Chapter 6 #2
If she tried, Abby could remember Makayla’s voice on the phone late at night, the click and hiss of her lighter when she smoked on her balcony, the way she interrupted herself to laugh or to imitate the inflections of people they mutually despised.
She could remember the names of every man Makayla had ever dated, the code they used to reference each one, the elaborate stories they spun about the future until Abby believed every detail.
How could a person perform such relentless caring while running another life beneath it? How did a person create a double?
“All this time,” Abby said, “we were at the same events. The fundraisers, the weekend trips, the Halloween party. Remember the Halloween party?” She turned and met Evan’s eyes for the first time since the number. “Makayla made us do a Scooby-doo group costume.”
“Yes,” said Evan. He did not smile. “She told me once that it was her dream to live in the same building as you. She would find listings and send them to me at two in the morning.”
Abby closed her eyes. The world behind her eyelids was a place where the memories and the messages on the iPad overlapped without the borders.
She wanted to ask Evan what else he knew, what other details he had, but she sensed that the answer would be the same regardless: everything, and nothing, and too much.
She turned from the island and pressed her back to the cabinets, holding herself up because her legs could not be trusted. “If I called her now,” Abby said, “what would she say?”
“She wouldn’t answer,” Evan said, and shrugged in a way that was not defeatist but factual. “I called ten times before I came here. She turned off her phone. She turned off tracking too.”
Abby looked at her own phone, the screen still black, its weight now hostile in her hand. “She never turns off her phone.” Abby’s voice was hollow, as if she and the phone were commiserating about a betrayal neither could explain.
“She did tonight,” Evan said.
Abby’s hand shook as she called Makayla.
The connection went directly to voicemail, and Makayla’s recorded voice, so cheerful and bright, asked her to leave something good.
Abby ended the call before the tone, afraid that even the act of speaking her name into the void would sound too much like forgiveness.
She called Hudson next. It rang four times, stopped, then returned her to the home screen without voicemail.
“He declined it.” Abby stared at the call log as though it might offer a kinder interpretation.
“He saw my name and declined the call.” The certainty was more painful than anything that came before, a final proof against which there could be no appeal.
She drew in a breath, shallow and sharp. “I have to see him. Now.”
Evan stood, keeping the armchair between them. “We don’t have to go there tonight.”
Abby straightened, feeling the bones in her spine lock into place.
“If I stay here, I’ll spend the rest of the night inventing reasons the messages aren’t real.
I’ll start believing that I’m the one who misunderstood, or that you staged all of it to mess with me, or that she’s being blackmailed.
” The options seemed pathetic even as she named them.
“I need to see him, and he needs to look at me and explain.”
She left the phone on the island and walked toward the bedroom, her movements suddenly purposeful because stopping would require her to feel everything at once.
Inside the bedroom, the lamp was still on, the bed still unmade.
The side nearest the door was hers, though she and Hudson had never discussed it.
She opened the closet and pulled down the first jeans she touched, a sweater with a high neck, socks that did not match. She dressed in a rapid, mechanical way.
Her face looked swollen with sleep and bloodless. She thought of a documentary she watched about people who survived disasters, how their faces all wore the same expression at the moment of rescue: not relief, but a kind of blunt, uncomprehending surprise. She saw the the look on her own face now.
When she returned to the living room, Evan had placed the iPad inside a dry canvas bag. He stood near the door with his keys in one hand and watched her put on her coat.
“I’ll drive,” he said as she reached for her own keys. “You’re shaking.”
“I can drive.” Abby closed her fingers around the keys and heard them strike one another inside her fist. The small metallic sound betrayed her more completely than her voice had.
Evan opened the door without arguing, he simply repeated, “I will drive. Let me do this.” His mouth had settled into a grim line and there was a quiet fury behing his eyes that she had never seen there before.
She looked at him then, really seeing him. “Okay,” she said softly. “You drive.”
Abby held the iPad on her lap without opening it.
“Why was it in the basement?” she asked after they passed the Ashford exit sign.
They had driven in silence for almost an hour, each of them lost in the turmoil of their own thoughts.
Her voice had become unnaturally calm, the way it did when panic exhausted itself.
“Why would Makayla leave it somewhere it could keep receiving messages?”
“She hid it there.” Evan checked the mirror before changing lanes. “It was in a box with the Christmas decorations. I went down for a lightbulb and heard it chiming.”
“And you opened it.” Abby looked at his profile, searching for accusation because anger at him would have been easier. “You read her messages.”
“I did.” His hands tightened on the wheel, but he did not defend the choice. “The first one appeared on the lock screen. I had to read the rest. I saw Hudson’s number.”
The rain intensified, drumming against the roof hard enough that they fell silent. Abby watched the wipers clear the windshield and lose it again, an endless sequence of visibility followed by erasure.
Memories began arriving without order. Hudson encouraging her to take Makayla to lunch. Makayla knowing which venue he preferred before Abby told her. Hudson complaining that Makayla monopolized Abby’s weekends, then suggesting trips and appointments that left Abby occupied for entire afternoons.
Each recollection had once meant something ordinary. Now her mind turned it over, searching for the hidden side.
“He said he was with his father on Sunday.” Abby pressed her fingertips against the cool window. “He came home after she canceled breakfast with me.”
Evan’s jaw tightened. “Makayla told me she spent the day preparing slides at the office.”
“Maybe they were working together.” The defense emerged automatically, weak enough that Abby hated herself for offering it. “Hudson’s company uses pharmaceutical suppliers. There could be a reason.”
Evan did not contradict her. His silence left room for Abby to hear how impossible she sounded.
They entered Ashford shortly before two-thirty. The hotel stood beyond the town center, an old brick building renovated into the kind of place Hudson liked because the expense announced itself through quiet service rather than ornament.
Evan slowed as they passed the entrance. “We can stop before we go in.”
“No.” Abby looked through the rain toward the covered drive.
They circled the building and entered the parking garage. Hudson’s black sedan stood on the second level beneath a fluorescent light, rainwater pooled beneath its tires.
Abby made a sound she did not recognize. It was too small to be a sob, more like the involuntary gasp of someone struck in the chest.
Evan stopped the car several spaces away. “Abby, you don’t have to do the rest tonight.”
She stared at the sedan, watching the impossible continue to become physical. “His car only proves he told me the right hotel.”
Evan switched off the engine but did not remove his seat belt. “We can leave if you want to leave.”
Abby opened her door. “Bring the iPad.”
In the empty corridor of the hotel, beside the elevators, Evan opened the message thread and found the room number Makayla had sent Hudson that afternoon.
“Four eighteen,” he said quietly. They just looked at each other. “We can still go home.”
Abby pressed the button for the elevator. “I don’t have a home until I know who’s in that room.”
The doors opened, and they rode to the fourth floor without speaking. The carpeted hallway smelled faintly of furniture polish and someone’s late room-service dinner, ordinary details that offended Abby by existing..
Room 418 stood at the far end. A brass Do Not Disturb tag hung from the handle.
Abby raised her hand but could not make herself knock. Her engagement ring caught the hallway light, the diamond Hudson had chosen with Makayla’s help throwing a fractured reflection onto the door.
Evan waited beside her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him without being touched. He looked at the ring and then away.
Abby knocked, then held her breath as the sound disappeared into the room. Nothing happened at first, but something eventually moved inside, followed by the muted sound of a man’s voice.
Her knees weakened so abruptly that she put one hand against the wall. She knew Hudson’s voice before she could distinguish the words.
The lock disengaged, and Hudson opened the door wearing the white hotel robe, his hair damp and his expression impatient from the interruption. For one suspended second, he looked directly at Abby without understanding why she was there. “What the hell?”
Then his gaze shifted to Evan and the iPad beneath his arm, and then Hudson’s face emptied of everything Abby ever thought she knew.
Behind him, from somewhere inside the room, Makayla said his name.