Page 10 of I Hope This Email Finds You in Hell

Krystal. She should have been here by now. I check the time on my laptop. Almost ten. I was asleep for way longer than I thought. “Oh God, yes, so sorry! Amelia, hi. Is everything okay?”

She’s quiet for too long before she says, “Krystal never came home from work today. I know she was supposed to go to your place to watch Love Island tonight. Is she there?”

My stomach drops to my toes.

“No, she never came. Sorry, I got distracted and fell asleep and—”

“It’s okay,” Amelia cuts me off with a forced calm that screams motherhood. Still, I can’t miss her fear when she says, “She wouldn’t disappear like this. I think something happened to her.”

• • •

After hanging up with me, Amelia officially reported Krystal as missing.

I stayed up all night pacing my apartment, waiting for updates. Several times I grabbed my keys, wanting to take to the streets. But I haven’t driven after dark since that night, and now’s no different. Guilt chewed me up as I triple-checked that my door and windows were locked, my mind jumping to Poppi, the woman who disappeared over the weekend. Surely, the two can’t be related.

I get ready for work a whole hour early. Unsure what else to do with myself, I swipe my keys. Even with the sun up, I’m so frazzled that it takes an additional five minutes to hype myself up enough to start the car. It’s only once I’m pulling into the driveway of Amelia and Krystal’s house with a bag of bagels and cream cheese from the corner deli that I pause. Krystal’s car isn’t here.

Amelia’s is, though. I ring the bell.

“Brie?” Amelia’s obviously been crying. If not evident by her swollen red eyes, then by the tissue clutched in her fist. “What are you doing here?”

I hold out the bag of bagels. “Thought you might need breakfast. I know it can be kind of easy to forget to eat.”

Her gaze softens as she takes the bag. “Thank you. I’m waiting for my parents to come by with the kids. Aurelia knows something’s up, but I’m keeping them out of school and away from home so I can deal with the police. Do you want to come in for a minute?”

“Um, actually—” I check my phone. It’s already 7:30, but work isn’t far. Besides, I can’t deny Amelia’s pleading blue eyes behind her smudged wire-framed glasses. “Sure.”

I’ve been to their house before, but a bolt of admiration hits me just like the first time. It’s tastefully decorated in a mid-century modern way with pops of color and Amelia’s artwork on the walls. “You never have to worry about me quitting,” Krystal once joked in the office. “My wife wins the bread, but I got the benefits.”

“How are you doing?” I ask, even though I hated when people asked me that. Now, though, I see how there really is nothing right to say in the face of catastrophe.

She sniffles. “It’s been stressful. But Krys is going to be okay. She has to be.”

“Of course,” I agree. “And the police are on it, right?”

Something like contempt flickers across Amelia’s expression. “Supposedly.”

I raise a brow. “Or maybe not?”

She sighs, hoisting herself up to sit on the counter. “I think they might be on it for all the wrong reasons. I don’t know how much Krys has told you, but she has a past with addiction, though she’s been sober for years. They think her disappearing into thin air is part of that, even though I keep telling them it’s not. I mean, for fuck’s sake, her car was literally found under the bridge by Court Street, still running. With her bag in it and everything. You can’t tell me she would have left like that if it was her choice.”

“She would never,” I say, because if there’s one thing I know about Krystal, it’s that she’s loyal. “That’s shitty the police won’t listen to you.”

“They’re trying to find a common thread between Krys and that other woman, Poppi, who went missing. But the only link between her and Krys that we know of is that they both knew someone who passed from an overdose. I feel like they’re trying to explain everything away instead of admitting that maybe there’s a kidnapper or creep out there.”

“That’s awful. Did they both know the same person who died?” I ask.

“I doubt it. The person Krys lost was her younger sister, Shania. Her only sibling.”

“Oh.” I don’t know what else to say. Krystal is one of the only people in Tarrentown who has managed to crack my walnut shell enough for me to spill about the death of my parents. It’s not like she owed me a trauma dump in return, but especially after telling me yesterday that I remind her of her sister, I’m surprised to find out Shania’s dead.

“That was nearly eight years ago and made Krys finally get help. She met me a month later during an art therapy class I was teaching and has been clean ever since. Anyway, that’s why she calls you angel—your first day at Curated Care was on the anniversary of Shania’s death, so she felt like it was a sign from her sister.”

It takes everything in me to keep my composure. But I’m not the one with a missing wife, so I swallow down the lump in my throat and say what I wish I had told Krystal. “She was my angel, too.”

A small smile blooms across Amelia’s tired face before withering. She looks out the window as if Krystal might be standing on the back deck, and says, “I know it’s not a relapse like the police want to believe. They look at Krys’s past, and Poppi’s, and see a commonality. But that doesn’t explain Madeline Valero. She’s another woman who was reported missing Sunday night. Unlike Krys and Poppi, Madeline apparently doesn’t have a substance-abuse history. But it sounds like she’s had her fair share of mental health struggles. Her family died in a fire when she was a kid. If they really are connected somehow, I want to pop whatever asshole is behind it all.”

“We’ll find them,” I say surely, though I don’t feel very sure at all. The notion that this could be part of a greater scheme makes a shiver race through me.