Jason Pinter - The Darkness

Instead, she met a guy named Henry Parker who changed her world. Well, part of it was her own doing, choosing the not-for-profit sector of legal aid rather than one of those cushy jobs. She didn’t make the money most New York lawyers did, but she was pretty sure she slept better at night.

It took a few years, but looking back Amanda realized how much of her life she’d missed. It was as if she’d taken her expected life and turned it around. Her parents had died when she was young, and after being shuttled back and forth for years, she was adopted by a kind couple named Lawrence and Harriet Stein. The Steins were everything foster parents could be. Except for real parents.

Amanda went through the first twenty years of her life without knowing a real relationship of any kind, and she didn’t figure that would get any better.

Then she met Henry in extraordinary circumstances, literally picking him up on the side of the road, later to find out he was wanted for murder. Thankfully he was innocent. That would have been a deal breaker.

They’d leaped into a relationship faster than either of them knew what they were doing, and for a while it was good. Really good. Then just as they met under extraordinary circumstances, so were they torn apart. Henry broke up with her for reasons that he believed were noble, but devastated them both. And after some tentative patchwork, they’d decided to give it another go. Slowly this time. They were starting like they should have from the beginning. Movies. Dinner. Holding hands while walking through Central Park, picnic lunches on the Great Lawn.

She’d moved in with Henry too quickly last time. For now, Darcy would do, but every night spent in that cold guest room, with the hard mattress that was meant more for show than for use, with the artificial orchids everywhere and paint so white that it seemed to have been bleached of all personality, she couldn’t wait for the day when she could feel his warmth next to her every night, where she could lean her head on his chest whenever she felt like it and listen to the beating of his heart. She craved that intimacy, that security. He needed it, too, she knew it. But if it took a few extra months to build protection for the rest of their lives, she supposed she could wait.

The alternative would have been unbearable.

When she used her spare key to open the apartment door, she had to fumble around in the hallway for the light switch. It wasn’t by the door like it would be in a normal apartment. The hallway light was part of some intricate module by the entrance of the atrium that controlled all the lights in the house. That was one of the things she loved about Henry’s previous apartments. There were no modules, and definitely no atrium.

Once she found the panel and turned on every light in the house before finding the one to her bedroom, she went inside, stripped out of her work clothes and threw on a pair of shorts and a tank top. Darcy and her husband,

Devin, were out at their summer home in Oyster Bay.

Every weekend they begged Amanda to come with them, and every weekend she declined. She hated being the third wheel, and having to do it four and a half days of every week (they usually left for Long Island early on

Friday) was enough. And while sitting at the edge of a beach, dipping her toes into the luscious water of the

Long Island Sound seemed like the perfect antidote to the stressful Manhattan life, it didn’t mean a thing without

Henry. And he wasn’t the “dip your feet in the water and laugh like a fool” kind of guy.

He had two modes: work and play. When the switch was on Work, Henry was as driven and ambitious as anyone she’d known. When it was on Play, there was nobody else in the world but the two of them. Everything faded away when he held her in his arms.

And she loved both sides of him unconditionally.

Amanda called Henry’s cell. It went right to voice mail.

“Hey, babe, hope you’re having a good day and Jack hasn’t led you off a cliff or something. Give me a call when you get a chance.”

When she hung up, Amanda turned on her laptop and put Aimee Mann on high. She was a massive fan, but found she couldn’t listen to her favorite song, “Wise Up,” as often as she used to. The lyrics were about finding what you thought you wanted most, only to realize that once you had it, it wasn’t what you thought it would be. Every time she heard it, she thought about their relationship.

She’d never been a goopy girl, the kind who read her horoscopes or gossiped over cosmos while wearing outfits that cost more than the GDP of the Congo. She wasn’t superstitious either, but she didn’t want to think about losing what she wanted. What she had.

She figured if Aimee knew what she and Henry had been through in their few years knowing each other, she wouldn’t take offense.

Kicking her shoes off, Amanda lay back on the hard bed, wanting to think about nothing until it was time to get up for work the next morning. The one thing she did like about Darcy’s place was that the girl didn’t spare the pillows. The guest room had no less than a dozen pillows of various shapes and sizes covering the bed. Amanda had spent her first week deciding which ones were right, and picked the right half-dozen to fall asleep to. When she and

Henry lived together it always drove him crazy. Mainly because he would wake up on one side of the full-size bed with one nostril covered and a feather sticking out of the corner of his mouth.

Amanda groaned as she rolled off the bed, blowing a hair strand from her eye. Darcy and Devin had a fifty-six-46

Jason Pinter inch flat screen in their bedroom, one of those cool wallmounted units that seemed to hover without wires or a bracket. It probably cost more than her education, so

Amanda figured she’d make use of it.

The remote control was some digital monstrosity that took Amanda ten minutes just to turn on. She was always amused by Darcy’s taste in television, so she decided to see what her friend had recorded. The DVR listed thirty-two episodes of Sex in the City, ten of

Gossip Girl, three of Desperate Housewives… and this morning’s newscast. Amanda laughed. One of those things didn’t quite fit.

She pressed Resume Playback on the news program, and saw swarms of cops roaming around what appeared to be a crime scene. A reporter’s voice-over spoke of some horrendous murder, some young man’s body found pulverized in the East River. The reporter was using her

“ultra serious” tone of voice reserved for crimes that were not just bad, but truly terrifying. Amanda felt her heart beat faster. Why the hell had Darcy taped this?

“Kenneth Tsang was survived by his mother and father and young sister. According to the police there are no suspects at this time, but sources confirm that the brutality with which the killer or killers ravaged Mr. Tsang’s body was done with some sort of message in mind. And since the city medical examiner Leon Binks has confirmed that over one hundred of Mr. Tsang’s bones were broken before the body was found in the river, that message will be heard loud and clear.”

Amanda shook her head. It was still hard to fathom just how much evil there was in the world. How normal people seemed to be at risk leading normal lives.

And then she realized why Darcy had taped the segment.

Standing by a yellow line of police tape, talking to a uniformed officer, was Henry.

Amanda watched. Henry was just doing his job, but something about him being so close to death always unnerved her.

When the clip ended, Amanda walked back into the guest room and grabbed the cell phone. She dialed Henry’s number at work. It rang through and went to voice mail.

Then she tried his cell again. Right to voice mail.