Chapter 52
Chapter Fifty-Two
Jack
She hadn't answered all day.
I'd told myself it was nothing—busy shift, phone in a locker, the usual unreachability of a surgeon on a full day. I said it three times and believed it less every time. By six o’clock, I was in the kitchen making Lily’s dinner and checking my phone every four minutes as if I could force a notification to appear.
"You keep doing that," Lily said from the table.
"Doing what?"
"The phone thing." She didn't look up from her coloring. "You've done it five times since we got home."
"I'm waiting on a work thing."
She looked up. She had Cassie’s eyes—direct and far too perceptive for a five-year-old. Sure you are, the eyes said.
I put dinner on the table, sat down, and ate. I didn't check my phone. For a while, at least, but the temptation was too strong to resist.
I checked it again and… nothing.
I called Bellows after the dishes. He picked up on the third ring.
"I need a favor," I said.
"The kid?"
"Just for an hour. Maybe two. Something’s come up."
A long pause. I could hear his television in the background. "Bring her over," he said.
I helped Lily into her jacket. She stood in the hallway, watching me the way she did when she was deciding whether to ask a hard question.
"Is it Maddie?" she asked.
I didn't answer. She just kept looking at me, steady and quiet. I realized then that I wasn't just hiding things from Maddie; I was trying to hide them from a child who lived in the same house. It wasn't working.
"I'll be back in a bit," I said. "Bellows is going to hang out with you for a while."
She thought about that for a second. Then she picked up Gerald from the counter and tucked him under her arm. "Tell her we want her on Friday," she said. It was matter-of-fact, as if the solution to every complicated adult problem was just to state the obvious.
I crouched down so I was eye-level with her.
"Yeah," I said. "I will."
I drove her to Bellows’. He opened the door in his cardigan, looked at Lily, then at me, and said absolutely nothing.
It was the most Bellows thing he could have done.
Lily walked past him into the house like she’d been living there for years.
At the door, she turned back and looked at me one last time.
"Gerald says good luck," she said.
I turned the car toward Maddie’s.
Her car wasn’t there. The lights were off. I stood on the pavement, looking up at the dark windows, and felt something cold in my chest. It was a feeling I recognized from a dry shack in North Dakota; the specific kind of silence that meant something had gone wrong.
I called her. Voicemail.
I called again. Same thing.
I drove to the hospital.
The woman at the front desk recognized me—I’d been there enough for Lily’s checkups—and she looked up the log without making a scene. Dr. Clarke had signed out at seven-fifteen. Her car had cleared the lot a few minutes later.
"Did anyone see which way she went?"
She looked uncertain. "Dr. Reyes might know. They were talking in the parking lot."
Reyes was easy to find—still in scrubs, coming out of an elevator with a chart. When I said Maddie’s name, her face shifted. It was the look of someone deciding how much of the truth to tell a stranger.
"She seemed off today," Reyes said. "I asked if she was okay as she was leaving. She told me she just needed a drive to clear her head."
I thanked her and walked back to my car.
A drive. To clear her head.
I sat behind the wheel and thought about Maddie the way I thought about problems I needed to solve: systematically, working outward from what I knew. She wasn't at home. She wasn't at the hospital. She was driving, alone, at night.
She'd been avoiding my calls all day. Since Thursday, since before Thursday. Since—
I thought about Tuesday.
About the yard behind the garage, my phone call, and the way her face had done something quick and careful when she'd seen the bruise.
I thought about what she knew. What she'd seen. What it would have looked like from the outside.
Oh no.
I started the car.
I drove without being entirely sure where I was going, just moving, following some instinct that was pulling me somewhere specific. Past the hospital, leaving Cedar Falls behind, the streets getting narrower and more familiar. I drove past Calloway Street, then kept going.
I turned into the corner where we used to live and there she was.
Her car, parked outside the old building. The building with the gap in the window frame and the radiator that had never worked and the kitchen floor where everything had happened. She was just sitting there, engine off, swallowed by the dark
I pulled up behind her.
I sat for a moment, looking at the back of her head through the windscreen. The set of her shoulders, the way she was very still.
I turned off the ignition, took a breath, and stepped out into the cold air.