AllFreeNovel
Share Us
You fucking bitch.
It doesn’t take long. Less than a minute.
“Ma’am?” the receptionist asks. I look sharply up. My heart pounds and I think that she is going to tell me that he’s on his way. I set the magazine aside and press myself from the chair to go to her. “I’m sorry,” she says, setting the phone back in its cradle, “but as it turns out, our marketing department created that brochure. That man doesn’t actually work here. We don’t know who it is.”
I blink once, twice and then three times.
“I... I don’t understand,” I say, stammering. “His picture is on your brochure.”
“It’s a stock photo,” she says, and though she doesn’t mean for them to, her words come as a punch to the gut.
A stock photo. I feel physically sick.
Stock photography. Images bought online, which means one of two things: that Nat is married to a model or, more likely, that every single picture on Nat’s Facebook page was doctored using stock photos of this same man. Microstock images are dirt cheap. You can buy them for something like a dollar each, and then make alterations on programs like Photoshop to make it look like he’s in Punta Cana or riding the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier. She can insert herself into them, make believe they’re husband and wife. She must have found dozens of photos of this same man to use, on some website like Shutterstock.
Heaven on Earth.
On top of the world.
Why would she do this? Why would she pretend to be married to this man?
The receptionist slides the brochure across the desk to me and I spin it around so that I’m looking into this man’s eyes, the world around me growing dim. I tune everything else out—the ding of the elevator, footsteps, a cough—and focus on him and only him. His eyes are seductive, a strange but beautiful combination of green and brown with flecks of gold. The color of them is one thing, but it’s that undeniable effect that his eyes are watching me, following me no matter which angle I look from. And then there is his smile, a simper really, smug but also incredibly sexy, and I’d bet my life that the day I first saw him on Nat’s Facebook page isn’t the first time I’ve ever seen him. He looked familiar even then, though I couldn’t place him at the time, and now I think what happened was that I saw him on an ad for the law firm or for something else. Because he’s a model. He’s not her husband.
“Are you okay, ma’am?” the receptionist asks, and I realize that I’ve lost all sense of time. I wonder how long I’ve been standing here staring at the brochure, my jaw slack, speechless. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
She is smiling when I lift my gaze to hers, a polite albeit uncomfortable smile, and when I look down at the brochure again I see what I failed to see before, how his placement, the way he sits, the way his hands are positioned and the angle of his head, are an exact duplicate of Nat’s cover photo on Facebook, except that Nat herself—her arms thrown around his shoulders from behind, hands clasped across his chest to show off her dazzling wedding ring, chin resting on his shoulder and eyes that gaze sideways, are gone. Excised.
Because they were never there to begin with.
“No. No thank you.” I stagger away from the desk, taking the brochure with me. I don’t know what I’ll do with it. Finding this man would serve no purpose because he is not Declan. Declan is someone else.
The cold air outside is an insult.
I weave my way around people back to the train. I feel lost, hopeless, bemused.
It’s as I’m riding the train back home that an idea comes to me. I find Emily Miller on Facebook. Emily Miller is an old high school friend, one Nat said she still talks to from time to time. With a name like that—and not knowing her married name—it’s not easy, but I scroll through a myriad of Emily Miller’s Facebook profiles with dwindling hope until I find the right one: Emily Miller Cease. She lives in Portland now. Her page is private, but I can see that she and I have mutual friends from high school. I send her a friend request but also a direct message, saying,
Hi Emily, It’s Meghan from high school. I’m trying to find Nat Cohen and was wondering if you might have her phone number or know another way to get in touch? Please call.
I leave her with my phone number.
Later that night my phone rings, the number a 971 area code. I swipe to answer, pressing the phone to my ear. “Hello?” I ask.
“Meghan. Hi. It’s Emily Cease,” she says, and then, “Emily Miller. From high school.”
“Emily. Hi. Thank you so much for calling me back. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.” Emily and I weren’t great friends in school, but we didn’t dislike each other. We just didn’t know each other well. We didn’t have many classes together or things in common or a reason to be friends. She was more into theater than sports, and I remember how incredible she was, how she had aspirations of being on Broadway one day. I wonder how that panned out.
Under different circumstances I might ask. But instead I get right to the point. “I’m trying to get in touch with Nat Cohen. You two were so close in high school, I’m hoping you might have her number.”
There’s a beat of silence.
When she speaks, her voice is solemn. Grave.
“I thought you knew. I thought everyone knew.”
My world is spinning already but I don’t know why. I lower myself to a chair, waiting for the bottom to fall out. “Knew what?”
“Nat is dead. She died nineteen years ago, Meghan. She and her whole family did.”
