8. Vince
VINCE
I came up from the garage with the diamond still in my hand.
The ride up had been quiet, just the hum of the elevator and my own breathing.
I'd been carrying the ring since I found it in her lunch bag hours ago, and it felt wrong there, loose in my palm instead of on her finger where it belonged.
She never took it off. I couldn't remember a single day in nine years she'd gone without it, not once, not even when she was working with the torch and the heat made her hands swell.
I'd tried calling her twice already. No answer.
The elevator doors opened and I stepped out into the penthouse.
"Josie?"
Nothing came back. The place sat there in the dark, just the city lights coming through the windows, painting everything in shades of gray and gold. I hit the switch by the door and the overhead lights came on, bright and ordinary. My chest tightened.
"Jos?"
Still nothing. The silence felt heavier than it should have.
I walked through the living room first, then the kitchen.
Her coffee mug sat by the sink, washed and turned upside down on the dish towel the way she always left it.
The counters were clean. The throw pillows on the couch were straight.
Everything looked exactly the way it always did when I came home late, the kind of order that came from habit, from her moving through the rooms and setting them right without thinking about it.
But she wasn't there.
My pulse kicked up. I went down the hall toward the bedroom, my shoes loud on the hardwood, too loud. She's just out, I told myself. She went to see Rosa. She's at the shop. Except the shop had been closed for hours, and if she was out she would have texted me. She always texted.
I checked the office on the way past, pushing the door open and looking in. Dark. Empty. The desk lamp was off and her sketchbook sat closed on the blotter where she'd left it that morning.
The bathroom. Also empty. Her toothbrush was still in the holder.
That should have been reassuring. It wasn't.
I reached the bedroom and pushed the door open.
Jesus.
Clothes were everywhere. The closet door stood open, empty hangers bunched to one side on the rail.
A scarf lay on the floor by the bed, fallen and forgotten.
The chair near the window had been shoved aside, tilted back against the wall.
Jeans that should have been folded on the shelf were gone, and the shelf itself sat crooked, tilted like she'd grabbed at it hard enough to knock it loose.
And socks. God. Socks all over the floor by the dresser, dark ones and light ones spilling out in a scatter, like someone had ripped the drawer too hard and just walked away.
I stepped inside and my throat went tight.
It didn't make sense. Josie didn't leave things like this.
She didn't leave things at all, not without putting them back where they belonged first. Even when she was dead tired, even when I came home at midnight and found her asleep with her tools still spread across the dining table, she put the tools away before she went to bed.
That was who she was. Careful. Deliberate.
She'd grown up in a house where everything had its place because there wasn't enough room for mess.
This looked like panic.
I stood there in the middle of it and my heartbeat was too loud in my ears.
What the hell happened?
I tried to think. Tried to put it together. She'd been fine this morning. Quiet, maybe, but not upset. Not like this. We'd had coffee together before I left for the office, the same as always, and she'd smiled at me when I kissed her goodbye.
Had she smiled? I replayed it in my head and I couldn't remember. I'd been thinking about the Duvall meeting, about the numbers I needed to go over before I walked into the room, and I hadn't been paying attention.
My stomach dropped.
I pulled my phone out and dialed her number. It went to voicemail.
"Jos, it's me." My voice came out rough. "I'm home. Where are you? Call me back."
I hung up and stared at the screen. She'd call. She had to. Except she hadn't called for the last two hours, not since I'd found the ring, and that wasn't like her. That wasn't like her at all.
I turned around and that was when I saw the drawer.
The small one by the bed, the top drawer of the nightstand on her side, hanging open. I walked over and looked down into it. A notepad sat inside, the kind she used for sketching out designs, and a pen lay across it at an angle. Nothing else.
I stood there staring at it.
I couldn't remember what she kept in there. I'd never looked, never needed to. It was hers, her space, and I didn't go through her things. But it was open now, and something about that felt worse than the clothes. Worse than the socks on the floor.
She'd been looking for something.
Or she'd taken something.
I picked up the diamond and set it down on the nightstand, right next to the open drawer. It sat there catching the light, the facets throwing tiny rainbows across the wood. My hand felt empty without it. Wrong.
The room pressed in on me. I wanted to call her again, wanted to hear her voice, but I knew she wouldn't pick up.
I wanted to believe this was ordinary, that she'd left in a hurry because something had come up, because Rosa needed her or someone from the shop had called. But I couldn't make myself believe it.
Not with the room looking like this. Not with her phone going straight to voicemail.
My chest ached. I rubbed at it with the heel of my hand and it didn't help.
The tracker.
God, I hated that I had it. I'd installed it two years ago after the break-ins at Mercer's, after she'd come home shaking because someone had smashed the front window with a brick and gotten into the back office.
The neighborhood was bad and getting worse, and I couldn't be there.
I was never there. So I'd put a tracker on her car and told myself it was insurance, the same as the cameras I'd had installed at the shop, the same as the man I paid to sit on the door downstairs.
Things I paid for so I didn't have to stand anywhere myself.
She didn't know about it. I'd never told her. It felt like a violation to open the app, like I was about to do something I shouldn't, but I did it anyway because the alternative was worse. The alternative was not knowing.
I pulled my phone back out. My hand was shaking. I opened the app and watched it load, the little spinning circle in the center of the screen taking forever, and my heart hammered the whole time.
Then the map came up and I saw the blue dot.
Rosa's.
Relief hit me so hard I had to sit down on the edge of the bed. She was at Rosa's. She was fine. She was just—upset, maybe. She needed to talk to someone and she'd gone to Rosa because Rosa was the person she went to when something was wrong, when she needed to get out of her own head.
That made sense. That was normal.
Except it wasn't normal to leave the house like this, with clothes on the floor and drawers hanging open. It wasn't normal to ignore my calls.
What did I do?
I didn't know. I went back through the last few days, the last week, trying to find it.
We'd had breakfast together on Sunday. She'd seemed fine.
Quiet, but not angry. Not hurt. She'd made eggs and toast and we'd eaten at the counter, and I'd told her about the Riverside project, about the numbers finally coming together after six months of pushing.
Had she said anything? Had I missed something?
I couldn't remember. Jesus, I couldn't remember.
Monday morning I'd kissed her goodbye and gone to the office.
Monday night I'd worked late. Tuesday I'd had dinner with Gideon and the site manager for the Tenth Street build.
Wednesday—yesterday—I'd been home by eight, and she'd been in the office working on a custom piece, some kind of bracelet, and I'd stood in the doorway and watched her for a minute before I went to take a shower.
She'd looked up and smiled at me. Hadn't she?
Or had I just thought she had?
My throat closed up. I stood and grabbed my jacket off the back of the chair. The penthouse felt too big around me, too quiet, and I needed to get out. I needed to see her. I could go to Rosa's. I could talk to her, find out what was wrong, fix whatever I'd screwed up.
I was good at fixing things. That was what I did. I looked at something broken and I figured out how to make it right again.
I could do that now.
I looked back at the bedroom one more time before I left. The socks on the floor. The diamond sitting on the nightstand next to the open drawer.
And then I turned and walked out, pulling the door shut behind me.
I just needed to see her. That was all.