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I never told him my patient was a woman.
I’m short of breath. “Yeah,” I say. “Fine.”
Ben also has Life360, for the nights Sienna stays with him. He can track her location just like I can. He could have watched her leave our apartment. He could have followed her little avatar in real time as she walked the three blocks to Gianna’s.
He would have known that I was alone.
“Meghan?” he asks again.
“Sorry. What?” I ask, a lump in my throat now.
I don’t know what to do. I can’t call the police, because Ben is watching. I couldn’t get to my phone in time. I couldn’t press the numbers without him stopping me.
And what would I say without confessing to what I did?
“What did she want?” he asks, coming closer. I can’t move as Ben’s arms rise to sweep my hair back and out of my eyes before he cradles my face in his hands. He tilts my head back, forcing my gaze up to his dark eyes, and I realize how quickly he could break my neck if he wanted to; he could sever the spinal cord and there would be no time to react or to fight back.
What if she told him that Sienna is not his? What if he already knows?
I try to control the quiver of my voice. “She has a headache actually. She’s not sleeping at Gianna’s after all. She’s coming home.”
His thumb sweeps along my throat, brushing over the trachea until I imagine his hands around my neck, applying pressure, cutting off the airway until I can’t breathe. “That’s too bad,” he says, and from the way he looks at me, I can’t tell if he believes it. “I thought we’d have more time.” Still, he’s not deterred. If anything, he’s more decisive. His hands slide to the small of my back, drawing me swiftly into him as the L passes by again, and I think of all the people on the train watching through the open window as his lips skim over mine, moving down my neck, as he unknots the drawcord on my scrub bottoms.
“Me too,” I say, pulling back, trying to infuse my words with disappointment as his hands fall away from me. “But I think that you should go, Ben. I’d hate for Sienna to come home and see us like this.”
Ben stands, three feet away, cold and unexpressive. His posture straightens and he runs his hands through his hair, his dark eyes holding me captive. He’s positioned between me and the door, and I wonder if I ran, if I could get to it, if I could unlock the dead bolt, turn the handle and get out of the apartment before he grabbed me by the hair or the wrist and yanked me back.
I don’t think I could. The apartment is small, cramped. There is no leeway, no elbow room. I’d have to pass by too close.
And even if I could get out of the apartment, he would catch me somewhere before I could get help or get out of the building. Or he’d shove me down the stairs from behind. No one would find me for a while.
Sienna, despite what I said, isn’t on her way home. For the next ten hours at least, I’m alone.
“No, you’re right,” he says, his voice sedate. “I should go. I don’t want Sienna to get the wrong idea about us.”
He watches me another ten seconds at least before he turns to leave.
After he’s gone, I yank the curtains closed and slide an armchair in front of the door.
All night long, I don’t sleep. I sit on the sofa with a knife in hand, keeping a vigil on the front door.
Twenty-Five
The sun rises. It’s hard to see at first. The curtains are pulled, but I see it in the small break between the dark flax panels: a sliver of early morning sun. I leave my post, my body stiff and exhausted. If I nodded off on the sofa for fifteen minutes that was all; otherwise I didn’t sleep. Instead I spent the night thinking about Ben and Caitlin, imagining them together, wondering if he or she found our old high school yearbooks on the built-in bookcase in the condo’s living room, and if they looked through them together, snuggled in bed maybe, finding pictures of his and my high school life, for research, for reference. There is a picture in the yearbook of Mandy Cho, my doubles partner, and me, taken after we’d won a match, standing with our arms around each other, tired and sweaty but elated. I think back to the night we met for coffee, when Caitlin asked, Do you still talk to anyone else from high school, besides Ben? before asking specifically about Mandy. She and Ben must have seen the picture of Mandy and me in the yearbook.
I go to the window, pulling back on a curtain panel to look outside. The street is quiet, still half-asleep, but the sunlight is a comfort. I tell myself that bad things don’t happen in daylight, but they do.
The last twenty-four hours prey on my mind. I turn away from the window, moving toward the kitchen to make coffee. On the way, my phone dings the arrival of a new text, and I jump, my heart quickening.
Can I see you tonight?
Ben. My pulse races. The text takes me back to last night, to sitting on the sofa beside him when I asked about his girlfriend’s name and, at the time I thought the question was innocuous, just idle conversation if not something teasing, flirty. I was wrong.
Caitlin. I obsess over that one word. I overanalyze the tone of his voice, and what his eyes looked like as he said it, whether they were hostile or if he watched me, curious and knowing, waiting for my reaction.
I step into a pair of shoes and leave the apartment for the basement, where I find my own copy of our senior year high school yearbook and bring it back up. On the sofa with the door locked, I flip through the pages, seeing Ben and me on the Homecoming court and then again at a football game. I leaf through the yearbook to the page devoted to the tennis team where, in the top right corner, Nat Cohen beams, holding a trophy, and it saddens me because, I know now that only a few years later, she would be dead. I turn the page and keep going. The inside covers of the yearbook are scribbled on by teachers and classmates, little slanted notes in various colored ink, like You’re a great friend and Keep in touch. On the back cover is a note from Ben, an inside joke, one only he and I would get, which makes me think how I would have left a note in Ben’s yearbook too, one which was probably something sappy with hearts. I wonder if he and Caitlin read it together and had a good laugh over it.
My phone dings again and I stiffen. I set the yearbook aside, reaching for the phone.
