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“Don’t be an asshole,” Reed says, before returning to his call.
I stare at my phone, willing Hannah to answer my text. When she doesn’t, I can’t resist calling her. Unfortunately, though, my call goes straight to voicemail.
“Hey, Hannah, it’s me. I’m wondering how therapy went. Call me right away, please. I’m worried about you. I love you.”
Reed ends his call and scowls at me. “You called her? Come on, man.”
“I think her phone is turned off.” I grimace as my stomach twists with knots.
“She’d have to turn it off if she’s on a flight,” Reed says.
“True.” I shift in my chair. I must admit it’s possible Hannah went straight from therapy to the airport, but my gut tells me she wouldn’t do that without calling me first.
“Is it possible to hack a phone when it’s been turned off?” Reed asks. “If so, hack her and check her location, and all your questions will be answered, my friend.”
I roll my eyes. “Yes, it’d be possible for me to turn on her phone remotely to hack her, since I’ve already got access,” I say. “But if I pull that shit, then I won’t be able to look her in the eyes and say, ‘I only hacked you that one time, once in the beginning, and I swear that will be the one and only time.’”
Reed shrugs. “Or you could not look her in the eyes when you tell her that.”
“Jesus Christ. Are you a psychopath?”
Reed laughs. “I look at Violet’s location all the time without telling her. And I know for a fact Josh and Kat set it up so they can see each other’s locations anytime they want.”
“You pay your sister’s phone bill. She’s on your plan. That’s not the same thing as hacking my girlfriend. And Josh and Kat gave each other consensual access to their locations. That’s not the same thing as me remotely turning Hannah’s phone on and accessing that information without her permission. Do you truly not understand that?”
“Of course, I do. All I’m saying is it’d be a minor infraction to avoid the major bummer of you flying to Seattle to surprise Hannah, if it turns out she’s sitting on a flight to LA to surprise you.”
I process his logic. Weigh the pros and cons and ethics of the situation. And finally say, “There’s actually a normal, mortal way to gather the same information that won’t breach Hannah’s trust and privacy.” I hold up my phone and smile. “I’ll call Hannah’s sister. Hannah would never fly to LA without telling her she left Seattle. In fact, if Hannah is on a flight right now, then Maddy probably took her to the airport.” I snicker. “And lucky for me, Maddy’s a terrible liar.”
The waitress appears again, this time with our check, and Reed interacts with her. While he’s handling the bill, I place the call to Maddy.
“Hello, Henn.”
“Hi, Maddy. Have you heard from Hannah recently?”
“I was just about to call you to ask the same question. She hasn’t answered my texts all afternoon and my call went straight to voicemail.”
My heart slams into my toes. “Same here.” Every nerve ending in my body spasms with acute worry. “Do you think maybe she caught a flight to LA on a whim?”
“She’d never do that without telling me. Plus, she’s got my mom’s car today and promised to pick her up from work at six. We’re doing pizza and a movie at my mom’s place tonight.”
“She had a therapy session at ten and promised to call me after that. But it’s been crickets.”
Maddy pauses. “Maybe she went to see a movie after therapy? She does that sometimes, if the session was brutal.”
I feel two diametrically opposed emotions at once: relief that Maddy’s offering an explanation that would mean Hannah is safe and sound, but also panic that Hannah’s therapy session, which was all about me and what I did, might have been brutal for her.
“That would explain our calls going straight to voicemail,” Maddy adds. “If Hannah’s in a movie, she would have turned off her phone.”
“Yeah, that makes sense. I was thinking maybe she went on a little tour of Henn and Hannah’s Seattle after her appointment. Like, maybe she decided to visit all the places she and I went during our first week together and remember The Happier Times. But a movie actually makes a whole lot more sense than that.”
“A little tour like that would make sense, too. That’d be a very main-character-having-deep-and-nostalgic-thoughts kind of thing for her to do. She loves that kind of thing.”
We both chuckle. “Yeah,” I say, “if there’s one thing Hannah Banana loves, it’s being the main character in her movie.”
“Yes, she does.”
I exhale a long breath of relief. “So, I take it you haven’t received a distress signal from her, right? You’ve checked to make sure of that?” Months ago, during dinner with the three Milliken women, our foursome got to talking about our mutual obsession with all things true crime. That conversation led to one about how terrifying it is that monsters walk among us, undetected. Which then led to me helping all three women load a clever, one-touch distress signal onto their phones—an app that looks like a calculator on its face, but when opened, sends an instant text message to the people selected, as well as a pinpoint location and instructions to send help. In this case, Hannah’s distress-signal text would go to the other two women and me.
