drown in her own unshed tears.
    It didn’t seem to matter to anyone but her that her life suddenly had a hole in it where Matt had once been.
    When the nightmares came there was no one to hold her in the darkness any more.
    There was no one