7. Cameron
— ? —
Cameron
I made it through half of one meeting after Hannah’s call this morning before I gave up pretending to listen.
Her voice kept replaying in my head, flat and careful in a way I’d never heard from her, wrong in a way I couldn’t name, and somewhere between a slide deck and a coffee refill I stood up, said a family matter had come up, and booked the next flight.
I canceled three more days of meetings from the tarmac and didn’t explain to anyone. The drive home from LAX takes forever.
Every red light is an eternity. I sit there with my hands on the wheel, rehearsing what I’m going to say, muttering the words out loud like a crazy person because I need to get them right.
“I know I’ve been distracted. I know I missed the anniversary. I’m going to do better, Hannah. I swear.”
The light turns green. I accelerate, then brake almost immediately for traffic.
“I should have defended you in that interview. I don’t know why I didn’t. I was tired and I said stupid things and I’ll spend the rest of my life making it up to you.”
I check my phone at the next light. Nothing. No response to the text I sent from the tarmac: Hey, landed. Coming home. Can we talk? Or the one from baggage claim: Almost home. I love you. Both just sitting there, unanswered.
She was strange on the phone this morning, clipped in a way I chalked up to leftover hurt, and I figured I’d come home and apologize properly and we’d move on like we always do.
I have a plan. Flowers tomorrow. Dinner at that restaurant she loves, the one with the rooftop and the string lights. Maybe a weekend away, somewhere we can reconnect without the distractions of work and phones and the constant pressure of my life.
Another red light. I check my phone again. Still nothing.
“I love you,” I say out loud, practicing. “I know I don’t show it enough. But I love you, Hannah. You’re my whole world.”
The words sound hollow even to me. When was the last time I actually said them and meant them, really meant them, instead of tossing them out like a verbal signature at the end of a call?
Her car isn’t in the garage when the door rumbles up, and I tell myself she’s at Summer’s, girls’ night, wine and bad reality television and phones going ignored on the couch. The explanation lasts exactly as long as it takes me to reach the front door.
The house is dark.
I notice it immediately. No lights in the windows, no glow from the kitchen where Hannah usually waits up for me with a book and a cup of tea. Just darkness, deep and complete, like the house has been empty for hours.
The key turns in the lock and I push the door open, reaching for the light switch.
“Hannah?”
My voice echoes off the walls. The silence is wrong. Too complete, too empty, like the house is holding its breath.
“Babe? You here?”
I check the living room first. Her reading chair sits empty, the blanket she always wraps herself in folded neatly over the arm. No book on the side table. No half-empty mug of tea.
The kitchen next. The dishes are done, the counters wiped clean, everything in its place.
Too clean. Hannah always leaves a trail: a coffee cup by the sink, her keys in a different spot every day, notes to herself stuck to the fridge.
The kitchen looks staged, like a photo from a magazine, and the wrongness of it makes my chest tight.
I take the stairs at a run.
The bedroom door is open. I flip on the light and stop cold.
Her side of the closet is half-empty. Hangers pushed aside, gaps where her favorite sweaters used to hang, empty spaces like missing teeth.
The little ceramic dish on her dresser where she keeps her jewelry is bare, the drawer beneath it pulled open and hollow.
Her bathroom counter is cleared. Her toothbrush is gone from the holder.
The bed is made, corners tucked tight the way she does them when she’s thinking too hard, and her nightstand drawer hangs open, cleaned out.
Her red dress from Paris is still here, hanging alone in the gap where her clothes used to be, and I don’t know what it means that she left it.
All I know is she didn’t do this in a rush.
She packed while I was in meetings, and I never felt a thing.
I stand in the bathroom doorway staring at the single toothbrush left behind, mine, bright blue and suddenly obscene in its solitude.
We used to brush our teeth together every night, bumping elbows at the sink, making faces at each other in the mirror.
When did we stop doing that? When did the small rituals that held us together become things I did alone?
And on the kitchen counter, where she used to leave me notes about groceries or dinner plans or little love messages I’d find when she was already asleep: a single piece of paper. Her key. Her wedding ring.
I pick up the note with hands that have started to shake.
Eleven words. Five years of marriage, and she needed eleven words to end it.
They don’t make sense. I read them again. Again.
She can’t do this anymore. She can’t do what anymore? Our marriage? Our life? Me?
Don’t look for me.
I call her. Voicemail. I call again, pacing the kitchen, and when it clicks over I leave a message, my voice cracking on every other word.
“Hannah. Babe. I just got home and you’re not here and your stuff is gone and I don’t understand what’s happening. Please call me. Please. I just need to hear your voice. I need to know you’re okay.”
I hang up. Call again. Voicemail again.
“Hannah, I’m sorry. Whatever I did, I’m sorry. The interview, the anniversary, all of it. Just please, please call me back. I’m losing my mind here. I love you. Please.”
I try Karla’s number. Hannah’s mother, three states away. The phone rings and rings and eventually clicks to a generic voicemail I don’t bother leaving a message on.
I call Summer. She picks up on the second ring.
“Where is she?” The words come out desperate, cracked. “Summer, please, I just need to know she’s safe-”
“Not telling you.”
“Summer-”
“She’s safe. That’s all you get.”
“Please. Just tell me where she is. I need to talk to her, I need to explain-”
“Explain what?” Summer laughs, harsh and bitter. “You humiliated her on national television, Cameron. You made her look stupid in front of the whole world. You took the things she trusted you with and turned them into entertainment. And now you want to know if she’s safe?”
“I didn’t mean-”
“Save it. Hannah’s done. And frankly, I’m amazed it took her this long.”
She hangs up.
I stand in the kitchen holding my phone, staring at the blank screen, and the panic has hardened into a cold, desperate weight in my chest.
I drive to Summer’s building anyway. The doorman won’t let me up. I try buzzing her apartment and nobody answers. I stand on the sidewalk looking up at the windows, trying to figure out which one is hers, which one has Hannah behind it, and I feel like a crazy person but I can’t make myself leave.
Eventually a security guard asks me to move along, and I do, because causing a scene won’t help anything.
I sit in my car across the street instead, watching the building.
A light goes out on the fourth floor and I stare at the dark window wondering if it’s hers, if she’s standing behind the glass watching me the way I’m watching her, if she can see me gripping the steering wheel of a car parked outside a building I’m not allowed into.
Probably not. Probably she’s asleep, or crying, or telling Summer every terrible thing I’ve ever done while I sit here accomplishing nothing.
I give it another twenty minutes before the guard circles back and taps my window, politely this time, and I put the car in drive because there’s no version of tonight where I win.
I drive to hotels. The big chain near the office. The boutique place she liked by the park. The one downtown where we stayed while the kitchen was being renovated and she said she felt like we were having an affair in our own city.
Nothing. Her car isn’t at any of them.
I take the surface streets home, driving slow, scanning every parking lot and side street.
At one in the morning the city is quiet, just me and the streetlights and the occasional cab.
I brake for every silver sedan I see, craning my neck to check the plates, and every time it’s not her car I feel the panic tighten another notch.
It starts to rain around two. I pull into the lot of another hotel, one I forgot about, and walk through the rows with water streaming down my face.
My suit is soaked through by the time I give up.
I sit in my car with the heater blasting and water pooling on the leather seats and I don’t know what to do next.
At four in the morning, I go to the hospital.
I know it’s insane. I know she’s probably fine, probably asleep in Summer’s guest room, but I can’t shake the image of her hurt somewhere, alone, and I have to be sure.
The emergency room is fluorescent-bright and smells like antiseptic and fear.
A woman with a crying toddler. An old man clutching his arm.
A teenager with blood on his shirt, scrolling through his phone like he’s bored.
All of them waiting for news, good or bad, and I’m just another desperate face in a room full of them.
“Hannah Jasper?” The receptionist checks her computer and shakes her head. “No one by that name has been admitted.”
“Are you sure? Can you check again?”
“Sir, I’m sure. We don’t have anyone by that name.”
Thank God. Thank God.
I sit in the waiting room for a while anyway, watching the doors like she might walk through them, until a nurse asks if I need help and I realize I’m just taking up space. I mumble an apology and leave.
I sit in my car in the hospital parking lot as the sun comes up, painting the sky pink and gold over a city that doesn’t know my life is falling apart. I try her one more time. Voicemail. I don’t leave a message this time. I’ve left enough messages. She knows I’m looking.
The sun keeps rising anyway. Joggers appear on the sidewalk across from the hospital, a garbage truck grinds through its route, a man in scrubs walks out yawning into the pink light, and the world starts its day like nothing is wrong, like my wife hasn’t vanished, like everything I care about isn’t sitting unread on a phone I can’t reach.
I watch a woman in the next row unlock her car, balancing a coffee and a phone call and a laugh at whatever the person on the other end just said, and I wonder if Hannah is laughing right now, somewhere.
If leaving me has made her lighter. The thought sits in my chest like a stone all the way to the airport.
At dawn, I drive to the airport and book a flight to Karla’s town, because if Hannah ran anywhere, she ran home to her mother.
The flight is three hours of staring at the seatback in front of me, running through every conversation we’ve had in the last month, trying to figure out where it went wrong. The anniversary I missed. The interview. The phone call where I hung up on her.
Tonight, Hannah. I promise. I love you.
I hung up on her. She was trying to tell me something, something about the interview, and I hung up because I was tired and I had meetings and I couldn’t spare five minutes for my own wife.
A hundred small betrayals I told myself didn’t matter.
The flight attendant asks if I’m okay. I realize I’m still wearing yesterday’s suit, wrinkled and rain-stained. I realize I’m crying.