AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I went still. I didn’t want that. I wanted her home.
“She can be with her cousins. Homeschool for a week or two. It might be fun.”
What he didn’t say was that the farm was two miles from the main road, and Craig and Sofia had a guard dog, a great big bullmastiff who was a gentle giant in the house, but scary as hell if you arrived uninvited. It made sense. It was the right thing to do, but I hated the idea.
“I don’t know.”
“I can go and get her right now. She’ll be at Craig’s before lunch. You can video call her there.”
I leaned back and looked up into his face. “What aren’t you telling me? It can’t just be the journalists. You were fine just an hour ago with Grace being at home.”
He hesitated. “There was a guy at the school. Some weird guy. I don’t know, I just think with all this attention it’s possible that we could attract some crazies.”
I turned around so that I could see him properly. “What did he say?”
Andy couldn’t look at me. “That I’m a pervert. That I should be locked up.” He looked sick to his stomach. It hurt me to see him like that. I rested my head against his chest.
“Take her,” I said. “Take her to Craig and Sofia.”
IT WAS THE RIGHT decision, but as soon as Andy left I felt lost. I found my laptop and brought it back to the kitchen table. I made myself coffee and added a large shot of whiskey to my cup, and sugar, and cream. I sat down and opened the laptop. I know my way around social media. I run a Facebook page and Instagram profile for the inn, I prompt guests to leave Tripadvisor and Google reviews, and I log in every few days to post and manage any comments. On Instagram I like to watch baking content, and I follow some of the really good DIY renovation accounts. It’s the kind of thing that Nina and Grace quietly roll their eyes at, but I like it. I’m not on Twitter or Reddit or TikTok, but I live in the world, and I’d have had to completely shut myself off not to be aware of just how toxic some of the online stuff had gotten. Still, what I found that day was on another level.
I started with Julie Bradley’s campaign Facebook page, and I branched out from there. It wasn’t hard to find content. People had embraced our campaign name. All I had to do was enter the hashtag “#WhatHappenedToNina” and I found thousands of videos and comments and reels and shorts and hot takes. The more I looked at the videos and the comments, the more obvious it became that the vast majority of these people, even the ones who posted sad or concerned comments, saw Nina’s disappearance as entertainment. They didn’t try to hide it. Some of them just outright made jokes or memes. The sad ones were performatively sad. The kind of posts that said this story is so tragic, that poor girl and the situation is so triggering for me personally because of my anxiety/ptsd/depression and I’ve really spiraled as a result today but I helped myself by going for a brisk walk and making my favorite matcha smoothie! check out my recipe and follow me on insert-platform-here for more on my mental health journey and like and subscribe! It was sickening. They didn’t see Nina or any of us as human beings, just as characters in a story they could use to sell, sell, sell. And that... that was the least toxic side of things.
According to the internet, I was a slut who charged for her services, I’d had two children with two different men and I had no idea who the fathers were. Or, alternatively, I was a frigid, lesbian, liberal bitch who hated all men and who’d tried to lock up her two beautiful girls. I hated my girls and I abused them, or I loved them too much and desperately tried to keep them safe from dangers that didn’t exist. One anonymous poster claimed to be Nina’s best friend, and she said that Nina had told her that I used to starve the girls because I wanted them to be thin. Another poster said it was well known around Waitsfield that I was into devil worship. Another said there had been a rumor that Nina’s father had been poisoned. That comment, which had been posted under an edited YouTube video of the press conference, had 2,563 likes. I kept searching and scrolling. Once I’d started it was impossible to stop. I watched all of a three-minute video of a girl putting on her makeup to camera. She gave makeup tips while talking her viewers comprehensively through all the conspiracy theories around Nina’s disappearance and ending with a critique of Nina’s makeup in her Instagram photos, pointing out how she could do it better.
I went back to the #WhatHappenedToNina page that Julie had set up and trawled through the comments again. There were thousands of them. Some of them were positive, but most of them weren’t. I came across a comment with a link to a new page, run by someone who called himself BobSpeaksTheTruth. This page had reposted all the toxic YouTube videos that targeted me. There was also a post where “Bob” claimed to have firsthand knowledge that Andy had been a teacher in New Jersey, that he’d been arrested for child molestation in New Jersey, two years before he’d moved to Vermont and married me. According to “Bob,” Andy hadn’t been charged because his victim had killed herself. It was all utter bullshit. Andy had never lived in New Jersey. He hadn’t gone to college and he’d never worked as a teacher. He’d lived in Vermont all his life.
Andy and I met when I bought some pavers from him for the path at the inn. He was selling them off at a great discount because they were left over from some job or another. And then he started coming by, with leftover bits and pieces. He never asked me out, never seemed like he was all that interested in me as anything but a friend. I wondered if maybe he was gay. Then I figured maybe he wasn’t, because he was a great bear of a man and there was nothing polished about him. Then I felt stupid because obviously gay men come in every shape, size, and level of sartorial sophistication. I thought about Andy a lot. I loved him before I knew it. He was always there, gentle, quiet, and supportive. He was the kindest man I’d ever known.
Nina’s father and I met in college, and we were together for exactly four and a half months. When I found out I was pregnant, he called his mother, who flew in from New York City. She was very nice to me. She took me out for lunch at a fancy restaurant and offered me money for an abortion, and when I said I didn’t want that, she flew back to NYC and took her son with her. The next I heard, he was on a foreign exchange program at a university in Paris. I tried calling him once, but his number was disconnected. We have never spoken since, but I heard through an old friend that he got married and lives in Connecticut with his wife and three children. I’ve always assumed that just like I know about him, he knows about me and Nina. Nina knows his name and where he lives, and I made it clear that if she wanted to get in touch with him, I’d help her to do it. She never had any interest in reaching out to him. She said she already had a father, and she didn’t need another one.
Andy and I met when Nina was three, and we got married when she was four. She loved Andy from the beginning. When we got married she was so happy. She asked if she could call him her dad, and he’s always been that to her, always gentle and encouraging and... I don’t know. It’s so hard to find the right words to describe their relationship, how special he was to her in those early years, how his care and love made her bloom. From the beginning Andy always acted like he liked Nina. Even before he loved her. Like, he thought she was a cool little kid. He asked her about her day and built her a little obstacle course with logs and scrap lumber, and then cheered her on when she conquered it. He filled her with confidence. The stuff about Andy was the worst of everything I’d read. They were poisoning something that was pure and beautiful, and it made me sick to my stomach. BobSpeaksTheTruth had gotten his tone just right. Serious, concerned, and with every “fact” he dropped he sounded measured. He couched everything with an “allegedly,” and he came across as someone who could be trusted. People who didn’t know Andy, hell, maybe even people who did know him, some of them would believe this. And once a rumor this ugly started, would we ever be able to set the record straight? Or would this follow us for the rest of our lives? I buried my head in my hands. I hated Bob, whoever he was. I hated all of them. The venal ones and the just plain stupid ones. Everyone who was feeding this crap with their clicks and their attention and their shares.
I stared down at my hands. My nails were short and cracked. My only jewelry was my wedding ring. These hands had built something. A home and a business and a family. We were going to lose the inn. My Tripadvisor and Google reviews were now a cesspool of one-star reviews and links to pornography. Our girls were our life, but the inn was our home. Our safe place. And these bastards, these sad, bored, basement-dwelling bastards with their pathetic conspiracy theories and their desperate need for attention, they were going to destroy it all. But it was worse. Much worse than that. What would this do to Andy? Grace had already seen some of this stuff. What would this do to her?
I stood up and paced the kitchen. I felt like my skin was too small for my body, like I was going to fly apart. My tongue was dry. I poured a straight shot of whiskey, then another. I drank because I wanted to destroy something, and the only thing available was myself. Rufus was watching me. As I looked at him he whined. Not a high-pitched, I-want whine, but a low, worried rumble.
My cell phone rang. It was Andy. I picked it up and answered.
“Hello?”
“She’s not here. She’s not in school.” He sounded panicked. Terrified.
“What?”
“They had me sitting here, outside the fucking principal’s office, and all the time they knew she was missing and they didn’t tell me because they were hoping to magically fucking find her and they knew they wouldn’t. Lee, she didn’t even make it to her first class.”
“Grace?” The world started to shift around me.
“Yes, Grace. Of course. I don’t know what to do. What should I do?”
“Grace,” I said. I think I dropped the phone. I think I must have sat on the floor, or fallen, because that’s where Andy found me later. But I don’t know because I can’t remember. Everything was black.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Matthew
By 9:00 A.M. on Thursday morning, Matthew’s friend in the K-9 unit had already delivered up. He called Matthew on his cell phone. Matthew took the call standing in line at the coffee shop down the street from the station.
