Signs of Life Read Online Free

assholes trying to kill you! You were in the most dangerous place on earth, and yet my husband manages to get his ass killed just two motherfucking miles from home on a goddamn neighborhood street!”
    Jeremy’s voice had risen to a hysterical shout, and he was twisting his fists in Jase’s coat.
    “It’s so unfair! You’re the one that should be dead! Not him!”
    Jase’s face was white, stricken, his eyes full of tears, but his voice was compassionate as he said, “I know, Jere. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry, man.”
    “ You should be dead, not him. Not him.” Jeremy’s grip on Jase’s coat was the only thing holding him up, and when he shoved Jase away, his legs buckled. He collapsed onto his knees, his body shaking as the last tenuous hold he had on his composure snapped.
    “Go away, Jase. I don’t want you here anymore.” He lashed out, his anger at Brent for dying focusing with vicious intent on the man who had been his rock, his unwavering support during the worst week of Jeremy’s life. Yet he couldn’t stop.
    “You don’t get to be here anymore. I wish you had died, not him. Go away! ” Jeremy’s voice had risen to almost a scream, and before the hysteria took him over completely, he dimly felt Jase stroke his hair with a trembling hand before the door closed softly behind him.
    Jeremy collapsed onto his side and curled into a fetal position as he sobbed, feeling like he’d never be able to stop, crippling pain and grief making him wish for death himself.
    When the storm finally passed, Jeremy crawled on hands and knees into the bedroom and pulled himself up on the bed, burying himself in the covers, Brent’s pillow clutched to him as he fell into an exhausted sleep. He woke hours later, his eyes gritty and feeling like sandpaper, his throat shredded from crying. The sight of Brent’s reading glasses on the night table next to a paperback novel he would never get to finish set him off into another bout of weeping.
    That happened over and over as Jeremy was assaulted with signs of Brent’s presence: his toothbrush and razor, his dirty clothes in the hamper, his leftovers from their last dinner out together in a box in the fridge. As each storm raged and passed, Jeremy thought he couldn’t possibly have any tears left, but the reality of Brent’s permanent absence always dredged up more until Jeremy was weak with exhaustion and emotional overload.
     
     
    WITH THE ruthlessness that had always served him well in his law practice, Jeremy boxed up all of Brent’s things one afternoon, took them to a local donation center and left them without a backward glance. What he couldn’t donate he threw away. His next stop was to a realtor’s office, and he listed their house, instructing the realtor to take the first offer.
    There was one difficult task that Jeremy couldn’t put off any longer, and he made a phone call.
    “Leticia? Can I come over?”
    He drove across town and pulled up outside a small neat house in Chula Vista, a blue-collar enclave south of where he and Brent lived in exclusive La Jolla. Jeremy sat in his car for a while, breathing deeply, hoping he could hold it together and not lose it in front of the woman who was carrying his and Brent’s son.
    Surrogacy had been a long, exhausting process, extremely stressful. He and Brent had gone through an agency, one that specialized in “matching” prospective surrogate mothers with gay couples. They elected to go with gestational surrogacy, where the woman they chose would “grow” and carry a baby created with their sperm and donor eggs, a baby that would not be hers biologically in any way.
    Jeremy remembered the night he and Brent cuddled up together in bed, looking through the profiles and questionnaires of women the agency forwarded to them as potential matches. Brent immediately zeroed in on a young woman with two little boys of her own and a husband who was in the Marines.
    “She has kind eyes,” Brent had said,