Read Chapter One of In Our Secret Life by A. Tony Mendoza
SHE SAW HIM STEAL A WALLET. SHE DIDN'T WALK AWAY.
Meet Jerry and Rita at the beginning of their extraordinary love story.
Chapter One
The First Secret
“We got away with everything.”
I do not say it loud. The room asks for nothing louder. The words land where I aim them, in the inch of air between my mouth and the ceiling, and they keep their shape there in a way nothing else has all morning.
That is how I know.
This will not last.
For a while now, the days have folded into one another without seams. Faces arrive without names. Names arrive without faces. Yesterday I woke certain it was breakfast and found the shadows already pooled long across the floorboards, the afternoon halfway gone without me. Some mornings I look at the silver-framed photograph on my nightstand and have to wait for it to tell me who I am.
I am not sure what year it is.
I am not sure how long I have been in this bed.
But this. This is different.
The room is sharpening, the way a lens does when someone gives the dial that final quarter turn. The curtains, paled to the color of bone after years in this light. The narrow stripe of sun across the floorboards, edged like a blade. The Zenith console murmuring in the corner.
Walker, Texas Ranger. Chuck Norris settling something with one roundhouse kick, justice handed down before the next commercial. I have loved this show as long as I have loved anything that talks back. Order restored before the hour ends.
Familiar in a way that feels borrowed.
Not remembered.
Understood.
And then.
Something anchors. A number. A feeling. A loss.
Five years.
Five years since I lost him.
That is how I know. Two thousand seventeen. Not because I remember the days. Because I remember the absence.
2017.
My hand lifts. Not from fear. The body has been unreliable for some time, and I have made my peace with that part. The mind is the part I have been bargaining with. And right now, for one minute, it has come back the way air returns after you have held your breath too long. All at once. Almost too sweet.
“Come closer.”
They hesitate.
My nephew Robert stands by the door in a polo shirt the wrong color for him. Bea hovers behind him, the woman who keeps my days now, her hand still resting on the cart. They have watched me drift before. Into confusion. Into stories that begin somewhere and never arrive at a destination. Both of them are deciding, in this exact moment, whether what they are seeing is the real me or a counterfeit. Both of them are being polite about it.
They are wrong.
I am here.
What scares me is that I know I am here. The clarity is so bright it stings. I have always trusted the body to warn me when something good was about to be taken away.
I let the hand fall. No need to insist. If they are meant to see, they will see.
Across from the bed, the door never swings all the way to the wall. It stops short, the same short every time. Even when I forget my own hand on a fork, the door stops where it has always stopped, the way certain habits outlive the reason they were trained into us.
The painting hangs behind the door.
A Love Story.
An Art Heist.
A Secret Worth $160 Million.
Coming October 27, 2026