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“I would too. So you’ll go when she’s not in the room. Does she take her purse with her to lunch?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” Lily says. “She might just bring a lunch and eat in the classroom, like me.”
“But eventually she’d have to leave?” I ask, hopeful.
Lily says yes. I ask her when she personally leaves her classroom, leaving her purse behind. When she goes to the bathroom, the copy room, or for things like department and team meetings, she says. My hope for that key hinges on Lily’s ability to pull this off, and that worries me because it’s not in Lily’s nature to break into places and steal things. “You just have to be confident and calm and quick. Do you think you can do this?”
“I don’t know, Christian,” she says. She’s scared of getting caught. She’s scared of being seen. “What happens if I can’t?”
“Then we’ll find another way,” I say, because the last thing I want to do is make her uncomfortable and scared. “Just do your best. If you can’t, you can’t.”
Lily turns around in bed to face me. “Christian?”
“What?”
“Why are you being so nice? Why are you helping me like this when I did a terrible thing?” she asks. I made a vow to Lily once. For better or worse. I never imagined that the worse would look anything like this, but life is unpredictable at times, and there is nothing I wouldn’t do for her.
In the dark, I just barely make out the outline of Lily’s face. I run my fingers along her hairline, her cheek, seeing her with my hands. I lean forward into her, close. She does too. For a minute, we breathe each other’s air. I feel her breath on me. Her hands slip around me, pulling me toward her so that we’re flush, one continuous being.
Lily brings her face somehow even closer to mine. She hesitates, and then she kisses me. It’s sedate, slow, deep. I feel that kiss everywhere. I’ve been too afraid to touch Lily. I’ve wanted to. God, how I’ve wanted to. But I’ve been walking on eggshells around her, not wanting to do anything she didn’t want to do, not wanting to do anything that would be uncomfortable for her, after what she’s been through both with Jake and the baby.
I pull gently back from her kiss, though our faces still touch. “Because I love you,” I whisper, sliding a tentative hand beneath her flannel shirt, stroking her softly, and she sighs quietly at my touch, like a breeze moving through leaves. Her body responds. Lily rolls onto her back. Her legs fall open. She reaches for me. I rise above her, slowly lowering myself between her thighs. “Because I would do anything for you,” I say. “And because what you did wasn’t terrible. It was necessary.”
It was necessary.
I just don’t know that everyone would see it that way.
NINA
Idrive to Jake’s office, which is the last place anyone saw him before he went missing. His office is located about thirty minutes from the high school where I teach, on the third floor of a four-story medical building. I leave straight from work, driving to it, not getting there until close to five o’clock.
I circle the lot first. I do so slowly, leaned forward in my seat, searching through the window for Jake’s car. His car isn’t here and, though I’m not surprised, I am disappointed; there was a part of me still holding out hope that it would be.
I park in the lot and walk into the modern glass building, taking a wide, open staircase up to the third floor where Jake’s office is. I follow the signs on the walls, moving down the hall and into the neurology office at the end of it, the one with Jake’s name on the door along with two other physicians’ names.
The receptionist looks briefly up from her computer when I come in. She smiles and asks for my name, as if to find my appointment on the schedule.
I say, “I don’t have an appointment. I’m Nina Hayes, Dr. Hayes’s wife. I was hoping to speak with someone about him.”
Her face changes. She straightens her back, sitting more upright. “Mrs. Hayes. Yes, of course. Just a minute please.” She gets up from her desk. She excuses herself and disappears somewhere that I can’t see, behind a partition. A minute later another woman, a doctor in a white coat and low heels, peeks her head out from behind the same partition. “Are you Mrs. Hayes?” she asks, coming closer, clutching a tablet to her chest, a stethoscope wrapped around the back of her neck. “Of course you are,” she goes on to say. “I recognize you from the picture in Jake’s office.” Her hair falls over her shoulders and down the front lapels of the coat. Her hair is long and ginger and I’m taken aback though it’s silly that I am, but for all the times I’ve thought of Jake at work, I’ve pictured middle-aged colleagues—all of them, in my imagination, inexplicably male—and not a woman this attractive. When Jake mentions colleagues by name, they’re almost always Dr. Winter and Dr. Caddel, and it’s my fault that I never thought to ask more about these people he works with.
“Nina,” I say, extending a hand as she shifts the tablet to one arm to reach out and shake my hand. “I’m here about Jake.”
“Andrea Caddel—Andi,” she says, and I realize my mistake. I’d just assumed theAndythat Jake sometimes mentions was a man and not the short form of Andrea. “Dr. Hayes isn’t here, Mrs. Hayes. I thought someone from the hospital called and spoke to you?” she says.
“Yes,” I say, “they did. I’m sorry. I should have clarified. I know Jake isn’t here, but that’s why I’ve come. I was hoping to speak with someone who would have been working with him on Monday. I’m trying to figure out where he might be. No one has spoken to him since Monday. No one has seen him either.”
She nods. “Yes, of course,” she says, softening. “Let me grab his nurse. We’ve been trying to reach him for days,” she says, as the receptionist returns, slipping back into her chair. “Everyone here is just so worried about him.”
“I know. I appreciate that. I’m worried about him too.”
“You must be completely beside yourself,” she says.
“I am.”
“Have you spoken to the police?”
“Yes. I’ve been to see them and I’ve filed a missing person’s report.”
