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I'm dead. I stare down at my body. Or what used to be my body. Strange how I never thought about what would happen after everything was over. Even stranger how I never thought this could happen to me.
I had all the details worked out. The money from the diamond would have supported my life-style for a few years at the very least. Days on the French Riveria, looking for a rich lover. Nights in Monte Carlo, doing the same.
This isn't how my life is supposed to end. Shot to death in my ex-husband's apartment. I'm too young. I have too much living left to do.
I can hear Ken coming up the stairs, and before he walks in the door, I remember the first time I ever saw him.
I'm walking across campus with some sorority sisters, laughing about one of the new crop of co-eds who didn't make it in, and I stop to fix my shoe while the others walk on.
When I stand up, there's this tall young man walking towards me on the sidewalk, hair so blond it looks like spun gold in the sunlight. He's alone, he's reading a book and eating an apple, and then he trips right into me.
When he straightens up, he stammers an apology, and I can't even find my breath. His eyes are the blue of a summer sky, his face classically handsome.
"Vanessa Michaels," I tell him and hold out my hand.
"Ken Hutchinson," he says and smiles.
That's how it begins.
One of my sorority sisters tells me he's one of the Duluth Hutchinsons-the only son. I learn more from Ken himself, and I wonder why this wealthy son has come to California to our private college.
We graduate, and his parents don't even bother to come to his graduation. The grandmother who raised me comes and pats Ken gently on the cheek.
"He's a good one," she says to me later when we're alone. "A good man. His sun rises and sets with you."
We drive upstate—see Yosemite, go into Oregon and spend days along the coast. Ken's been accepted into law school at UCLA in the fall, and we drive back towards the south when he says let's get married.
We head into Vegas, find a wedding chapel, and just like that I'm Mrs. Kenneth Hutchinson, wife of the future attorney.
The silver ring he puts on my finger has a tiny diamond, no more than a chip.
"When I can afford it," he tells me, "I'll give you the stars and the moon."
I work at a department store in the jewelry department, Ken starts law school, and the smile I fell in love with starts to fade.
He comes home one day, smiling, and catches me up in a hug and spins me around. Then he sits down and tells me about the guest lecture the chief of the Bay City Police Department gave and how he wants to quit, yes quit, law school, and go to the police academy to become a cop. Ken Hutchinson of the Duluth Hutchinsons, an ordinary working man, a cop.
We start arguing every day, and I realize I'm losing the man I fell in love with. Some nights, I'm so angry, I hit him. He just takes it, his eyes shadowed.
"There's no future being a cop," I scream at him one night. "What about money, Ken? What are we going to do about that?"
And I realize then, that Ken never has cared about money. Maybe because he never had to worry about it, or maybe because he see the misery it brought his own parents.
It's not only money that has changed him. It's his new friend, David Starsky-who does not come from money, who wants nothing more in life than to be a good cop and be Ken's partner some day in the future.
The divorce is my idea, and even with all I said, all I did, Ken gives me everything we had together and more.
I look up as Ken comes in the door, his expression changing as he notices my body. He falls to his knees beside me, his hands barely skimming my torso.
"Van," he says. Just once as if his heart has broken a little. He reaches for the phone, and I know before he says a word, who he is calling.
"Starsk."
When Dave comes running in the door, his only eyes are for Ken, although he does take a moment to look at my shrouded body. I'm not sure if the sadness I see in him is for my death or Ken's shock and grief. Or maybe I've never understood their relationship because it could be both.
I watch as he pours Ken a glass of brandy and sits down across from him, touching his hand lightly, and waiting until Ken can speak.
And I know the truth now. They love each other. Love that accepts the other totally, with the whole heart.
There's a final truth I see as I fade away. At the end of it all? Dave and Ken are, and, forever will be each other's stars and moon.