The Endless Road to Sunshine - Nicky James Page 0,1

fill out a few forms and empty my pockets into a bin before going through a metal detector.

A uniformed officer, who called himself Lenny, frisked me while making friendly chit-chat about the weather. None of it registered. His voice droned in the background, an indecipherable wah-wah-wah, not unlike the school teacher character I remembered from a cartoon I’d watched growing up.

For all I knew, I was dreaming. When I woke, all the bullshit from the past year and a half would be nothing more than a fragmented nightmare I would soon forget. I would open my eyes. It would be April tenth again. The birds would sing from the giant elm in the backyard. Morning sunlight would leak through the blinds we’d forgotten to close before bed. And Morgan would be sleeping beside me, his lashes dark and delicate against his milky white skin. His arm would be draped over my abdomen like always.

Over breakfast, I would share about my dream, and he’d smile that special smile he reserved for me alone and tell me I was cute and imaginative. Then he’d kiss me, and we’d drink more coffee, never speaking of it again.

“Through here.” The officer’s clipped tone brought me back to the present where the cold hard reality that was my life awaited. “The prisoner is chained to the table. Any hostility and the visit will end. Any yelling or elevated voices and it will end. I will remain present at the door at all times. Termination of the visit will be at my discretion. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

He unlocked the door and waved me in ahead of him.

For the better part of eight months, I’d sat rigid, enduring endless hours on the hard bench in a courtroom while Morgan’s case had been tried. It was national news. Not a single person from one end of Canada to the other hadn’t heard about Morgan Atkinson, coined the Kingston Strangler.

During those long days in court, we’d made eye contact a few times, but mostly I’d stared at the back of his head, wondering, weaving all kinds of possible explanations as to how and why the authorities had gotten it wrong. If Morgan glanced in my direction, mostly, I looked away. Overwhelmed didn’t begin to describe the situation.

It hurt too much seeing him in chains, listening to the case unfold. Week after week as the trial played out, as the evidence was brought forward, as the lawyers battled one another and called witnesses to the stand, I’d held my breath and told myself it was all a big misunderstanding. It would be over soon.

I didn’t know if it was self-preservation or stupidity, but I’d convinced myself Morgan would be set free in the end. He would come home, they’d find the right person and put them behind bars, and we could carry on with our lives the way we had before.

That wasn’t what had happened.

Eleven life sentences. The man I thought I loved would never again see the light of day.

The visitation room was stark and bare. Four concrete walls and one small window with a grate over the top that looked out over a yard. Morgan sat behind a heavy steel table that was bolted to the ground. He wore an orange jumpsuit, his hands and feet cuffed together and attached to a belt around his waist which, in turn, was attached to a hook in the floor.

The dark scruff along his jaw called my attention. It flooded memories to the surface of a time long ago when I would nuzzle and kiss and nip along its sharp edge, teasing before devouring his mouth. His stormy gray eyes, full of depth and character and love, peered back at me. It was nothing but lies. A hint of a sad smile tugged at his mouth.

And I hated myself for thinking him handsome even now.

My Morgan. My husband. The man I’d loved with all my heart for twenty fucking years.

What happened to you?

Somewhere under this mirage lived a monster so dark and menacing the sheer thought of its existence made me want to recoil and run away. I couldn’t see the beast. Morgan had buried that part of himself deep under layers of trickery and false fronts. It would have been so easy to convince myself the evil inside him didn’t exist at all.

That was why I’d come, wasn’t it? For proof. For closure. To hear it from his lips. I couldn’t live with the uncertainty in my mind any longer.