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“You didn’t know her before?”
“No.”
“What was it like to live with her?”
“Fine. I guess, though the last couple weeks, she was all uptight. She stopped answering her phone. When I asked who she was avoiding, she said collection agencies, and maybe it was. She would leave for days at a time until I thought she was gone for good, and then she’d come back, out of the blue.”
“Where would she go?”
She shrugs. “She was seeing someone I think,” she says. “Maybe she was staying with him. Is that all you want to know?” she asks. She doesn’t wait for an answer. She starts to walk away and it’s a reflex when I reach out to stop her with a hand on her arm, which she shrugs instantly off.
“Sorry,” I say, pulling my hand back. “No. There’s more. I want to know what you meant back there, at the hospital. When you said that Caitlin hated her parents. What did you mean by that?”
She rolls her eyes, which is not unlike something Sienna would do. “It’s not that hard to understand.”
“No, you’re right. I get that,” I say, talking fast, worried she’ll lose interest in me and try leaving again before the conversation is through. I should have phrased my question another way. “It’s just that it surprised me. From the way Mrs. Beckett talks, she adores Caitlin. I never imagined there would be any animosity between them.”
“Well you imagined wrong.” The woman turns away. But then, almost immediately, she turns back and deadpans, “You’re so worried about someone getting into Caitlin’s room that shouldn’t be there. But what if the danger is already inside?”
It’s not that I think Mrs. Beckett pushed her off the bridge. Of course I don’t think that, and I know that if the police can find Milo Finch, he’ll be arrested.
But still, my breath hitches. My voice gets caught. I say nothing back. I can only watch as this woman turns again and disappears into the night.
A gust of wind comes in just then. The rush of winter air assaults me, the wind agitating my hair before slipping down the collar of my coat, touching skin. I pull my hood up over my head and tug the coat’s zipper higher.
I hear my name shouted from somewhere behind me.
Meghan.
I spin around. There is a crowd of people on the sidewalk behind me. The light at the intersection has just turned green and they cross the street all at once, moving toward me in a pack. I take them in, searching each individual windblown face when Mr. Beckett breaks through the crowds.
My heart pounds and my legs go numb, watching as he moves with confidence as he walks, weaving around people, somehow unsusceptible to the cold.
“I thought that was you, but I wasn’t sure,” he says when he reaches me, his eyes going the same way the woman just went, and I wonder if he can see her, if he knows who she is. “I saw you from back there,” he tells me, making a dismissive gesture to somewhere behind him, on the other side of the intersection, and I wonder: From back where? How long had he been watching me? Did he see that she and I were talking?
He brings his eyes back to mine. He smiles and asks, “Is this how you get home, Meghan?”
I try to keep my voice from shaking, but it does anyway from the cold and nerves. “Yes,” I say, though that’s not true.
He smiles again, clearly pleased. “We can walk together then. I’m headed this way myself and I wouldn’t mind the company.”
I swallow hard, my saliva thickening. “Okay,” I breathe out, my breath visible in the cold, as we turn and move down the sidewalk together, closer than I would like because of the crowds.
“Do you always walk home alone like this?”
“Yes. It’s a short walk. It’s not far and is good exercise.”
“I don’t know how safe it is to walk in this city alone at night anymore,” he says. I keep my gaze on the sidewalk. Still, I feel his eyes on me, searching. “You’ll have to forgive me, Meghan. Once a father, always a father. Raising a daughter, it’s in my nature to be protective. But you have a good head about you and I’m sure that you’re smart, careful, that you stay on busy streets when you’re alone. That said, it sure is cold,” he says, pressing his hands further into his coat pockets.
“You get used to it,” I say, though that’s a lie. You don’t ever get used to cold like this. In the coming days, meteorologists say we’re likely to enter a deep freeze thanks to a polar vortex coming in from the North Pole, with possible overnight lows of negative twenty degrees, and a wind chill that is even more grim, more like thirty or forty degrees below zero. It isn’t atypical for January and Chicagoans are a hardy bunch; brutal temperatures like these rarely bring us to our knees, but that doesn’t mean we like it.
“Do you?” he asks disbelieving. “Because I’ve lived in Chicago my whole life and I’ve never gotten used to cold like this.”
“It helps to keep moving. The faster I walk, the better. It keeps the blood flowing.”
He chuckles. “I like that about you, Meghan. You’re very smart. Very astute. And you always look on the bright side of things.”
We come to Broadway, just a few blocks east of Sheffield, which will take me home.
