Page 101 of Wrong Mail

He looks at me a long time, and I watch him understand that I'm still asking. That the confession bought him nothing. That his wife is sitting across the island building the exact case the logs are building, brick for brick.

"Home," he says. Then, after a beat, "I told you before."

"No. Your phone was home. It's not the same thing."

"No." He looks down.

“So where were you?"

His mouth opens. And I see it. The answer is there, whatever it is, sitting right behind his eyes.

I lose it. “David, your career, your whole life, everything is on the line. Why won't you tell me the truth?"

He looks at me with it, and then he chooses not to give it to me. He chooses the silence instead.

Whatever he was doing Tuesday, he would rather let me think this than say it out loud.

And that is answer enough.

I shake my head and look away.

Out past the cedars, the sky has started to go the color it goes before the back half of a storm comes through. I think about Rodriguez reading the logs. The board reading them. Twelve strangers in a box someday, laying the same dates against the same doors and arriving at the same answer. And I understand that it has stopped mattering what I believe.

It has already been decided.

"I never killed anyone,” he says again, quieter now, a man rehearsing a line he already knows no one will believe.

Chapter Thirty-Six

The unmarked SUV comes up the drive at eleven, and I know before it stops that this is the day the ground gives way.

Rodriguez gets out alone. A second car follows him up the drive, a marked one. It stops across the gate and idles there. Nobody gets out. He doesn't hurry. He never hurries. He stands for a moment, taking in the house, then comes to the door.

They're here for David.

That’s the first thing in my head when I see the detective on my step. David left after breakfast saying he had to meet with a lawyer. I didn't ask anything else. I have spent the morning not looking at the app, because I am afraid of what the dot will tell me.

I let Rodriguez in. Luna lifts her head off the floor, considers him, then lies back down.

I offer him coffee, but he declines. Instead, he sets a tablet on the island and stands over it. We aren't going to sit. It isn't that kind of visit.

"I need you to look at something, Mrs. Grant," he says.

The footage is gray, taken from a camera high in the corner of a corridor. A timestamp sits in the bottom corner. People cross it in the hurry of a public building. Then a woman comes in from the left, and my stomach drops before my mind can name her.

It's Julia.

She is wearing the jacket I have seen her in countless times. Her hair is loose. She appears to know where she is going. She stops at a desk, says something to the clerk behind it, then waits. The timestamp is from three days before she disappeared. It reads 2:14 in the afternoon.

She is here on this screen, upright and breathing, moving through the world like someone with somewhere to be.

My voice comes out thin. "That's her. That's Julia."

Rodriguez watches me instead of the screen. "Keep going," he says, and taps forward.

“This was taken at UW Medical Center,” he says before I can ask. “Your husband's hospital. She spoke to someone at the main desk about a former patient. An older admission. They directed her to records.”

He lets that sit.