Chapter 5 #3
Abby’s mind jumped to the worst possible explanation with the speed of someone trained by loss—an accident, a hospital, the kind of calamity that came with a knock at the door because a call wasn’t enough.
A flicker of fear started deep in her belly and in her mind’s imagination she saw Makayla’s face, frowning at some unreadable text while she drove through the slicing rain.
Another image, overlaid on the first: the headlights on rain-slick streets, the telescoping blur of traffic after midnight.
Then another; the headlights of a car coming toward her.
She stepped into slippers, shrugged on a robe, and padded to the living room, trying to remember if she’d left the deadbolt locked.
The rain outside had picked up, the sound of it turning the courtyard into a spillway.
For a second, she hesitated by the door, the phone pressed to her chest, and tried to calm her breathing.
Then she drew herself up, forced her hand not to shake, and unlocked the first bolt.
The security screen glowed blue in the darkness.
Evan’s face was in the frame, hair plastered flat and beads of water running down onto his collar.
He looked impossibly pale, the color of someone who’d had a terrible shock, and his eyes darted back and forth as if searching the lobby for an escape route.
He was wearing a hooded jacket, but the fabric was too thin for rain like this.
For a moment, Abby didn’t recognize him; in the harsh light, he looked years older, all the soft lines of his face carved into grief.
She pressed the intercom button and tried to sound calm. “Evan? What are you—what’s wrong?”
“Please,” he said, voice shredded by static and something that sounded like fear. “Can you let me up?”
Abby buzzed the door, then waited just inside the entryway, arms pulled tight across her chest, half expecting to wake up and find this was only a nightmare.
The silence between the two doors was profound, a vacuum sealed around whatever was about to happen.
She checked her phone again. Nothing from Makayla, nothing from Hudson.
The elevator made its slow, whining ascent, the kind of mechanical labor that always drove Hudson crazy.
She counted the floors as it climbed, her pulse ticking in her fingertips.
The doors slid open and Evan stepped out, moving with the slow, uncertain gait of someone who’d just learned how to walk.
He was holding something clutched to his chest, wrapped inside his coat—a folder, or a book, or maybe a package.
Abby’s mind, in its terror, briefly considered that he might be bringing her some last earthly possession of Makayla’s.
He stopped just outside the elevator, body angled as if bracing himself for a blow. “Abby,” he said, voice stripped of everything but need. “I’m so sorry to wake you. I’m sorry to be here at all, actually.”
She looked past him, reflexively checking the hallway for police, for neighbors, for any sign of an emergency with the weight of an institution behind it.
There was nothing. “What happened?” she said, and her voice was as thin as tissue paper.
“Is Makayla—did something happen to Makayla?” Her throat seized when she said the name.
Evan closed his eyes, water trailing down his nose, and stayed silent just long enough to make her skin crawl.
When he opened them, the look in his eyes was not panic, not horror, but a kind of exhaustion she’d only ever seen in people who had already lived through the worst. He stepped forward, then thought better of it, and stopped a safe distance away.
Abby wanted him to say, “She’s fine, Abby, I’m overreacting, it was a false alarm.
” Instead, he shook his head and looked down at what he was holding—an old iPad, Makayla’s, she could tell by the sticker of a cartoon logo from her company on the back—then up at Abby with an apology almost as heartbreaking as grief itself.
“There was no trip,” he began, the words catching in his throat. “She lied. Makayla wasn’t in Cleveland. She never got on the plane.”
Abby felt herself tilt, unmoored, as if the floor had shifted half an inch to the left. “What are you talking about? She said?—”
“I know. I know she did.” Evan pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, then held out the iPad.
“I found this. It was shoved in the back of the closet in the basement. I went down to get a lightbulb and I head the pinging. I shouldn’t have looked— or, well, maybe I should have, but in any case I did and now I can’t undo it. Abby, I’m so sorry.”
“What’s wrong? You’re scaring me.” She stared at the iPad as if it were a bomb, expecting it to vibrate or light up with some final, damning text. A dozen half-formed explanations jostled in her mind, but none of them made sense. “Just tell me what’s wrong,” she said, her voice raw. “Please.”
Evan lowered the iPad and spoke so quietly she had to lean forward to hear. “Makayla and Hudson are having an affair.”