Chapter 2
It was one fifteen when I left the school—a half hour after Jack Mayfield had slammed through the exit doors.
I crossed the parking lot, squeezing the banker’s box filled with books and framed photos, careful to peek around one side to watch for careless student drivers backing out without looking.
If I’d known what my day held in store, I wouldn’t have worn a pencil skirt, too tight around the knees for quick walking.
When my ankle turned, I nearly dropped everything.
“Shit,” I said. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”
I stifled a sob, focusing on the twinge in my ankle. I couldn’t break down here. Pain was better than tears. Indignation was even better. I should be screaming. No one was listening to my concerns for our students.
I hobbled in search of my parked car, scanning the parking lot to see how many people had witnessed my stumble. Then I saw him. Standing near the bumper of his black car, arms crossed over his tight polo shirt, eyes hidden behind expensive-looking aviator sunglasses.
“Hey,” he said from fifty feet away. “You owe me the rest of that conversation.”
It felt wrong to say nothing, but any reply would embolden him. Keep walking.
“Bitch,” he called out. “You talked to my daughter for months. You know something.”
I kept my eyes focused on my silver hatchback, only three cars away. Over my shoulder I started to say, “I’m sorry—”
But then I saw him take a step, shouting, “You think an apology brings my daughter back?”
I opened the driver’s door, shoved my boxes of office stuff onto the passenger seat, and pulled my door shut, locking it before I reached into my purse for my antismoking tablets.
I hadn’t had a cigarette in sixteen months, but the pills did triple duty: anticraving, antianxiety, and antihypertension.
Just when I was about to step on the gas, something slammed against the car’s thin metal roof. I shrieked. Jack Mayfield’s face appeared in my window, mouth open in a ragged, wailing expression of unprocessed grief. He motioned for me to roll down the window.
“No,” I shouted through the glass. “Step away. Please.”
“You’re not even trying to help!”
I went back to college at the age of twenty-seven. I neglected my own child for nine years. In grad school, I took on a ridiculous amount of debt. All because I wanted to help. But not at this moment. Not with that raging face so close.
He ordered, “Roll down your fucking window!”
Sidney’s father drummed his fist twice more against the car’s roof, delivering a final pound on the hood even as I backed out. I kept going, turning the wheel fast, knowing I was doing a shitty job checking my blind spot.
I couldn’t focus on the parking lot ahead. I didn’t want him following me or knowing where I lived. He’d have easy access to my old address, but not the new one we’d just moved to, a week ago.
When a slow-moving police cruiser came toward me from the direction of the parking lot’s main entrance, I jammed on the brake and waved my hand. The officer stopped and rolled down his window.
“There’s a man,” I said breathlessly once I had my window down, too focused on the rearview mirror to make eye contact. “He was threatening me.”
“Abby?”
I turned. “Robert?”
“You don’t sound thrilled to see me.” He half grunted, half laughed, the way he used to when he was feeling shy. “Someone bothering you?”
I gestured back toward the parking lot. “Jack Mayfield. Sidney’s father. Big guy next to a black—what do you call it?—maybe a BMW.”
“Oh,” Robert said. As usual, he sounded relaxed. “I know Jack. And that’s a Bentley.”
We both watched as Jack Mayfield brought a phone up to his ear. I wondered who he was calling. Board president. Chief of police. Maybe one of his famously well-connected siblings. The Mayfields co-owned a major baseball team and a trendy bar popular among Chicago aldermen.
“We’ll let him finish,” Robert said. As he’d told me more than once, a lot of good policing was just giving people time to come to their senses.
That aura of strong calm was the first thing that attracted me to Robert. It was the opposite of what I’d grown up with after my mother died and my father remarried. A house filled with bickering and cruelty.
“Your day going all right?” I asked him, trying not to sound as jittery as I felt.
“Only started. I’m on until nine.”
Without taking his eyes off Jack, he asked, “Where’s Benjamin, anyway?”
“He only had two exams today. I signed a slip to let him leave early.”
“I’m just asking because I wouldn’t want him wandering the parking lot while this guy is having a temper tantrum. He might want to take it out on the counselor’s kid.”
“You’re right,” I said, taking a deep breath, reminding myself that Robert wasn’t being nosy, just cautious. “Benjamin took his bike. He should be at the pool by now.”
“Public pool’s open already? I thought they opened Memorial Day weekend.”
“No, private. The Dartmoor.” Fancy names.
There are no moors in our part of Illinois.
No summits either. “It opened three weeks ago. He goes there as a guest. And yes, the Mayfields belong.” Everyone belongs, I resisted adding, except people like Robert, Benjamin, and me.
“But I’m not worried about Benj while he’s there. ”
“And how’s he taking all of this?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t find him at lunch. But I don’t think he knew Sidney very well.”
“Summit’s small. Two hundred students, tops?”
“Hundred sixty.”
“Probably only twenty girls in Benjamin’s grade, then.”
“Sidney was a year above Benjamin. But thanks for the math lesson.”
“You’re welcome.”
Both of us kept watching Jack Mayfield.
A pressure had been building in my head all day, and now I heard the first telltale ringing in my ears.
My childhood had infected me with a dizzying distaste for crime scenes—the yellow tape and spinning lights, the endless questions.
That volatile past felt closer at times like this.
My finances were a mess. My employment was in jeopardy.
And yet, who could think about money? We’d just lost a student. An incredible girl.
Smart, pretty, popular Sidney Mayfield, who thought she might become a psych major at her future college, either Vassar or Brown, hopefully. Which would you pick?
Sidney, who wanted to know more about helping people, the marginalized and misunderstood ones most of all—and of course, friends, too. Izzy Scarlatti, for starters. And some person Izzy was dating. The additional problem being: Izzy was dating more than one person.
How to help.
Asking for a friend.
Sidney was aware of the therapeutic cliché—that someone will ask, pretending it’s for a friend. But in Sidney’s case, she really was asking for other people. She had to be. Or I’d misunderstood her completely.
Despite that disturbing thought, I was starting to feel a little calmer. Maybe it was the deep breaths I kept taking, waiting for Jack to finish his call. Maybe it was the clonidine tablet kicking in. Maybe it was Robert’s composure, reminding me. I was safe. Benjamin was safe.
I reached into my purse for a mental health hotline card.
“You could give Jack Mayfield this.”
Robert took one look and snorted without taking his hands off the wheel. “You kidding me? That guy isn’t going to be interested in counseling. Not after what happened to his daughter.”
My hand floated above the windowsill, card still clasped between finger and thumb.
“You’re right.”
“Owe me a drink at Ray’s.”
“No, I don’t,” I said, no patience for that long-expired game. “I can’t owe you anything, Robert. We’ve talked about that.”
And then I left them at it—one enraged father, one laconic ex-boyfriend, one school that couldn’t wait to get rid of me, because what was the point of counseling when it couldn’t prevent a teenager from ending her life?