Chapter Three
“Mommy?”
Talia, in the front passenger’s seat, turns to six-year-old Caleb, buckled into the back.
He looks so small, despite the booster car seat. He’s always been in the bottom height and weight percentiles for his age. He acts young for his age, too, radiating sweet innocence, needing endless reassurance.
His sister, also in the back seat, is the opposite. Hayley is fearless, the kind of kid who went off to kindergarten without a backward glance and was the first in her age group to dive off the board and swim across the deep end at the town pool.
She turned twelve in July, but she looks at least a few years older.
Her shorts and cropped tank bare long tanned limbs and a maturing figure.
An earbud peeks through strands of thick brunette hair that hang past her shoulders.
She appears to be lost in whatever she’s listening to, oblivious to her parents and brother.
“What’s up, buddy?” Talia asks Caleb.
“How many more minutes now?”
She glances back at the map on the dashboard screen. When they left home in Westchester, the ETA to Mulberry Bay had been just before five o’clock. It’s been pushed later every mile they’ve traveled. As of now, they won’t get there till after seven.
She just smiles and says, “It won’t be long, sweetie.”
“But how many minutes?”
“We’re not counting in minutes,” Ben says, behind the wheel. “We’re counting in hours.”
“Wait, what?” Hayley removes one of her earbuds. “Mom said this place is only, like, two hours from home.”
Ben shrugs. “Mom was wrong.”
Talia bites her lip to keep from pointing out that she made the trip in under two hours back in June.
That trip is the reason her ordinarily laid-back husband has been in this dark mood all summer.
This trip was intended to bridge the chasm that’s been growing between them ever since she confessed the truth about where she’d really been that weekend.
“This stinks!” Hayley shouts. “You tricked me!”
“Nobody tricked anybody,” Ben says.
“Mom tricked me! She’s a liar!”
Ben says nothing on the subject. He doesn’t have to. He said it all in June, when she confessed that she hadn’t been away on a yoga retreat, as she’d told him.
No, she was in Mulberry Bay, reunited with Midge Kennedy and Kelly Barrow on the twenty-fifth anniversary of their friend Caroline Winterfield’s prom-night disappearance.
“I’m not a liar, Hayley,” Talia says, then clamps her lips between her teeth to keep from saying anything more.
This definitely isn’t a conversation she feels like having right now. Or ever.
“Yes, you are, Mom! You said we had to leave tonight because there will be too much traffic tomorrow.”
“I’m sure there will be too much traffic tomorrow. A lot more than there is today.”
“That’s hard to imagine,” Ben mutters, eyes on the rearview mirror, right turn signal on.
“I was supposed to sleep over at Chloe’s tonight because I haven’t even seen her all summer because she was at sleepaway camp and then she was on vacation with her family and Mom said I can and then she said I can’t!
” Hayley gasps a breath and rails on, “It’s not fair!
I’m not even going to see her until school starts next week! ”
“Because you’re on vacation with your family,” Ben points out.
“I don’t want to be on vacation! I want to sleep over at Chloe’s!”
“There will be other sleepovers.”
Oh, Ben. Wrong thing to say.
“I don’t care about other sleepovers! I care about this sleepover! This sleepover is epic!”
Ah, Hayley’s word of the summer. Everything—from podcasts to bathing suits to quinoa bowls—can be, according to her, epic.
Except for the things that are not. Like her parents, her brother, and family vacations.
“Chloe’s mom even said I could stay there all weekend instead of going on this stupid trip, and that’s what I want to do, and it isn’t fair that I have absolutely zero say!”
Ben turns toward Talia. She attempts to catch his eye and mouth a warning: Do not engage!
But he’s looking past her, craning to see out her window as he edges the car toward the right lane, saying, “Hayley, you’re being completely unreasonable.”
Wow. Good job, Ben. That’s a perfect thing to say to a twelve-year-old girl at a time like this.
“Unreasonable? I am not! How am I being unreasonable? You’re being unreasonable, and so is Mom! You’re the most unreasonable human beings in the world, ever! Ever!”
“Because we wanted you to spend a fun weekend with us instead of leaving you at Chloe’s for four days?”
“Her mom wants you to leave me there! And so does Chloe!”
“Come on, you don’t want to miss out on seeing Mommy’s hometown.”
Oh yes she does, Talia thinks.
“Yes I do!” Hayley says. “I don’t care about some stupid place in the middle of the stupid Catskills!”
“That’s not a nice thing to say about Mommy’s hometown,” Ben says, eyes on the rearview mirror.
“Don’t call her Mommy! I’m not a baby!”
“Nobody said you’re a baby. Dammit!” He slaps the steering wheel. “What the hell is wrong with people? What happened to common courtesy?”
He gestures at the traffic in the right lane. It’s moving now, rolling slowly past them as they remain at a complete standstill in the left lane behind a red ribbon of taillights.
“Just wait for a truck,” Talia advises. “Truck drivers always let you merge in front of them.”
“They don’t in my experience.”
“They do in mine.”
“That’s because you’re a woman.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Forget it.”
It isn’t like him to make comments like that. He’s Ben—loving husband, lifelong best friend, father of her children, and the one person who believes in her.
Until lately, anyway.
She’s been job hunting ever since she got laid off from her marketing position during a postpandemic corporate downsizing.
Yesterday, yet another company with which she’d had multiple interviews informed her—via what felt like a cut-and-pasted email—that they were moving ahead with a different candidate.
When she told Ben about it, he just sighed and shook his head.
It feels as though the man who’s always encouraging her not to give up has given up on her himself.
“Mommy?” Caleb says.
“Mm-hmm?”
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
She looks at her husband. “Ben—”
“Yeah, I heard. What would you like me to do?”
“Can you hold it for a little bit?” Talia asks Caleb. “Just till we can get to a rest stop?”
“How far is it?”
“About three miles. I saw a sign.”
Hayley unplugs one earbud. “So that means, like, three hours. I hope you’re wearing a Pull-Up, Caleb.”
“I don’t wear Pull-Ups! Pull-Ups are for little kids!”
“Yeah, well . . .” She shrugs and puts in her earbud again.
“Let’s play the alphabet game, Caleb,” Talia suggests.
“We already did that.”
“Then we’ll pick up where we left off. How many things can you spot that start with the letter c?”
“We already did c.”
“Then d.”
“Um . . . dump truck?” he says as Ben attempts to merge into the right lane in front of one that speeds up to close the gap.
“Dammit,” Ben says.
“Dammit starts with d,” Hayley comments.
Talia shoots her a look. “Are you playing?”
“Nope.”
“Daddy? Can you play?” Caleb asks.
“Not right now, buddy. I’m trying to merge.”
Ben tries to merge, Caleb names d words, Hayley sulks, and Talia wonders if she and Ben are ever going to get past this thing.
“Marriage limbo,” her friend Mei-Xing said when they had lunch last week. “That’s what they call these little rough patches with couples like you and Ben.”
“Couples like me and Ben? What does that mean?”
“You know—couples who are going to stick together no matter what because they love each other and they’re good together, aside from whatever caused the problem. As long as the problem isn’t an affair. Then, all bets are off.”
“No one had an affair!”
“That’s what I mean. Ben will get over it.”
It: Talia’s lie.
He was the one who suggested that she go to a yoga retreat, perhaps feeling a little guilty about his own frequent business travel and golf outings.
She was torn. But Caleb, recently diagnosed with a separation anxiety disorder, was so attached to her that his child psychiatrist had been urging her to spend a night or two away from home.
It wasn’t easy to lie to Ben about that trip. To lie to her children. But she did it.
Just as she’d lied all those years ago to the police, to her own mother, and to Caroline’s.
At that age, if your friend asks you to do something—makes you promise not to tell—you do it. You promise.
At that age, your friends mean everything to you.
She turns around to look at Hayley.
She’s glowering, arms folded over her bare, tanned midriff.
“Hey, Hay?”
It’s a thing in their family. Cheerful, fun. Hey, Hay, Talia and Ben say to her, and if she’s in an agreeable mood, she smiles and answers, Hey.
If she’s in a bad mood, Talia and Ben sometimes greet each other with a heads-up: Hayl-storm warning.
They haven’t done that in a while, even though Hayley’s good moods are few and far between. This hasn’t been the summer for good-natured banter.
Either Hayley doesn’t hear her, or she’s ignoring Talia.
She waves at her daughter.
Hayley removes one earbud. “What?”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“The sleepover. I know it meant a lot to you.”
“It did! I haven’t seen Chloe in forever. This was the worst summer of my whole entire life.”
It may not have been the worst of Talia’s—that distinction belongs to the summer of 1999, when Caroline disappeared—but it’s right up there.
“I really am sorry. Let’s just try to make the best of it, okay?”
Hayley rolls her eyes and replaces the earbud.
Talia turns back to Ben—so familiar, and yet not. He works as an advertising sales executive in Manhattan, the type of man who always looks neat and pulled together.
Even back in their college days, Talia teased him about his preppy style and expensive taste in clothes.
Today, he has a hint of beard stubble, and he’s wearing black Wayfarers, a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. They’re spotless white canvas, and the T-shirt and shorts are Brooks Brothers and neatly pressed, because Ben is Ben, even dressed down.
But there’s a stubborn set to his jaw, and she knows it isn’t just because of the traffic.
“What kind of person are you?” he asked her in June, with tears in his eyes, looking at her as if she were a stranger. “What kind of wife does something like this? Lies to her own husband? What kind of parent lies to their children? How could you?”
“I’m sorry,” she said, over and over. “I’m so sorry.”
Ben has yet to accept, or even acknowledge, her apology.
He’s still trying to get his head around the fact that she kept so much of her past from him.
When they met, they lived in the same residence hall and hung out with the same group.
He had a hometown girlfriend, and Talia was focused on the present and the future.
They were just friends—well, occasionally friends with benefits—when he noticed the four letters indelibly inked over Talia’s heart since 1999.
T-I-C-K.
When he asked about the tattoo, she said it was a reminder that the clock is always ticking, that time can run out before you know it.
It’s true.
Tick . . . tick . . .
It’s just not the whole truth.
T-I-C-K: Talia, Imogene, Caroline, and Kelly.
Throughout her childhood and high school days, they were an inseparable quartet: Talia, Imogene “Midge” Kennedy, Caroline Winterfield, and Kelly Barrow. The tattoos were a group Christmas gift, intended to seal their friendship before they graduated and left for college.
But that last summer didn’t work out the way they’d planned. For Caroline, there would be no graduation. No college.
For Caroline, time was quickly running out the June day when she asked her friends, “Can you keep a secret?”
Talia always assumed that things had worked out for Caroline the way she’d planned. She wanted to believe she’d run away, become a mom, maybe a wife. That she had grown up and was growing older like the rest of them.
Now she knows it’s just another lie in the string of them that tethers her to the past, some of which—many of which—were told by her.
Riddled with guilt, haunted by memories, she knows, too, that just because you can keep a secret doesn’t mean you should.